In determining when to send his ships out, Father was governed largely by the weather. Dark, stormy nights were the ones chosen. In the afternoon he would go up to the cupola of our house, and with his glasses he would scan the horizon to see how many Federal gunboats were patrolling the coast. Then his ship would go out in the early part of the night. In the morning, at daylight, he would be again on the lookout to count the Federal gunboats, to see if any were missing. If they were all there, he felt reasonably sure his ship had gotten through the blockade. It would be months before he knew definitely whether his ships had come safely to port or whether they had been captured. When he lost one, the loss was complete; but when one got through, the gain was large. He had a working arrangement with the Confederate Government by which the return voyage brought them clothing, arms, and munitions of war of all kinds. The terrible days between Lee's surrender and bringing some sort of order out of the chaos in the South made a lasting impression on my mind. I cannot recall just now long the interim was, but it must have been a full year or more. There was one regiment of Texas soldiers that came to Houston and disbanded there. They looted the town. They attempted to break into Father's storehouse, but he stood at the doors with a shotgun...Murder was rife everywhere; there was no law, there was no order. It was unsafe to go at night to you next-door neighbor's. When Father had this to do, he always reached for his shotgun or six-shooter and held it ready to shoot while both going and coming."15 Men of war met at the House plantation to discuss military strategy. One of those men was Jefferson Davis. On January 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing "all slaves in rebellion." The proclamation encouraged slaves to rebel and kill their owners -- their reward would be their Freedom. Slave owners had cause to hate Lincoln. Lee's surrender on April 9th 1865 was bad news for Thomas House -- his blockade running business was over. Lincoln would be assassinated five days latter. This encouraged southern troops to fight on. The news of Lincoln's assassination was a cause for celebration at the House plantation. The last rebel troops surrendered a month later May 26, 1865. In 1866 the Ku Klux Klan formed secretly in the South. They were a vigilante group, that terrorized blacks, and used frontier justice against carpet baggers, and criminals that traveled throughout the south during reconstruction. Thomas House and some of Edward's older brothers joined the Texas Klan. 16 After the civil war Edward was sent to preparatory school in England. Edward developed close friendships with his English schoolmates. Some of Edward's schoolmates would become members of Cecil Rhodes Round Table group, so would Edward. Some of Edward's schoolmates would grow up to become the most powerful English diplomats and spies in Britain. Edward would grow up to be on of the most powerful diplomats and spies in America. Edward's mother died when he was fourteen. Edward returned to the States to complete his education. According to House, "I had expected to be able to enter Yale, but I found myself wholly unprepared and reluctantly entered the Hopkin's Grammar School of the Class of '77...What I had been taught was of but little use, and I would have been better off as far as Latin and Greek were concerned if I had known nothing and had started from the beginning. I studied but little, and I soon found I should have difficulty in joining the Class of '81 in Yale. Meanwhile, Oliver T. Morton, a son of Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, and I had become fast friends and we agreed to tutor and go to Cornell instead of Yale. Both Morton and I were more bent on mischief than upon books and, while the mischief was innocent, it made us poor students." 17