CONFEDERATE BIOGRAPHY:  SAM HOUSTON, JR., Walker Co, TX

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Submitted by Mary Love Berryman - marylove@tyler.net
14 April 2002 
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TEXANS WHO WORE THE GRAY by Sid S. Johnson - Page 174

SAM HOUSTON, JR.

Sam Houston, Jr., was born in the Republic of Texas, at "Raven's Hill" 
in Walker county, May 25, 1843. He was educated in Bastrop Military 
College and in Baylor Univer­sity. He enlisted for Confederate service, 
when not eighteen years old, in the Second Texas Infantry, in the 
company com­manded by Ashbel Smith, former Secretary of State and 
Min­ister Plenipotentiary to England of the Texan Republic, and bore 
himself amid carnage and blood with a gallantry worthy of his 
illustrious sire, and was severly wounded at the battle of Shiloh and
 being captured endured the hardships and suffer­ings incident to prison 
life in Camp Chase and Camp Douglas.  Upon his exchange he promptly 
rejoined the service, though still under age, and was chosen one of 
the lieutenants of Mc­Mahon's Battery from Galveston, serving until 
the surrender and being in the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, 
Jenkins Ferry and many smaller engagements. After the war he became 
a physician and remained in practice during his life. He was married 
to Miss Lucy Anderson, at Georgetown, Tex­as, and they are survived by 
two children; Margaret, wife of M. L. Kauffman, of Piano; and Harry 
Houston, a banker in Canton, Van Zandt county.  He died at 
Independence, Tex­as, in 1895, and is buried by the side of his wife 
who had preceded him to the grave several years.  It will be seen from 
this brief sketch that young Sam Houston was of he­roic stuff and was a 
high average of the world-famed boy soldier of the Confederacy. But 
there are considerations that place him in a class to himself and 
heighten the heroic ele­ments of his devoted service to the South and 
throw an illu­minating side light on the last years of his father's 
public life.  All the world knows that Sam Houston, the elder, un­til 
the "Lone Star" arose out of the exhalations of blood and battle smoke
at San Jacinto and enshrined him among the Immortals, had led a most 
picturesqe but troubled life.  After the battle of San Jacinto, going 
east for the treatment of his wounds, Providence brought him at Mobile, 
Ala., face to face with his fate in the person of Margaret Lea, a 
blooming young lady fresh from her graduation at the Marion Female 
College.  She was a woman of high culture, literary taste and warm 
heart, and for the first time in his troubled life he found in her 
wedded love and the sweet ministrations of home.  Sam Houston, Jr., 
was their first born and their pride. The world knows of the painful 
differences that arose between the elder Houston and his Texan 
compatriots as to the policy of secession, and how he steadfastly 
adhered to the cause of the Union.  And familiar, too, is the story 
of his enforced retirement from the governor's chair into that clouded 
private life from which he never emerged.  The world, however, will 
never fully know the heartburnings and resentments he had to conquer, 
and the crucifixion his great soul endured in his divided allegiance 
between the Union whose supremacy he had so often sworn to uphold, 
and the State whose foundations were laid in his blood and tears, to 
whose service he had devoted his ripest wisdom and which held the home 
of his wife and children. And yet when the new Confederacy, which his 
state had joined, called for defenders, we see him permitting his 
first born and minor child enlist as a private soldier.  And as great 
as was this sacrifice, it is, considering his rearing and envir­onments, 
eclipsed by the steadfast service of his beardless son.