CONFEDERATE BIOGRAPHY:  R. E. SMITH, Smith County, 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 

R. E. SMITH.

Robert Ewing Smith, son of Stuart Smith and younger brother of John P. 
and Ed. W. Smith, was born near Marietta, Georgia, April, 1844, and 
enlisted in his brother's,W. H. Smith's Company, in Gregg's Seventh 
Texas In­fantry, in the fall of 1861.  The regiment went immediately,
under orders, to Hopskinville, Kentucky, where it became a part of the 
army of observation and defense, under command of General Albert Sidney 
Johnston.  It was afterward sent to the defense of Forts McHenry and 
Donelson, where, after a heroic defense, it was surrendered with the
commands of Generals Pillow and Buckner, and sent for imprisonment to 
Johnson's Island, near Chicago.  Here the subject of this brief sketch 
died and was buried.  It is gratifying to his sur­viving relatives to 
know that under the auspices of the Daughters of the Confederacy of 
Chicago, a handsome mon­ument has been erected over the indiscriminate 
dust of him­self and fellow captives, who perished there.  Robert Smith 
was a good man and made a faithful soldier.

I 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 s
moke 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 t(; 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.

R. H. BROWN.