Robertson

🏛️The era

Texas entered the Civil War in 1861 as one of the Confederacy's frontier states. It was far from the great battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee, yet it sent tens of thousands of men east to fight. Texas units earned a fierce reputation, and the most famous of them was Hood's Texas Brigade, which fought with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

The war in the West was a different struggle. The Army of Tennessee fought across Tennessee, Georgia, and the Deep South in a long series of hard campaigns that often ended in retreat. Its officers and men took heavy losses, and its story is one of endurance through repeated defeat.

Families on both sides sent father and son, brother and brother, into the war. Even so, it was very rare for a father and his son both to reach the rank of general. After the war, many Confederate veterans rebuilt their lives in Texas towns like Waco, a growing Brazos River city. Their graves became part of the landscape through which later generations remembered the war, and this marker, erected in 1965 during the Civil War centennial, belongs to that tradition of remembrance.

👥People & events

Jerome B. Robertson came to Texas before the Civil War and was already a mature man when it began. He rose through the ranks of the Texas forces in Virginia and, as the marker records, commanded Hood's Texas Brigade from November 1862 to January 1864. Those were some of the hardest-fought months of the war in the East, and the brigade was in heavy combat during that period. Command of so famous a unit brought prestige, and it also brought heavy casualties and hard choices.

His command ended in January 1864. Robertson came home to Texas after the war and spent his last years in Waco, where he died on January 7, 1890.

His son, Felix H. Robertson, followed his father into Confederate service and became a general in the Army of Tennessee, the main Confederate army in the West. His record is complicated and contested. His promotion to general was never confirmed by the Confederate Senate. He has also been accused of involvement in the killing of wounded Black Union soldiers after the 1864 fighting at Saltville, Virginia, an episode historians still debate. Any honest account of his life has to acknowledge those accusations.

Felix Robertson lived for decades after the war and died in Waco on April 20, 1928. By then, very few people who had held high command in that war were still alive. Father and son are buried one block south of this marker, so a single Waco family spans the whole arc of the war and the long years of memory that followed it.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The marker's main claim is a rare one. Apart from Robert E. Lee and his son, it says, the Robertsons were the only father and son to serve as Civil War generals. Whatever the exact count, the pairing shows how deeply the war drew in whole families, and how military careers in that era were often shaped by family ties, local reputation, and regional loyalty.

The two men also connect Waco to both great theaters of the war. The father's service with Hood's Texas Brigade links this Texas city to the battles of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The son's service links it to the long, grinding campaigns in the West. Together they show how far from home the war took Texans.

The marker also belongs to the history of how Americans remember the war. It was erected in 1965, the centennial year, when communities across the South were placing markers and holding commemorations. Today visitors can read it as a record of two lives and also as evidence of how the Confederacy was remembered a century later. That remembering often left out the war's cause, slavery, and its consequences for Black Americans, including the accusations attached to Felix Robertson's own record.

🧭If you visit

The marker sits in Waco, a city with deep layers of Texas history along the Brazos River. The Robertson graves are one block south, so give yourself time to walk over and pay a quiet visit after reading the marker. Older Texas cemeteries often hold veterans of several wars, and walking among the headstones gives you a sense of the generations that built the city.

When you visit the graves, think about the dates. The father died in 1890. The son died in 1928, decades later, in the age of automobiles and radio. Between them, their lives stretch from the frontier Texas of the early nineteenth century into the modern era.

Waco makes an easy stop on a trip along the Interstate 35 corridor between Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin. If you are following Civil War history across Texas, pair this stop with other sites around the state. Read them with the same open eye you would bring to any monument, and ask both what happened and how, and why, people later chose to remember it.