Sam Houston Spoke Here
Gilmer, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On this Cherokee Trace site he had visited 25 years earlier, when he lived with the Indians, Sam Houston twice spoke as the leading Texas statesman-- on June 10, 1857, as U. S. Senator, and early in 1861 as governor. At both times he spoke against secession and in favor of the Union.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the tense years before the Civil War, the aging hero of Texas independence returned to a spot along the old Cherokee Trace — ground he had known decades earlier while living among the Cherokee. Speaking here first as a U.S. Senator in 1857 and again as governor in 1861, Sam Houston warned his fellow Texans against leaving the Union, a stand that would soon cost him his office.
Why it matters
Houston's lonely defense of the Union on the eve of secession captures the wrenching divisions that split even the leaders of a Confederate state.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the late 1850s, the argument over slavery was pulling the country apart, and Texas was no exception. Many Texans had come from the Deep South and were ready to follow it out of the Union. The pressure kept building through the decade until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 brought on the crisis.
This spot sits on the Cherokee Trace, an old route that ran into East Texas from the north. Travelers, settlers, and Native people used it long before the roads of later years. That background matters here, because the man who came to speak on this ground had known it for decades.
In early 1861, Texas held a secession convention and then put the question to the voters, and the state left the Union. It was one of the most fateful decisions in Texas history. It was made over the objections of the state's most famous living figure.
People & events
Sam Houston's life had already taken remarkable turns. As a young man he had lived among the Cherokee, who adopted him. After he abruptly left the governorship of Tennessee, he went back to live with them. According to the marker, it was during those years, about a quarter century before his speeches here, that he first visited this site on the Cherokee Trace.
By 1857 he was the best-known man in Texas: the general who won San Jacinto, twice president of the Republic, and now a U.S. Senator. On June 10 of that year he stood here and spoke against secession. It was an unpopular position in much of the state, and Houston's Unionism had already made him enemies. He lost the governor's race that year.
He came back to it. Houston was elected governor in 1859, and early in 1861 he spoke at this spot again, still urging Texans to stay in the Union. This time the tide was too strong. Texas seceded, and when Houston refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, he was removed from office. The man who had done so much to bring Texas into the United States spent his last years watching it leave.
Its place in the American story
Houston's stand shows that secession was not a unanimous rush, even in a state that joined the Confederacy. Some Southern leaders saw where disunion would lead and said so publicly, at great personal cost. Houston was the most prominent of them in Texas, and his warnings about the war's cost proved painfully accurate.
His story also connects two chapters of American history that are usually told separately. Before he was a senator or a governor, Houston lived with the Cherokee, at a time when federal policy was pushing Native nations off their lands. The ground where he defended the Union was a trail he had first known through that earlier life.
Few places tie a single leader so directly to the national crisis. Here, on an old trail in East Texas, one of the founders of Texas made his case for keeping the United States together, and he made it twice.
If you visit
The marker is in Gilmer, the seat of Upshur County, in the piney woods of East Texas. It is a quiet spot, which makes it easy to picture a crowd gathering to hear a legendary speaker make an argument that many of them did not want to hear.
Think about the Cherokee Trace as you stand here. This was a route people walked and rode long before it became part of a modern town, and Houston himself first came this way as a young man living among the Cherokee. The marker is a place to think about how a single life could cross so many eras.
Gilmer works well on an East Texas history drive. Anyone following Sam Houston across the state can add it to a longer trip that includes the places associated with his life and career. Allow a few minutes to read the marker and look around, and remember that some of the most important arguments in American history were made in small towns like this one.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sam Houston
Related events
- · Secession crisis of 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cherokee Trace
Gilmer, TX
Around 1821, Cherokee people living near Nacogdoches blazed a trail north toward their kin in Arkansas, guided by a scout who set his course by dragging buffalo skins behind his horse while others marked the trees and planted Cherokee roses still seen along the route. Sam Houston, David Crockett, and thousands of settlers followed this road into Texas. The Cherokee were expelled from Texas in 1839 after Houston left the presidency, their chief killed in a two-day battle on the Neches River.
Upshur County, C. S. A.
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During the Civil War, Upshur County became a busy Confederate supply and training center, its factories in Gilmer and Ore City turning out hats, shoes, saddles, cloth, iron, and pottery for the army while a quartermaster depot coordinated the effort. With the men away at the front, women, children, and the elderly kept the farms producing grain, meat, and cotton. The marker also honors Emma Sansom, the teenaged "sunbonnet heroine" who guided Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry to a hidden ford in Alabama and later settled in Texas.
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