Houston chooses Juneteenth over Confederate soldier
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has announced that the statue of Confederate soldier Richard “Dick” Dowling will be moved from Hermann Park by Juneteenth. This is fitting, because you can’t celebrate Juneteenth and Dick Dowling at the same time.
By moving Dowling, Houston is finally choosing Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is remembered as the date in 1865 when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger read an order in Galveston that reminded white Texans of what they already knew. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, had declared that all enslaved people living in the states of the Confederate rebellion were forever free. Why, then, did it take until June 19, 1865, for that proclamation to be enforced in Texas?
Part of the answer: Dick Dowling.
On Sept. 8, 1863, eight months after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, U.S. Navy and Army forces steamed up the Sabine River with a plan to return Texas to federal control. Had they succeeded, Texans might well remember that date, and not Juneteenth, as the moment when freedom came.
Instead, federal forces were defeated at the Battle of Sabine Pass. The reason had as much to do with bungling and poor coordination by U.S. officers as it did with the defense of Texas mounted by Confederates, who had mostly abandoned their positions around the Sabine Pass before the battle. That left only Dowling, a few cannons and a few dozen men to defend Fort Griffin, a small fortification that had been built, in part, by the coerced labor of slaves.
With some well-aimed cannon fire from the fort, Dowling’s men forced the U.S. military to retreat. Federal troops would not
return in force to Texas until the summer of 1865, by which time Dowling’s victory had made him a Confederate legend.
That legend is the one that Dowling’s statue in Hermann Park honors. But consider how the Battle of Sabine Pass looked from the perspective of enslaved Texans in 1863. For these men and women, Dowling’s famous victory was a moment of defeat that delayed their liberation.
How would they have regarded the hero of Sabine Pass?
It does not require great imagination to answer that question, because African Americans themselves participated in the Battle of Sabine Pass — on the side of the Union, of course. At least two dozen black sailors were on board the Union gunboats that steamed into Sabine Pass to face Dowling’s guns at Fort Griffin.
Many of them never left the pass again. Casualty reports indicate that several African Americans were among the many Union sailors who suffered gruesome and often fatal wounds when one U.S. gunboat’s boiler exploded, spraying scalding hot water on the boat’s crew.
Among those killed at the battle, according to a surgeon aboard another U.S. boat, were “three contrabands” — the term that many Americans used at the time to describe enslaved freedom-seekers who fled to U.S. military lines during the war, effectively emancipating themselves and then enlisting in the fight for a broader emancipation. Other official casualty lists note the participation of black men in the battle, including one that reported the death of “a negro contraband, name unknown.”
These and other documents about the Battle of Sabine Pass can be seen in a digital collection created by Rice University students, faculty and staff in 2011. Together, they reveal a story that centers not on Dowling, but on the people whom Dowling was shooting at.
That story has long been erased or eclipsed by Dowling’s admirers, including at the state historic site near Port Arthur that will apparently be the Houston statue’s new home. But the state site at least has something that the Hermann Park location lacks: a small monument that acknowledges “Union Casualties.”
The battleground monument even notes that “Twenty-Five African-American Men Fought Here on Behalf of the Union,” though it does not mention slavery, and it is dwarfed by the statue of a gigantic, bare-chested man who represents Dowling as the defender of the pass. The Union monument’s claim that all of “their names are unrecorded” also needs to be updated in light of more recent research.
One African American sailor, who was named at the time, was “George Houston, contraband.”
He survived the battle and appeared on a Navy muster roll a few months later. And in doing so, he made clear how enslaved and formerly enslaved people thought about the Civil War. They fought on the side of the war that proclaimed emancipation for all; Dowling fought on the side that was trying to keep emancipators out.
This Juneteenth, an empty corner of Hermann Park will signal that the city of Houston is beginning to agree with George Houston at last.