Edward Lea's Confederate Kin

Edward Lea's Confederate Father

Albert Miller Lea (1808-1891)

Reference: The Handbook of Texas Online

Albert Miller Lea, soldier and engineer, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 17, 1808, the younger brother of Pryor Lea. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point on July 1, 1827, and graduated fifth in the class of 1831. He was brevetted second lieutenant in the First United States Artillery on July 1, 1831, was transferred to the Seventh United States Infantry on August 11, 1831, and was promoted to second lieutenant on March 4, 1833, the day that he was transferred to the First Dragoons at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Lea served mainly as a topographical engineer, and his Notes on the Wisconsin Territory, published in 1836, gave the state of Iowa its name. Lea resigned from the United States Army on May 31, 1836. In 1837 he was appointed chief engineer of Tennessee and later was appointed to the commission to survey the boundary between Missouri and Iowa. In 1841 he was appointed chief clerk of the war department, and from 1844 until 1851 he taught at East Tennessee University, Knoxville. At the same time he was engaged in the manufacture of glass and served as city engineer. After a brief tenure as acting secretary of war under President Millard Fillmore, Lea moved to Texas, where from 1857 until 1861, he was chief engineer of the Aransas and the Rio Grande, Mexico and Pacific railroads. His article "The Gulf Stream, Its Effect on the Climate of Texas" appeared in the Texas Almanac in 1861.

Lea may have been a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, who aspired to establish a slaveholding republic around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico. In February 1860 he wrote Governor Sam Houston that Robert E. Lee, the new commander of the Eighth Military District, might, with government approval, aid Houston in his scheme to impose a protectorate over Mexico. Although Governor Houston made a trip to San Antonio to talk with R.E. Lee, presumably about Mexico, the joint effort envisioned by Albert Lea never materialized.

During the Civil War, Lea served as a brigade commissary officer at Knoxville, Tennessee, from August 26, 1861, until his transfer to the staff of Brig. Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer on September 10, 1861. After Zollicoffer's death at the battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky, on January 19, 1862, Lea was promoted to captain and transferred to Florida, where he served as assistant adjutant general on the staff of Brig. Gen. Joseph Finegan. He was subsequently promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed engineering officer on the staff of Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee. He also served on the staff of Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder and was present at the Battle of Galveston, where his son, Edward Lea, an officer on the federal ship Harriet Lane, was killed. Lea officiated at his son's funeral service the following day. After the war, he settled first in Galveston, where in 1866 he was appointed city engineer and later sold real estate. In 1874 he moved to a farm near Corsicana. There he died on January 16, 1891. Albert Lea, Minnesota, is named in his honor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin Statesman, January 17, 1891. Charles C. Cumberland, "The Confederate Loss and Recapture of Galveston, 1862-1863," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (October 1947). Roy Sylvan Dunn, "The KGC in Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 70 (April 1967). S. W. Geiser, "A Century of Scientific Exploration in Texas," Field and Laboratory 7 (January 1939). Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army (2 vols., Washington: GPO, 1903; rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Edward Lea's Confederate Uncle

Pryor Lea (1794-1879)

Reference: The Handbook of Texas Online

Pryor Lea, early Texas public official and railroad promoter, was born in Knox County, Tennessee, on August 31, 1794, the brother of Albert Miller Lea. He graduated from Greenville College, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1817, and began his practice in Knoxville. In 1824 he became United States attorney for Tennessee and was elected to the Twentieth and Twenty-first United States congresses, 1827-31. He moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1836 and to Goliad, Texas, in 1846 to promote railroads.

Believing Aransas Bay would make the best port for East Texas, Lea made preliminary surveys for a railroad to connect San Antonio with Lamar on the coast through Goliad. He worked with James W. Byrne and other Lamar proprietors to build a port and promote the railroad. On February 12, 1850, Byrne sold Lea one-fourth interest in Lookout Peninsula (Point), Goose Island, and the unsold sections of the Lamar townsite. The deed reconveyed the property to Byrne, however, on March 1, 1853, when Lea was unable to make payments. On February 14, 1852, Lea incorporated the Aransas Road Company to establish a "commercial emporium" at Aransas Bay connected to Goliad and the Texas interior by turnpike and railroad. In September 1856 the state legislature granted the company the right to extend the turnpike from the mainland to the bay's deep-water channel through a series of bridges connecting the various islands. This act was amended in February 1858 to substitute a railroad for the turnpike and ferries for the bridges. As president, Lea published Circular Concerning the Aransas Road Company (1858) to promote the venture. Although the turnpike was surveyed from Goliad to Aransas Bay, construction on it and the railroad was never completed, largely because of the Civil War, and the project was still struggling as late as 1879. Aransas Pass, Texas, now occupies the site Lea chose as his port on the bay. Lea, visualizing a transcontinental railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast that utilized the Aransas Road Company project, joined United States senator Luke Lea and Alexander H. Phillips in incorporating the Central Transit Company on November 7, 1866. Lea publicized the venture in An Outline of the Central Transit (1859), but the plan never materialized.

In 1861 Lea served in the Texas Secession Convention and chaired the committee authorized to publicize the proceedings of the convention and the new 1861 Confederate state constitution. John Henry Brown and John D. Stell were on this committee, which printed its Address to the People of Texas (1861) in English, German, and Spanish. Lea also served a term in the state Senate. During the war he was an incorporator of the Goliad Aid Association, founded to aid indigent families, and served as a commissioner in the Aransas Salt Works Company, established near the site of present Rockport. After the war, Governor James W. Throckmorton appointed him state superintendent of public instruction on November 10, 1866. Lea also became one of the original trustees of Aranama College in Goliad. In the circular, Address to the People of Texas on Education (1867) he stressed the importance of education to the cultivation of morals. The governor later removed Lea from office, however, as an "impediment to Reconstruction." He was highly esteemed in Goliad County, where he was unanimously elected as the district representative to the Constitutional Convention of 1875, but his "extreme age" induced him to decline the honor. Nevertheless, the eighty-four-year-old jurist published The Great Question of the Hour: What Constitutes the Money of the Constitution? in 1878 as an "aid in finding the truth, to counteract tendencies to political error." Pryor Lea died at Goliad, Texas on September 14, 1879.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1971. Hans Peter Nielsen Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 (10 vols., Austin: Gammel, 1898). Hobart Huson, Refugio: A Comprehensive History of Refugio County from Aboriginal Times to 1953 (2 vols., Woodsboro, Texas: Rooke Foundation, 1953, 1955).