DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. They called them the Swamp Angels. Now that's a name that earns itself, and once you hear where these men served and what they faced, you'll understand why it stuck.
Commanded by Colonel Ashley W. Spaight, the 11th Battalion of Texas Volunteers, Confederate States Army, drew its ranks from the people of southeast Texas — men who knew the bayous, the brackish air, the particular silence of a coastal marsh before a storm rolls in. Their job was to hold the line, defending the Texas Gulf Coast and Louisiana borders from Federal incursions.
Not exactly glory country. But somebody had to do it, and these men did. The battalion traced its origins all the way back to a militia outfit called the Sabine Pass Guards, formed in 1861.
So before they were the Swamp Angels, before they had a colonel and a battalion number, they were neighbors who'd decided to stand together. And then 1862 came. Not a battle.
Not a Federal gunboat breaking through. What came for the Swamp Angels was yellow fever, right there at Sabine Pass. Many of them lost their lives to it.
Not in the heroic fashion the old stories tend to favor — just gone, taken by the low country they were sworn to protect. The men who survived the war, survived the fever, survived all of it — they came home. And they didn't disappear into the history books quietly.
Many of them became community and business leaders, building up the very southeast Texas towns they'd left to go serve. The Swamp Angels. Commanded by Colonel Ashley W.
Spaight. Born in the marsh, tested by fever, and woven into the fabric of the coast they never stopped callin' home.
What the marker says
Commanded by Col. Ashley W. Spaight, the 11th Battalion of Texas Volunteers, Confederate States Army, was nicknamed the "Swamp Angels." Tracing its origins to the "Sabine Pass Guards" militia formed in 1861, the battalion served during the Civil War to defend the Texas Gulf Coast and Louisiana borders from Federal incursions. Many of them lost their lives during an 1862 yellow fever epidemic at Sabine Pass. The battalion was comprised of southeast Texas residents, many of whom became community and business leaders after the war. (1990)