We of the South Remember: Houston and Galveston, Texas

Houston declined for many years to erect a statue commemorating founder Sam Houston. Why? Because the old patriarch refused to support the secession of Texas from that compact called the “Union.” Texans were known as the most ferocious fighters of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Texas Brigade was General Lee’s favored shock formation: “Texans always move them,” he said. In this piece I pointed out the defiance expressed on a Texas state historical marker in Corsicana. Additional examples abound; Texans were once considered among the more “unreconstructed” of the occupied South.
​

Houston has “progressed” since then, and we’re sure Houstonians are happy that the first man their city chose to honor is forgotten. He was a Confederate hero. His name was Richard William Dowling.

U.C.V. is the United Confederate Veterans. But what’s the deal with the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Emmet Society. Huh? The AoH is the Irish Catholic fraternal organization best-known for organizing the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. The Emmet Society is named for Robert Emmett, the Irish revolutionary who led the Uprising of 1803.


Richard, or “Dick” as he was best known, was born in County Galway in the west of Ireland. His parents, tenant farmers, were evicted so in 1845, the first year of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, Dowling and sister Helena took passage to the U.S. They arrived in New Orleans in 1845; Dick ran a coffeehouse and raised the money to send for his parents and brothers, who arrived in 1851. His parents and a younger brother perished in a yellow fever outbreak two years later.


Dowling moved to Houston in 1857 and opened two saloons. The most popular was the Bank of Bacchus, located in Houston’s courthouse square and it soon became the town’s most popular establishment. Dowling was highly regarded. He helped set up Houston’s first gaslight company, joined a fire company and helped set up a streetcar system. He joined a militia company composed primarily of Irishmen and was elected first lieutenant. Its purpose was primarily social, but when the war broke out, it was mustered into Confederate service. The unit renamed itself the Jeff Davis Guards and was posted to Fort Griffin, an earthen fortification mouth of the Sabine Pass, the body of water separating Texas from Louisiana.


Dowling bought six old smoothbore cannon. He and his men planted range-stakes in the Sabine Pass at various distances. Dowling paid for the powder and shot and the lads got to practicing.


In 1863, the Confederacy sought to establish a trade route through Mexico to bring in much-needed supplies. Lincoln had an idea to stop that, and assigned the job to General Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts politician. His only real military skill was moving his troops into position where they could be more easily killed by Southern soldiers. Banks was, though, very good at plunder, graft and similar schemes; maybe he was busy with that, because he passed it off to General William B. Franklin. Franklin came up with a scheme to silence Downing and his men at Fort Griffin and land 5000 U.S. troops on the Texas side of the channel.

​On September 8 Franklin sent in U.S. Navy. Two, the Clifton and the Sachem, were ordered to “silence” Dowling and his four guns at Fort Griffin. But once the two vessels were within range, Dowling and his men opened fire. The training had paid off; the deadly accurate fire disabled the American ships. Clifton, Sachem and their thirteen heavy guns were captured by the Confederacy. The rest of them went limping back to New Orleans, another humiliation for the military reputation of Massachusetts. It was called the most lopsided battle of the war:

The Confederate Congress offered its thanks and promoted Dowling to major. The “ladies of Houston” had a special medal struck. After the war, he returned to his business ventures and started buying up land in East Texas – early oil-boom speculation, some say -- but died in a yellow fever epidemic.


The monument – again, Houston’s first – was unveiled on St Patrick’s Day 1905 at the Cambridge Street entrance to Memorial Park. Once the Ancient Order of Hibernians would commemorate St Patrick’s Day with a wreath-laying ceremony, but by God, we’ve progressed. We don’t do that any more.


The city of Houston removed the monument in June 2020. KHOU, the local “news” station, dredged up the slander invented by the SPLC that the monuments were installed for the sole purpose of “intimidating Black Americans.” A twaddler from the Houston Press who calls himself a “gifted storyteller” offers up this drivel: “But this being Houston, where 1980 is ancient history, nothing is ever done. Today, Dowling the man is only remembered by Houston's rapidly vanishing (if not downright extinct) coterie of Confederate apologists, military historians, and the local Irish community, who honor him at his statue every St. Patrick's Day.”


Well, he has a point. For all the talk of rock-ribbed Texas conservatism, many of the ones you meet in Houston are pining for the days of the carpetbagging Bushes. Houston isn’t a Southern city anymore. A degraded hellscape of prefab strip malls and shopping complexes, each featuring the same shitty private equity-backed rollups; acre upon acre of suburban squalor, built with the cheapest Chinese materials and guaranteed to start disintegrating after 20 years, to house the wagies at the Amazon warehouses; Californians fleeing the consequences of their stupidity ordering up their vegan meals at restaurants staffed by New Americans.

​

Well, we certainly understand why Houston may wish to protect the delicate sensibilities of all those new additions to the team base, but we don’t much care. Here, for posterity, are the names of Lieutenant Dowling and the brave company men of Company F, Jeff Davis Guards: proud sons of Ireland and soldiers of the South, who with four antique cannon repelled the American invasion of Texas, captured two Yankee gunboats and sent the 5000 Yanks scurrying for safety.

An hour south of Houston is Galveston, which remains a Southern city. Beautiful and dignified, with one of the finest arrays of Victorian architecture anywhere in the world, it remains a Southern city.


It’s best known as the origin of “Juneteenth,” which is when (this is the Americans speaking) U.S. general William Granger “enforced” the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, and the American victory was complete.

That’s correct, of course — the complete victory bit — but allow me to add a footnote. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by King Linkum on January 1, 1863, merely “freed” the slaves in unoccupied Southern states. Not the “border” states, in other words: Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. There were electoral votes, after all.

But the truth of it was Lincoln didn’t care any more for liberating the slaves than he did for the Massachusets hicks that Nathaniel Banks sent to their deaths in Louisiana. Lincoln hoped to provoke a general slave uprising, like the one in Haiti that ended with the slaughter of every white on the island.


Then, as now, the Americans took a weird, even perverted delight in fantasies of real hardcore case-hardened Revolutionaries butchering their “enemies” for Justice. Hence the psychosexual passion so many Americans evidenced toward the lunatic John Brown, from Emerson to Whitman to moronic Harvard kids larping as the John Brown Brigade. Julia Ward Howe, a prototype of the decaying blue-haired Karens who creep along the streets of the West University area in Houston in their Volvos pasted with RESIST! and CO-EXIST stickers, compared his “sacrifice” to that of Christ in her wretched Battle Hymn of the Republic.


So in 2020 the Americans instituted Juneteenth as a Federal holiday; there were big goings-on in Galveston that year. But, this being the United States, it ain’t a celebration until the enemy is mocked, humiliated and scourged.
​

This is Galveston’s Confederate memorial. Called Dignified Resignation, it depicts a Southern sailor. He holds a broken sword. At his feet is a scroll that says Glory To The Defeated.

​The monument was dedicated in 1911 by the Galveston chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The president of the chapter was Mollie Rosenberg, the second wife of Swiss-born local magnate Julius Rosenberg. A native of Virginia, her father and four brothers fought to defend the South from the Americans.
So in 2020, there were the usual demands from the usual people — the blue-hairs of Galveston — to demolish the statue because “that’s not who we are” and so on, but they were unable to convince the city to go along with it. There was a compromise, of sorts. You noticed the blank space on the pedestal? They removed it, I suppose to prevent it from damaging the delicate sensibilities of tourists. There’s still a Confederate seal on the back of the pedestal, where no one can see it.

The plaque reads “There has never been an armed force which in purity of motives intensity of courage and heroism has equaled the Army and Navy of the Confederate States of America 1861-65.”


The horrors! The hypocrisy! Poke around a bit and you’ll find all sorts of reconstructed Texans — no, they’re not Texans; they’re the soulless conspicuous-consuming drones that make the best Americans — bleating about the DoC “re-writing history to promulgate the ‘Lost Cause’ myth.”

Bleat away. Oh, and before I forget: Texas governor Greg Abbott and Lt-Governor Dan Patrick have consistently declined to sign bills to defend historical monuments, including Confederate ones, prepared and submitted by Texas legislators.


Because that’s not who we are. Right, Abbott? Don’t want to scare off foreign investment, do we? Don’t want people to think we’re backward and in the way of progress, do we? Bad for business or hurt the reputation of Texas. George HW Bush understood that.


And that is how the GOP whores after strange gods and betrays our ancestors.

​
One day, we’re going to restore that plaque. And the Dowling monument too – but not in Houston. It’s not who you are. Right? And you don’t deserve it anyway.

This piece was originally posted to A Memoir of the Occupation on June 7, 2025.