Whenever they arrived at a fort, they left a company of soldiers behind to defend it before moving on. In June 1861, Baylor and his men had traveled quickly along the San Antonio–El Paso Road. He was ecstatic about his appointment as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles, and about their orders to secure the Union’s abandoned military installations in West Texas. “Them Baylors,” he wrote to his sister Fanny in 1857, “may they never cease to have good luck until the poorest among them is worth millions.”īaylor saw his service in the Confederate Army as another opportunity to make his mark. He was proud of all he had achieved and saw his success as part of a family effort.
He also began to read the law and was admitted to the state bar in 1853. In 1851, he ran for the Texas legislature and was easily elected. By the 1850s Baylor and his wife, Emy, were living near the south-central town of LaGrange, with some acreage in crops and a growing herd of cattle.īaylor liked the work, but he was a man on the make, always interested in new ways to make money and to gain the respect of his peers. His family had been lured by its rich, loamy bottomlands, the promise of booming cotton crops, and the right to own slaves. He had come to Texas from Kentucky as a teenager, part of a flood of migrants who poured into the newly established republic after it secured independence from Mexico in 1836. He had first volunteered for the Confederate Army in May, hoping to defend Texas from invasion or to take the fight to the Yankees in Virginia.
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