Mike West, Managing Editor
Posted: Sunday, July 27, 2008 8:39 am

Henry Eustace McCulloch

Editor’s Note: Rutherford County produced five Confederate generals during the Civil War. Previously, The Post has profiled Joseph Palmer, William Barksdale, Ben McCulloch and Winfield Scott Featherston. The fifth is Henry Eustace McCulloch, the younger brother of Ben McCulloch.

When Tennessee frontiersman Ben McCulloch decided to join David Crockett in Texas, he brought along a close compatriot, his younger brother Henry.

A neighbor, Crockett, was a major influence on the McCulloch brothers who worked as farmers, hunters and raftsmen before they left for Texas in 1835,

Henry Eustace McCulloch was only 19 when they headed to Nacogdoches, Texas. He was born Dec. 6, 1816 in Rutherford County and was one of 12 children.

Just like his older brother, Henry developed a reputation as a fierce Indian fighter and surveyor and took part in the famous “Surveyors’ Fight” against Kickapoo Indians in Navarro County, Texas. A party of 300 Kickapoos attacked some 25 surveyors in a day-long battle. About 30 Indians and 18 surveyors died in the battle.

In 1839, Henry’s name was on the muster roll of Texas Ranger Capt. Matthew Caldwell’s “Gonzales Rangers.” That same year his brother, Ben, was in a bitter race for a Texas “Congress of the Republic” seat versus Alonzo Sweitzer, an early Texas settler and Ranger captain.

At the request of Sweitzer, Reuben Ross, delivered a challenge to a duel to Ben McCulloch, who declined it, saying Sweitzer wasn’t a gentleman. Ross, who was a trained duelist, took up the challenge himself and seriously wounded Ben in the arm, maiming him for life.

The duel controversy ended when Henry McCulloch fatally shot Ross on Christmas Eve, 1839.

The following year, Henry (unlike his bachelor brother) married Jane Isabella Ashby, daughter of John Miller Ashby and Mary Harris Garnett of Kentucky, who had been early settlers in the Gonzales area. They had 12 children.


Later in 1840, he was wounded in the Battle of Plum Creek, while serving as a scout against the Commanches. He also took part in the Battle of Salado Creek and participated in the failed Somervell expedition.

Henry was elected sheriff of Gonzales in 1843 where he also operated a mercantile business. In 1844, he moved his family permanently to Seguin, which is near New Braunfels. About that same time, Henry, who was more educated that his brother Ben began writing a series of letters about their adventures on the Texas frontier.

In 1847, Henry was in command of a Ranger company in Burnet County, Texas and built what became known as Fort Crogan. At the start of the Mexican War, he commanded a volunteer company patrolling the western frontier and continued that service following the war.

Like his brother, Henry was elected to the Texas Legislature from Guadalupe County, serving in the state house in 1853 and the state senate in 1855. During his terms, he induced a bill to regulate slave owning and sponsored legislation to acquire the Alamo as a state monument.

U.S. President James Buchanan appointed him as a U.S. marshal for eastern Texas and he was a delegate to the Texas secession convention in January 1861.

Following secession, Henry was commissioned as a colonel in the Texas Provisional Army. On March 4, 1861, he was named commander of the 1st Texas Cavalry Regiment (Mounted Rifles.)

Initially, the cavalry was to patrol from the Red River southwest to a point near San Angelo. Once hostilities began, McCulloch moved his 1,300 troopers, to confront any federal troops remaining in Texas.

He received orders from Gen. Earl Van Dorn to intercept a federal force northwest of San Antonio. On May 9, 1861, McCulloch captured the 8th U.S. Infantry near San Lucas Springs.

In June the 1st Texas was dispatched across the Red River to suppress raids by the Wichita and Caddo Indians.

By September 1861, Henry McCulloch was a brigadier general, in temporary command of the Department of Texas.

Henry and his brother, Ben, were the only brothers to serve as generals in the Confederate army.

On May 11, 1861, Jefferson Davis appointed Ben McCulloch a brigadier general and assigned him to the command of Indian Territory and established his headquarters at Little Rock, Ark., where he began to build the Army of the West with regiments from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

In December 1861, Henry was named commander of the new Western Military District, comprising that part of the state west and south of San Antonio. Early the next year, he was ordered to assume co-command of Texas State Troops being sent to Arkansas, along with Gen. Allison Nelson.

Upon the death of Nelson, the Texas troops were reorganized again into a division of four brigades with Henry commanding the 3rd Brigade. This new division was under command of Gen. John G. Walker and assigned to the Trans-Mississippi Department.

Also assigned to the Trans-Mississippi department was Ben McCulloch, who commanded the Confederate right wing at the battle of Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern, on March 7, 1862. At Pea Ridge, Ben was shot from his horse and died immediately. His command fell to Brig. Gen. James M. McIntosh, who was killed but a few minutes later while leading a charge to recover McCulloch's body. Col. Louis Hébert, the division's senior regimental commander, was captured in the same charge.

April 1863 found Henry McCulloch in Louisiana where his brigade took part in the Red River Campaign, the Camden Expedition and the Battle of Milliken's Bend, which was connected to Union plans to control Louisiana and capture Vicksburg, Miss.

Henry saw significant action at Milliken’s Bend. The clash began with a night march by the Texans who left Richmond, La. at 6 p.m. on June 6 with plans for a sunrise attack.

McCulloch's Brigade, 1,500 men, arrived near Milliken's Bend at 2:30 a.m. the following day. When Union pickets opened fire, McCulloch formed a line of battle with the 19th Texas Infantry on the right, 17th Texas Infantry in the center, and the 16th Texas Cavalry (dismounted) on the left flank. The 16th Texas Infantry was held in reserve.

The commander of the 19th Texas, Richard Waterhouse, had something in common with Henry McCulloch. He was a Tennessee native.

The Texans faced a smaller Union force led by feisty Col. Hermann Lieb, born in Switzerland, he immigrated to the United States and settled in Illinois.

In command at Milliken’s Bend, Lieb had a detachment comprised chiefly of inexperienced black troops from Louisiana and Mississippi and the 23rd Iowa.

Lieb stationed his men on the levee behind a wall of cotton bales. Backing up the inexperienced troops was the powerful Union ironclad Choctaw.

McCulloch drove the Union troops down Richmond Pike, reforming less than a 100 yards from the Federal line.

“No quarter for the officers, killed the damned abolitionists,” he shouted, urging the Texans forward. Despite a heavy volley from the Union troops, the Texans scaled the levee and attacked with fixed bayonets.

"This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy's force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered,” McCulloch wrote.

Joseph P. Blessington of the 16th Texas wrote, "The enemy gave away and stampeded pell-mell over the levee, in great terror and confusion. Our troops followed after them, bayoneting them by hundreds."

The heavy artillery from the Choctaw stopped the Texans. The arrival of a second gunboat, the Lexington, forced McCulloch to withdraw.

McCulloch spent the rest of the war back in Texas and was active not only in dealing with Indian raids but in pursuing and arresting Confederate deserters and bushwhackers.

After the war, he became active in politics again and helped physically remove Reconstruction Gov. Edmund J. Davis from the state house. As a reward for his services, Henry was appointed superintendent of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum (later the Texas School for the Deaf) in Austin. He was forced to resign his position in 1879 following an investigation.

In retirement, McCulloch became a popular public speaker and in much demand for his knowledge of the Texas Rangers and the Civil War. He died March 12, 1895 and is buried in Sequin, Texas.