In modern times, parents give their children unusual first names to set them apart from other kids.  Naming children is an interesting topic, made so by the number of “experts” who try to explain the phenomenon.  For example, one “expert” opined that modern black parents give their kids African-sounding names even though they’re found nowhere in Africa.

In contrast, parents of the past often named their children after Bible personalities.  That’s what happened to James Ebenezer McCord.  The boy wasn’t happy with James, Jim, Jimmy, Jake, Eb, or even Ebenezer.  So when he grew up, he told everyone that he was J. E. McCord.  Folks either called him “J.E.” or McCord.

J. E. was born on the 4th of July 1834 to William P. and Lucinda Miller McCord in Abbeville, South Carolina.[1]  In 1847, the family moved briefly to Mississippi, then in 1853 onward to Texas, where the McCords settled in Henderson, over in Rusk County.  J. E. began working as a land surveyor soon after arriving in Texas.  In 1856, he led a party of surveyors to map out the location of a chain of counties on the western fringe of frontier Texas.

It is possible that no one in Texas was more aware of hostile Indians than land surveyors.  West Texas, you see, was squarely inside the Comancheria — land the Comanche and Kiowa passionately guarded against white encroachment.[2]  McCord was also well aware that in preparations for the Civil War, the U. S. Army was in the process of withdrawing its forces from West Texas fortifications (which they started in the early 1850s).  Before the Civil War, J. E. McCord worked briefly as a purchasing agent for the State of Texas.

Texans remaining on the frontier during the war of Yankee aggression realized that their only hope was to organize their communities and homesteads as fortifications.  It did not take the Indians long to realize that fewer soldiers were patrolling the area of West Texas, and it was not very long after that that they began to take advantage of this absence.

In January 1860, the Texas legislature provided for a regiment of Texas Mounted Rifles to patrol the western frontier of Texas, extending from the Red River to the Rio Grande.  Edward Burleson, Jr., one of the regiment’s company commanders, appointed twenty-six-year-old J. E. McCord as the company’s first lieutenant.[3]  At the end of his service in Burleson’s company, McCord joined the ranger company of William C. Dalrymple, whom he served through December 1861.

After Texas voted for secession on 1 February 1861 (formally joining the Confederate States of America on 2 March), Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker directed newly commissioned Colonel Benjamin McCulloch to raise a regiment of ten companies of mounted riflemen to protect the Texas frontier.  McCulloch, preferring a Confederate command in the east, relinquished his commission to his brother, Henry.

Earlier, Henry McCulloch (appointed colonel by the Texas Committee of Public Safety) had raised five companies of mounted rifles and stationed them along the state’s northwestern border to replace withdrawn U.S. Army troops.  Bureaucrats were everywhere in Texas.  Folks who had volunteered for service with the state-mounted rifles and wanted to serve with the Confederate States Army would have to resign from the Texas Mounted Rifles and then enlist or accept a commission within a C.S.A. regiment.  What caused Texans to mutter to themselves was the fact that their enlistments in the Texas mounted rifles were about ready to expire anyway.  What would be the purpose of writing a letter of resignation?

In any case, Henry McCulloch’s regiment entered active service as the First Regiment, Texas Mounted Riflemen (First Texas Mounted Rifles), C.S.A. — and it wasn’t long before Confederate officials decided to move the regiment out of Texas.

Anticipating the loss of the Texas Mounted Rifles, the 9th Texas Legislature authorized the creation of the Texas Frontier Regiment and ordered this regiment to take possession of western fortifications and establish a protective arm around West Texas settlements.  Governor Francis R. Lubbock appointed attorney James M. Norris as colonel of the Frontier Regiment and Senator Alfred T. Obenchain as lieutenant colonel and second in command.  The governor also appointed J. E. McCord as regimental adjutant in the rank of major.

Under Norris and Obenchain, the regiment experienced significant disciplinary problems and did little to halt them.  It was a case of poor leadership, which is indisputably true, but part of the problem stemmed from inadequate state funding.  To reduce costs at a time when Texas was cash-poor, Governor Lubbock lobbied Confederate officials to assume fiscal responsibility for the regiment. 

Jim Norris had little interest in the regiment, and the strain of command became too much to bear.  When Norris resigned and returned to his law practice, Governor Lubbock promoted Obenchain to colonel, and he assumed command of the regiment at Fort Belknap.  Major McCord advanced to lieutenant colonel and deputy commander.

No one was less suited to command a military organization than Albert Obenchain.  Life as a ranger, constantly patrolling the inhospitable Texas terrain, was at best tedious, extremely difficult, and downright dangerous.  If the rangers were patrolling, asking for the attention of hostile Indians, they were engaged in constant drilling – the stuff that came directly from Hardee’s Light Infantry Tactics, which everyone knew was of dubious use to anyone in a running Indian fight.  Few rangers remained in the service beyond their initial enlistments; most marked time until that glorious day when they could return home to their families.  The officers hoped they could be transferred to another theater in the war.  Some of the men (and a few of the officers) wished Colonel Obenchain dead.

Obenchain was so overbearing toward the men seasoned field men, such as Charlie Goodnight, who thought of him as “tyrannical and arrogant.”  Obenchain’s unpopularity led to his murder by two of his men at Hubbard Creek in Stephens County near Camp Breckenridge on 16 August 1862.  The men buried him in an unmarked grave on the frontier.  After Obenchain’s murder, McCord assumed command of the regiment.

The men highly respected McCord, but that didn’t change the regiment’s abysmal shortages of critical supplies.  For quite some time, the gunpowder was of such poor quality that some believed a man could be shot and survive while standing ten feet in front of the muzzle.  The regiment requested 5,000 pounds of gunpowder to cover six months – listing it as an emergency requisition.  The state purchasing agent eventually supplied the rangers with one thousand pounds of gunpowder, but it arrived six weeks later.  The situation forced rangers to develop a black market arrangement with local civilians. 

As previously noted, the principal mission of the Frontier Regiment was to protect the settlers living in the northern and western regions of the Texas frontier; it was all the settlers had to protect them from the withering Comanche and Kiowa raids, which began in 1861.  Between 1861 and 1870, hostile Indians murdered hundreds of settlers in West Texas and the panhandle region.  In the first six months of McCord’s command, the rangers killed twenty-one Indians and captured 200 horses.  Texas settlers weren’t mathematicians but were good at doing simple math.  They concluded that at the rate rangers were killing Indians, all the settlers would be dead before the end of the Civil War.

With a mistaken hope that the Confederacy would agree to pay the costs of the regiment, Lubbock and the legislature reorganized it over the winter of 1862-63.  Along with reorganization came the inevitable name change.  This time, the regiment became The Mounted Regiment of State Troops.  On a positive note, McCord proved himself to be the right man to command it.

In 1862, J. E. McCord was 28 years old.  For such a young commander, he was intelligent, insightful, devoted to his service, and aggressive in its execution.  He promptly abandoned Norris’ passive patrolling and instituted a series of hard-hitting raids against Indian war parties.  These operations frequently involved employing forty men beyond the frontier’s westernmost perimeter to locate and destroy the enemy.  The regiment experienced its greatest successes in 1863.

Even though McCord’s strategy was working to curtail Indian raids, primarily by placing them on a defensive footing (the Indians never knew when Texas Rangers would appear out of the dark of night or early morning mist to attack them), the Texas legislature balked at McCord’s aggressive strategies.  Some historians argue that legislators interfered out of concern that McCord would stir up more Indians than the Rangers could kill.  After receiving orders from the Speaker of the Texas House to curtail his raids into Indian country, McCord resigned.  If the legislature wouldn’t let him fight the regiment, they’d have to find someone else to run it.

Usually, politicians aren’t astute, but the legislature wisely refused to accept McCord’s resignation in this case.  Subsequently, with the full support of his captains, McCord began an even more aggressive series of operations.

However, the state’s monetary problems were far from solved, which prompted the legislature to again offer ranger companies to the CSA.  High Confederate casualty rates demanded immediate replacements.  Colonel McCord designated six of the regiment’s companies for Confederate service while remaining in command of the remaining detachment.

Effective on 1 January 1864, Texas frontier units became the Frontier Organization, taking the form of districts under the overall command of Brigadier General of State Troops John D. McAdoo.  District commanders included William Quayle, George Erath, and James Hunter, with each district encompassing around 1,300 men.  Colonel McCord continued to command his remnant force of peacekeepers along Texas’ east coast until the war’s end.

In April 1864, Colonel McCord received orders to move his force to Grimes County, where news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (egged on by Yankee sympathizers) stirred up enslaved people.  In Grimes County, enslaved Africans outnumbered their white owners by a considerable margin.  Meanwhile, with no frontier force to protect them from marauding Indians, frontier settlers had nothing good to say about the governor or the legislature.

After the Civil War, McCord returned to his home in Rusk County.  He moved to Caldwell County in 1867, where he met and married Sarah Elizabeth Mooney (January 1868).  Nine years later, the McCord family (with six children) relocated to a ranch at Home Creek near Coleman, Texas.  McCord distinguished himself in real estate, banking, and as a community leader.

Colonel James E. McCord passed away at his home on 23 December 1914.

Sources:

1. Henderson, H. M.  Texas in the Confederacy.  Naylor Publishing, 1955.
2. Knowles, T. W. They Rode for the Lone Star: The Saga of the Texas Rangers: The Birth of Texas – The Civil War.  Taylor-Trade Publishing, 1998.
3. Lubbock, F. R.  Six Decades in Texas.  Jones/Pemberton, 1968.
4. Neal, C. M.  Valor Across the Lone Star.  Texas State Historical Association, 2002.
5. Smith, D. P.  Frontier Defense in Texas, 1861-1865.  North Texas University Press, 1987.

Endnotes:

[1] Abbeville was also the birthplace of John C. Calhoun in 1782 and has the distinction of being both the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy.  At a meeting there on 22 November 1860, state legislators decided that South Carolina would secede from the Union; on 2 May 1865, Confederate President Jeff Davis met with his cabinet at the Burt-Stark Mansion, where he officially acknowledged that the Confederacy was defeated. 

[2] In the present day, the Comancheria made up all of West Texas, the Llano Estacado, Texas Panhandle, the Edwards Plateau (including all of the Texas Hill Country), Eastern New Mexico, Western Oklahoma (including the Oklahoma Panhandle and the Wichita Mountains), Southeastern Colorado, and Southwestern Kansas.

[3] There is no better pedigree in the State of Texas than that of the Burleson family.  Edward Sr. was a distinguished soldier and Texas statesman, serving as the Commander of the Texas Army, Texas Ranger, Legislator, and Vice President of the Texas Republic.  Edward Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps as a soldier, Texas Ranger, and state politician.

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