Confederate Army Deserters Hanged in Corpus Christi

The plaque names Captain John Ireland as the officer who carried out the sentence. Ireland was a Seguin lawyer who reported owning six enslaved people in 1860, voted for secession as a convention delegate in 1861, and volunteered as a private in 1862, rising to lieutenant colonel on the coast. After the war he became a judge, then a legislator nicknamed Oxcart John for fighting railroad land grants, and was elected governor in 1882 and 1884. The Handbook of Texas places him on the coast at the war's end but does not mention this hanging.

What the plaque says

Confederate Army Deserters Hanged in Corpus Christi The hanging of two Confederate Army deserters at Corpus Christi in May of 1862 was the only military execution to take place in Nueces County during the Civil War. At that time, the Texas coast from Matagorda to Corpus Christi was blockaded by the Arthur, a union ship commanded by Acting Lieutenant John W. Kittredge. A nearby Confederate outpost on Shell Bank Island, Camp Aransas, was garrisoned by Captain Benjamin Neal's artillery battery and Captain James Morgan's Company D of the 3rd Texas Infantry Regiment. The May 21, 1862 issue of the Galveston Weekly News reported that four enlisted men at Camp Aransas tried to desert by stealing a launch to reach the Arthur. One was fatally shot, two were captured and one escaped. The two captured, both reportedly from New York, were promptly court martialed, hanged and unceremoniously buried at the site of the hanging, in the vicinity of Mesquite Street and Upper Broadway. The sentence was carried out by Captain John Ireland, a future governor of Texas. Given the increasing rate of desertions at the time due to conscription and the ongoing pressure from the blockade, these executions would have served as a warning to potential deserters. Local unionists were forced at gunpoint to view the bodies and placards on them reading "traitors take warning" and "union men beware." As a result, many Corpus Christi unionists fled with their families to Matamoros, Mexico. Confederate military records reveal that actually three deserters, not one, were shot "while trying to escape." Whether they were deliberately murdered or actually tried to escape custody is not known. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.5 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 1.3 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.5 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.6 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Site of Kinney's Trading Post — steps away
• Old St. Patrick's Church — steps away
• Felix von Blucher — 0.2 mi
• The Ranchero — 0.2 mi