[Jack Hammer]

Please forgive my naivete, but could someone who knows please explain to me why or how it was that one might enlist in the Union army in Mexico, of all places???

[1010RD]

Interesting takeaways:When here, they quickly adapted and became ardent Americans.

This is something you don't get in our current immigration environment. This is why English should be the only language of government and those state and local governments that receive federal funding. Illegal immigrants have no incentive to learn English or about American culture. Legal immigrants are treated worse than dirt by our American bureaucracy.

Welfare reform is desperately needed. We shouldn't give welfare to non-citizens. Secondly, there needs to be a ban on welfare to green card holders as well. 43% of legal immigrants are on welfare after 20 years. The habit is formed early on.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

The referenced German loyalists were made of many (or entirely) Wendish Lutherans.

[Rightly Biased]

The Monument IIRC is only one of two places in the US where the Colors are at half mast all the time.

These Germans just wanted to stay out of the war and the Confederates were going after them because they believed them to be Union symptathizers. So as they were escaping the Confederates they were slaughtered on the plain. (the germans did not fight back) Women Children and men all dead on the plain.. A very dark day in Texas History. And the Confederate soilders wouldn’t let the German immigrants collect thier dead for a long time almost a year IIRC.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qfn01

[Liberty Valance]

Those were some rough times in central Texas. Between the Comanches, bandits and the Civil War, very few got out of those times without some scars.

The descendants of those Germans are doing quite well in the Hill Country today.

Recommended reading for a background on those times ...

[x]

I did not know about this.

When I saw the headline I assumed that "Nueces!" was a Mexican commander's answer when the Texans told him to surrender.

The Texas State Historians' Association site says that the Unionists were "mostly German intellectuals." That must have made for quite a battle.

Kidding aside, the incident shows that Confederacy, like other governments, wasn't averse to using all the power and force that it could wield -- and then some.

[Brass Lamp]

But what led to this gruesome footnote in Texas History? German settlers, by the thousands, came to the new state of Texas beginning in the 1840s. They were leaving an oppressive society in Germany for the openness and freedoms offered in America.

The German immigrants of the 1840s were fleeing the backlash of the failed communist revolution of 1848. The "'48ers", as they were called, were communists.