Pendleton Murrah served as governor of Texas from November 5, 1863 to June 17, 1865. Murrah was probably born in Alabama in 1826 or South Carolina in 1827, either illegitimate or orphaned early. He attended the University of Alabama and graduated from Brown University in 1848. Murrah moved to Marshall, Texas and began practicing law there around 1850. In 1857, he was elected to the state legislature after losing a race in 1855. He announced as a candidate for the Confederate Congress in 1861 but withdrew due to ill health. He served briefly as a quartermaster officer in the Fourteenth Texas Infantry in early 1862 but was forced by poor health to resign his commission. He defeated T.J. Chambers in the gubernatorial election of 1863. During his administration, military and financial difficulties pushed the state and the Confederacy into contests over conscription, frontier defense, and the impressment of cotton, cattle, and slaves. In addition, Murrah was dying of tuberculosis. In May 1865, Governor Murrah fled to Mexico, where he died at Monterrey on August 4, 1865. In Murrah's absence (May to June 1865), Lieutenant Governor Fletcher S. Stockdale was acting governor.
Fletcher Stockdale was born in Kentucky in 1827 and moved to Indianola, Texas in 1846. In 1856 he was a promoter of the Powderhorn, Victoria, and Gonzales Railroad. He served in the state senate from 1857 to 1861, and was on the committee which drafted the Ordinance of Secession in 1861. Stockdale was lieutenant governor from 1863 to 1866. After the Civil War, Stockdale practiced law and promoted land in Cuero. He was active in a number of Democratic National Conventions, and in the Constitutional Convention of 1875. He died in Cuero in 1902.
From the guide to the Records, 1863-1865, (Texas State Archives)
