DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how that roadside marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, the name alone ought to stop you cold. Titlum-Tatlum.
Say it out loud. There's a nearby island wearing that name, sitting in Brazoria County, and for a long stretch of history it was known as a resort — a quiet kind of place for fishermen, hunters, and small boats. Easy.
Peaceful. The sort of spot you might forget about entirely. The Civil War, eighteen sixty-one to sixty-five, had other ideas.
Suddenly that little island had a purpose that nobody was putting in the travel brochures. Captains like H. C.
Wedemeyer — a shipbuilder in peacetime, mind you, a man who knew wood and water the way a preacher knows scripture — were using Titlum-Tatlum as a base of operations. Not for fishing. Not for hunting.
For defying the Federal blockade. Here's how it worked, and it is a thing worth picturing. Federal blockading ships sat out there on the open water, tall-masted, and men with spyglasses in those high riggings scanning the coastline for anything that moved.
But ships loaded with cotton could slip into the waterways around Titlum-Tatlum and tuck themselves in among the willows. Right in among the willows. Out of range.
Out of sight. Just sitting there, quiet as a held breath, waiting. They'd wait for dark nights.
They'd wait for bad weather — because bad weather, out on the Texas coast, is the kind that makes a federal lookout wish he'd chosen a different line of work. And then, when the moment was right, the blockade-runners would move. Hugging the shores.
Sometimes — and this is the detail that gets me — sometimes being towed by men on land, men walking the bank, pulling those ships along until the water was deep enough to sail free. Men on land, towing ships. That is a particular kind of determination.
Once those ships reached open sea and made it across, the cotton they carried would buy things the Confederacy couldn't make for itself — guns, gunpowder, medicines, coffee, cloth, hardware, shoes. The marker's plain about it: the Confederacy was hampered by lack of manufacturing facilities, and those ships were the remedy. And the purchases didn't just sit overseas.
They came back into Texas by the same route the cotton had gone out. Same hidden waterways. Same willows.
Now, the blockade-runners needed every advantage they could get — the marker calls what they carried the life-blood of the Confederacy, and havens like Titlum-Tatlum were a big part of how they stayed alive long enough to run. But Texas gave them something else too. Unstinted support is the phrase used, and it covers a lot of ground.
The coast guard was in it. Infantry and cavalry were in it. They would not permit Federal forces to land — not even to take on drinking water, not even to gather wood.
That meant the Federal blockading ships, denied those basics right there on the Texas coast, sometimes had to abandon their posts entirely and make for New Orleans just to get supplies and repairs. Think about that. A little island called Titlum-Tatlum, willows draped down to the waterline, and the ripple effects of what happened in its shadow reached all the way to New Orleans.
Some places earn their names quietly. Some earn them in the dark, in bad weather, with a rope in a man's hands and a loaded ship sliding toward open sea.
What the marker says
Nearby island. Resort for fishermen, hunters, small boats. During the Civil War, 1861-65, used by such captains as H. C. Wedemeyer, a peacetime shipbuilder, as base for operations defying Federal blockade. Ships loaded with cotton entered waterways around Titlum-Tatlum and hid among willows, out of range of observers with spyglasses on the tall masts of federal blockading ships. On dark nights or in bad weather, blockade-runners would slip out of here to the open seas, hugging shores, sometimes being towed by men on land until water was reached. Cotton taken overseas by such ships would buy for the Confederacy (hampered by lack of manufacturing facilities) guns, gunpowder, medicines, coffee, cloth, hardware and shoes. Purchases came into Texas by the same route that cotton was freighted out. Aside from such havens as Titlum-Tatlum, blockade runners needed every advantage over the foe, for they supplied life-blood to the Confederacy. Texas gave them unstinted support: from her coast guard and from infantry and cavalry that would not let Federals land even to get drinking water or wood; so that blockade ships often had to drop duty and take off for New Orleans for supplies and repairs. (1965)