The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 104, July 2000 - April, 2001 Page: 33
673 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Fighting for the Confederacy
Texas's military-age men who served in the army. There were 134 men
found in either the muster rolls, the indigent families list, or the newspa-
per who had service records from companies formed primarily in
Harrison County and thus almost certainly served in the military.
However, these men did not appear in the census of 186o (and were
therefore not included in the data base), either because they were
missed by the census enumerator or not reported to him by their fami-
lies or because they moved into the county after the census was taken in
the summer of 186o. As an example, consider Clinton E. Perry, who
served with the "Marshall Guards" in Hood's Texas Brigade and was
killed at Antietam. Although he was the son of a large planter and
appeared in the census of 1850, Perry was not enumerated in 186o,
apparently because he was attending military school in Kentucky.24 Thus
there may have been a sizable number of Texans who served but were
not counted in the census; thereby inflating the percentage when esti-
mates of the number who served are divided by the total reported in the
published census. This would not mean, however, that the actual pro-
portion who served was higher because it is likely that approximately an
equal number of men who did not serve were not reported in the cen-
sus.25 To repeat, unless Harrison County somehow was not representa-
tive of Texas (or my research missed proof of service by an additional
two hundred men from the census of 1860), only about 50 percent of
military-age men served in the Confederate Army or with State Troops
between 1861 and 1865.
Comparisons with the percentages of military-age men in other South-
ern states who served provide additional perspective on these statistics for
Harrison County. Maris A. Vinovskis estimated that 61 percent of all white
males aged thirteen to forty-three in the eleven Confederate states
entered military service. When the age range is limited to thirteen to forty-
three for Harrison County, the proportion who served rises slightly to 52
percent (see Table 1). Vinovskis, however, rather than beginning with
individuals named in the manuscript census of 186o and determining if
they entered military service, depended on the same method-dividing
24 Campbell, Southern Community in Cnsts, 210, 226, 229.
2 If the 134 Harrison County soldiers who were not in the Census of 186o had been included
in the total number who served, and that number had been divided by the number reported in
the census without adding 134 to the total population (and another 134 who probably were pre-
sent, not in the census, and did not serve), the estimate of the proportion who served would
have been notably higher (134 + 863 = 997, which is 58 percent of 1,724). Thus it seems likely
that beginning with the number who served rather than with the military-age population report-
ed in the Census of i86o, which is the method used by all previous studies, is responsible for an
overstatement of the proportion who entered the army.
There were, of course, a few men who were over the age of forty-six in 186o who entered mili-
tary service and added to the total. However, there were not enough men in this category to
affect significantly the calculation of percentages of military-age men who served.2000
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 104, July 2000 - April, 2001, periodical, 2001; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101221/m1/61/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.