Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
As the reality of the war and the grip of the Union blockade settled upon the South, two brothers who had been among the most successful plantation owners in Texas decided to diversify their holdings — by taking up the dicey new business of blockade-running.
Compared to other Deep South states, Texas has comparatively few plantations standing as historical beacons of the Civil War. Robert Mills and his younger brother, David, epitomized the enormous wealth that slavery and plantation agriculture had brought to the southeastern corner of Texas in the few decades before the Civil War. Most of Texas knew little firsthand about slavery and nothing about plantation farming; the land was too arid to support it.
Yet the wealth and political power of slavery was what brought Texas into the Civil War. And down in Brazoria County, where the land is fertile and blessed with rivers, the Mills brothers owned more slaves than any white man in Texas, 300 by the eve of the war.
Robert had arrived in Brazoria from Kentucky in 1833, first joining another brother, Andrew, in a mercantile business. But the two dissolved their partnership the next year; Andrew eventually went into bankruptcy and died at sea. Robert then went into business with David, also known as D.G. In the war for independence from Mexico, the two got a taste of evading a larger navy along the Texas coast by operating a troop transport out of New Orleans. But when peace came, they focused on their business, operating as cotton brokers in Galveston and mercantilists in Brazoria.
In Brazoria they parlayed their commercial acumen into agricultural wealth for the first time, purchasing Lowwood, a sugar plantation that would become David’s home. The brothers went on to purchase 1,000 acres of the Bynum Plantation, along with its 36 slaves, in 1837 (they later bought another sugar plantation, Caney Place, as well as a cotton plantation, Palo Alto). The plantations of the Mills brothers grew along the Brazos River in the heart of the old Austin colony, where Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Texas, had often agonized over slavery – though he ultimately came down squarely in its favor.
The two wisely split the duties of their growing empire. Robert continued with the brokerage and mercantile businesses, earning the nickname “the Duke of Brazoria.” A Galveston lawyer, William Pitt Ballinger, described Robert as “urbane” and prone to “fine talk of homes, books and trade.” David, meanwhile, dutifully went about learning everything he could about plantation farming. He became so adept that he could reportedly identify which bales of cotton came from which plantations.
The brothers became so wealthy that they even issued their own paper money — so-called Mills Money, complete with their signatures — getting around a Texas law forbidding the practice by simply re-issuing currency from the Mississippi and Alabama Railroad Company. Because the bills traded at face value and didn’t fluctuate in value, like Texas money or other currencies, the money stabilized the price of doing business with the Mills brothers.
By the 1860 Census, the Mills brothers held more slaves than any other plantation owner in Texas. More than 300 men and women toiled in their sugar cane and cotton fields, which now sprawled over nearly 21,000 acres, part of a conglomerate that included brokerages in towns and cities and ships to get both crops to market. One steamer, the J.H. Bell, was “a splendid boat,” carrying 1,000 bales of cotton out to sea. In 1860, David alone reported his real estate value at $364,234 and the value of his personal estate at $250,000.
When war and the Union blockade arrived, blockade-running was just the natural extension of the Mills brothers’ empire. They could profit from it coming and going, getting their goods to market and very likely charging the Confederate government for their difficulties.
The Confederate government tried to cut them out by confiscating several of their ships, but the Mills brothers simply bought more — and this time, they amassed a small navy of small deft vessels designed to navigate shallow waters and elude bigger ships. One was the Rob Roy, skippered by Capt. William Watson, which sailed a regular route to Tampico or Veracruz, Mexico, laden with cotton and sugar, before heading east for Havana to pick military supplies for the Confederate Army.
But the brothers’ success couldn’t last. When the war ended in 1865, they were overextended and heavily in debt, and they faced repeated crop failures — not to mention the loss of the slaves, without which plantation farming could not survive.
A new, unpublished paper by the amateur archaeologist James Smith for the Brazosport Archeological Society describes what happened next: creditors dismantled many of the plantations of eastern Texas, and what they left was largely destroyed by a series of hurricanes and fires near the turn of the century. Today many are the sites of sprawling prisons. As for the Millses’ vast empire, all that remains are just a few ruins, surrounded by a subdivision.
Richard Parker is a journalist in Texas whose work is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune. Emily Boyd contributed research for this article.