BLOOD FEUD
On April 6, 1865, the Confederacy was in its death throes. Robert E. Lee’s defeat at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, Va., had all but ended the fighting in the Eastern Theater. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Rebels were doing all they could to hold back James Wilson’s cavalry in northern Alabama, and in North Carolina, William T. Sherman continued to close in on Joe Johnston’s depleted army. Meanwhile, far away from the battlefield, two high-ranking Confederate officers in Texas were waging their own private war.
Colonel George Wythe Baylor and Maj. Gen. John A. Wharton did not start out as enemies. After all, they were both Texans, fighting under the same banner and fiercely devoted to the Southern cause. Baylor, in fact, reportedly had raised the first Confederate flag in Austin during the Lone Star State’s secession debates in 1861. Both men had distinguished themselves on multiple battlefields and should have been brothers in arms. But they also came from very different backgrounds—one to the manor born, the other having to fight for everything he ever got.
Baylor was from simple stock, but rose through the Confederate ranks through brains, courage, and pure ability. He served on General Albert Sidney Johnston’s staff until Johnston was mortally wounded at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, and won commendations for gallantry while commanding a regiment during the April 8-9, 1864, fighting at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana. The brother of Colonel John Baylor (see “No Mere Sideshow,” p. 18), he undeniably had the heart of a lion but was also a bantam rooster of a man. After four years of fighting, he was in “exceedingly delicate health,” suffering from chronic dysentery that had reduced him to a gaunt 135 pounds.
John Wharton,
