"It was just before we left the house on the flat.. that Civil War was declared, and I can recall many pictures in Harper's Weekly then of the rising of the war cloud.
War times began their hard pinch here and one of the dearest memories I have of them is that mother had no tea, we gathered the leaves of yaupon shrub...they made a substitute, but only a substitute; then white flour was almost impossible to get, and no one had whitebread but Mother and Mary...As for clothing, Confederate money was of little value and even if it had been, cloth was almost impossible to get."
-Lillie Barr Munroe; Resident of Austin during Civil War
Some of you laugh to scorn the idea of bloodshed as the result of secession. But let me tell you what is coming. You sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet. You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, as a bare possibility, win southern Independence... but I doubt it... The North is determined to preserve the Union... When they begin to move in a given direction, they will move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.
Sam Houston; Speech in Galveston, February 1861