"...the most uneasy and unlikely of allies. Gore himself commented on the matter, noting in a letter written in early June "what curious thing it is, that where but a year ago our sons were off to the hills of Nashville and fields of Virginia to soak their red blood into those soils to arrest the advance to the damned Yankee, now we look at the Yank rifleman and extend our hands so he can pass us the weapon." Politically, it made for an extraordinarily awkward position on both ends. At least officially, the Hughes administration did not entirely support the Republican forces, maintaining its line in communiques that it was an "internal matter" within the "territory of the enemy combatant." This was wholly a diplomatic nicety for foreign consumption, because vessels passing via Nicaragua had a curious way of finding themselves at port in rebel-held Corpus Christi with guns, ammunition, and even explosives on hand.
Full-throated support for Texas was impossible in Philadelphia, however, due to the matter of abolition, an absolute key demand for the Americans and a question that badly split the Republicans in two. Hughes had become a convert to the cause over the past several years and the war had radicalized him; as early as 1914, he had declared that it would be the policy of the United States to end slavery wherever the Army occupied territory. His likely successor Elihu Root and the likely next Secretary of State, Henry Cabot Lodge, were even more dedicated militants, viewing the war as fundamentally a moral crusade against the evils of the "peculiar institution" and the society it supported. As such, the men who most in Philadelphia were certain would design the peace treaty with the Confederacy come 1917 were unwilling to bend until, as Cabot Lodge phrased it in a speech that summer, "every shackle on every wrist and ankle is broken forever and its iron melted."
In practical terms, this meant that the United States - while having made clear it viewed the upstart Republican government in Laredo as the legitimate government in Texas - could not formally support the Texan cause against the Ferguson Loyalists, even if their actions plainly revealed their preference. Furthermore, it placed Garner in a difficult situation. The core of Republican support came from the smallholders of West Texas and the Hill Country, urban laborers in the state's nascent industries, and Tejanos of the vast haciendas of South Texas who while in semi-peonage were nonetheless free men - in other words, the mob-like army marching upon San Antonio was hardly composed of slavery's most dedicated defenders. But abolition was still a deeply unpopular idea to many Republican fighters who took pride in their Texan ancestry and viewed the peculiar institution, and more fundamentally the strict social hierarchy flowing from legal white supremacy, as integral to their identity. It was also the case that Texas' rapid growth over the past several decades had been driven in part by domestic migration from elsewhere in the Confederacy rather than purely from overseas or Mexico and the United States; as such, especially in the balmier, more plantation-driven economy of East Texas, support for slavery remained extremely high, and so regardless of how the campaign advanced, a cleavage of Texas in two remained a grim possibility over the question if Republican leadership came out in favor of the question.
Garner thus pursued a policy of vacillation, remaining steadfast that his cause was simply to restore rightful Texan sovereignty "to all Texan clay" and refused to answer otherwise straightforward questions about whether he would support abolition. "We are Texans," he would huff, "and we do not have a price, at least not one we do not name ourselves." This was a point of view roundly opposed by Gore, who had come around to a strong position of support of abolition on its own merits years ago but had kept such views private in order to have a political career, and to a lesser extent Johnson, who came to believe that Texas would, eventually, be forced to yield on the matter, suggesting in a one-on-one meeting with Garner that both men referenced in their diaries that "Texas may eventually have to choose between the Negro or the Republic remaining in bondage." Gore and Johonson nevertheless never forced Garner to make such a choice in public out of the same pragmatic considerations of avoiding a massive rupture in Republican fortunes just as they seized San Antonio in a stunning shock in early June, a state of affairs that had reverberations across the Confederacy.
Though there is not much contemporaneous documentation that the United States overtly pursued policy in response to the precarious position of Garner and the Republicans on slavery, the actions of the Americans in Texas at least suggest that there was some level of understanding who the real enemy was and that the slave question would have to be saved for later, and that in the meantime the Republicans were an extremely useful internal catspaw. The skies of Texas were filled with American airships and airplanes that shot down Confederate enemies and kept the outgunned rebels from being strafed from the air; while the idea of Dallas being evacuated by the US Army was an absolute nonstarter, they nonetheless did not advance much further south and instead focused on consolidating attacks towards Arkansas via Texarkana and Fort Smith, putting further pressure on Confederate supply lines into Texas as cavalry and later infantry closed in on Little Rock from south, west and north, eventually seizing the city entirely almost bloodlessly in mid-July and effectively ending Arkansas' participation in the war.
This remarkable turnaround in Republican fortunes bolstered Garner's campaign for legitimacy as his forces marched rapidly from San Antonio northwards, and on July 4th, 1916 - the same day that Atlanta was falling far to the east - the Republican Army engaged with the Loyalist militia as well as Confederate forces immediately south of Austin. Despite being outgunned thanks to light artillery and some rudimentary landships, the Republicans with heavy losses eventually pressed their way into the city on July 7th and raised the Bonnie Blue Flag of rebellion over the Texas State Capitol after tearing down the Confederate Southern Cross from its grounds. Ferguson was unfortunately not in the city, having fled towards Galveston days earlier and seeming likely to evacuate Texas entirely as Confederate forces now under threat from both Corpus Christi and Austin by Republican divisions and the United States Army in Dallas and Texarkana regrouped in a line behind the lower Brazos and upper Neches Rivers.
With Austin in hand, the legitimacy to the public of the Republican force was largely consolidated - the course of the war from then on seemed in many ways inevitable, as it had been when Texas threw off Santa Ana in 1835 and Lincoln in 1862. [1] Now in this third revolution, Texas was ready to chart its own course - it only now needed to throw Richmond's forces at last over the Sabine to secure Garner's "every inch of Texan clay" pledge to his people..."
- Republic Reborn
[1] Remember - this book is written from a fairly nationalist Texan point of view