Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865

By Thomas W. Cutrer

Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469666280

Thomas W. Cutrer

Thomas W. Cutrer is professor emeritus of history at Arizona State University.

Book preview

THEATER OF A SEPARATE WAR

. . .

THE LITTLEFIELD HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA

GARY W. GALLAGHER and T. MICHAEL PARRISH, editors

This book was supported by the LITTLEFIELD FUND FOR SOUTHERN HISTORY, University of Texas Libraries.

This landmark sixteen-volume series, featuring books by some of today’s most respected Civil War historians, surveys the conflict from the earliest rumblings of disunion through the Reconstruction era. A joint project of UNC Press and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, University of Texas Libraries, the series offers an unparalleled comprehensive narrative of this defining era in U.S. history.

THEATER OF A SEPARATE WAR

THE CIVIL WAR WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, 1861–1865

Revised Edition

. . .

THOMAS W. CUTRER

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2017, 2023 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Miller, Clarendon, and Madrone types by codeMantra

Cover illustration: Battle of Pea Ridge, Ark., by Kurz & Allison.

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

ISBN 978-1-4696-6621-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6628-0 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original of this book as follows:

Names: Cutrer, Thomas W., author.

Title: Theater of a separate war : the Civil War west of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 / Thomas W. Cutrer.

Other titles: Littlefield history of the Civil War era.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Series: The Littlefield history of the Civil War era | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047324 | ISBN 9781469631561 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469631578 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: West (U.S.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. | Southwest, Old—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.

Classification: LCC E470.9 .C87 2017 | DDC 973.7/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047324

For Emily, as always and forever

CONTENTS

. . .

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Has It Come So Soon As This? Secession and Confederate Statehood

2. I Will Gladly Give My Life for a Victory: Kansas and Missouri, June–December 1861

3. The Wolf Is Come: War in the Indian Nation, 1861–1862

4. The Only Man in the Army That Was Whipped: The Pea Ridge Campaign, February 1862

5. Charge ’em! Damn ’em, Charge, Charge, Charge! The Struggle for the Southwest, July 1861–July 1862

6. We Are Men and Braves: Indian Warfare in the Far West

7. No Feeling of Mercy or Kindness: The Prairie Grove Campaign, March 1862–January 1863

8. Hold Out Till Help Arrived or Until All Dead: The Capture of Arkansas Post, 9–11 January 1863

9. Texas Must Take Her Chances: Coastal Defense and the Battle of Galveston, April 1861–January 1863

10. All New England Men and of the Best Material: The Federal Occupation of South Louisiana, April 1862–April 1863

11. Cannot You Do Something to Operate against Them on Your Side of the River! Milliken’s Bend and the Campaign for Vicksburg, Spring 1863

12. Courage and Desperation Rarely Equaled: The Rebel Assault on Helena, 4 July 1863

13. Much Unmerited Loss and Suffering: Quantrill’s Lawrence Raid and the War on the Missouri-Kansas Border, August–September 1863

14. Drive Him Routed from Our Soil: The Little Rock Campaign, July–October 1863

15. More Remarkable Than Thermopylae: Texas Coastal Defense and the Battle of Sabine Pass, January 1863–June 1865

16. Our Troops Should Occupy and Hold at Least a Portion of Texas: Banks’s Overland Campaign, July–November 1863

17. The Land of Coyotes, Tarantulas, Fandangos, Horn-Toads, and Jack-Rabbits: Banks’s Texas Campaign, October 1863–August 1864

18. No Nobler Death: The Indian Territory, July 1863–February 1865

19. We Must Fight Them and Whip Them: Banks’s Drive toward Shreveport, November 1863–April 1864

20. I Am Going to Fight Banks If He Has a Million of Men! The Battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, 8–9 April 1864

21. A Brisk and Brilliant Six Weeks’ Campaign: Steele’s Camden Expedition and Banks’s Retreat from Pleasant Hill, April and May 1864

22. Destroy Property and Recruit Men: Price’s Missouri Raid, August–November 1864

23. Let Come What Will, We’ll Fight the Yankees Alone: Confederate Collapse in the Trans-Mississippi

Conclusion: A Sort of Botany Bay

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A map of the trans-Mississippi appears on page xvi

PREFACE

. . .

The trans-Mississippi theater of the American Civil War remains to a remarkable degree unknown and underappreciated. Despite the romantic allure of the New Mexico campaign of 1862, the pathos of the war in Indian Territory, the drama of the recapture of Galveston, the heroic defense of Sabine Pass, the ferocity of the Red River and Camden campaigns of 1864, and the irony of the final battle of the war—a minor Confederate victory on the Rio Grande achieved more than a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—the trans-Mississippi West languishes in the backwaters of Civil War historiography. Neither the massive size and strategic importance of the region nor the dedication and hardships of the soldiers who served there in Union and Confederate armies has inspired substantial interest among historians or readers drawn to the military story of the conflict.

Soldiers at the time foretold their fate. In the autumn of 1863, for example, the Army of the Gulf and the Army of Western Louisiana were deeply engaged in the momentous Overland Campaign in south Louisiana, a series of battles that ultimately saved Texas from invasion. But, Capt. Elijah Petty commented to his wife, in comparison to the Chickamauga campaign underway in Tennessee, these little places here are of minor importance to them and will be overlooked.¹

For nearly 150 years, historians tended to disregard what one called the dark corner of the Confederacy. Early in the twentieth century, historian Nathaniel W. Stephenson wrote that a great history of the time would have a special and thrilling story of the conduct of the detached western unit, the isolated world of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—the ‘Department of the Trans-Mississippi’—cut off from the main body of the Confederacy and hemmed in between the Federal army and the deep sea. But to the largest degree, this story has not yet been written. The Annals of the Civil War: Written by Leading Participants, North and South, one of the major collections of primary documents relating to the Civil War, contains not a single article on the war west of the Mississippi. The classic West Point Atlas of American Wars contains not a single map of the trans-Mississippi. Ken Burns’s vastly popular and influential PBS documentary The Civil War gives the theater equally short shrift, and most of the general treatments of the war accord it at best only an occasional passing reference.

In recent years, however, the trans-Mississippi has become a fertile area for study. The letters, journals, and memoirs of those who fought there are at last being edited and published, and a number of fine monographs on the battles and leaders, strategy and tactics of the theater have been written. The bibliography and notes of this volume will readily attest to the contributions of a growing number of fine scholars doing outstanding pioneering work in this field.

This volume of the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era is an examination of military operations from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. As such, it goes beyond the Confederate trans-Mississippi—Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Indian Territory, and the New Mexico Territory—to include events in Kansas and the wide sweep of military activity in California, Utah, and the Dakotas. In common with Earl J. Hess’s Civil War in the West, it is to the largest degree an analytical military narrative. While the narrative includes some contextual attention to social, political, and economic history, my purpose in providing the military narrative is to establish the foundation and build the framework for future scholars to treat these other broad topics, as well as the compelling experiences of civilians, women, Native Americans, enslaved people, and the common soldier, who played such a vital role in the story of the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

. . .

Among those scholars who are beginning to cast a full light upon the trans-Mississippi are Anne J. Bailey, Michael E. Banasik, Alwyn Barr, Norman D. Brown, Mark K. Christ, Edward T. Cotham, Joseph G. Dawson III, Donald S. Frazier, David B. Gracy II, Charles D. Grear, Richard W. Hatcher III, Earl J. Hess, Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Kenneth W. Howell, Gary D. Joiner, Richard Lowe, Richard B. McCaslin, Carl H. Moneyhon, T. Michael Parrish, William Garrett Piston, Jeffery S. Prushankin, William L. Shea, and Jerry D. Thompson, many of whom I am proud to claim as friends and to whom I am deeply indebted for many kindnesses, professional and personal.

I am also greatly indebted to Mike Parrish and Gary Gallagher for the honor of entrusting this project to me, for their careful and insightful readings of the manuscript, and for their many fine suggestions that so greatly strengthened it. I must also thank Mark Simpson-Vos, editorial director of the University of North Carolina Press. But my greatest debt of gratitude is to Emily F. Cutrer, who—in addition to being an outstanding writer and scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history, and as such offered many welcome suggestions toward the making of a better book—is the wife whose patience, encouragement, and support through the long months of this process sustained and inspired me to its completion.

THEATER OF A SEPARATE WAR

. . .

TRANS-MISSISSIPPI

INTRODUCTION

. . .

The Confederate states of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, the parishes of Louisiana west of the Mississippi, the Indian Territory, and the New Mexico Territory constituted what Richmond editor Edward Alfred Pollard called the distant and obscure theatre of the Trans-Mississippi. But distant and obscure as it might have seemed to a citizen of Richmond in 1862, the trans-Mississippi was an area of tremendous potential significance. For one thing, at 600,000 square miles, the trans-Mississippi Confederacy comprised more than one-half of the entire Confederate landmass, and the area was as variable as it was vast. In addition, manpower reserves were substantial. In 1860, Arkansas had a white population of more than 324,000; Louisiana, 375,000; Texas, 420,000; and Missouri, in excess of 1,000,000. The black populations of these states were also significant, with Louisiana’s slave population nearly equaling that of its free citizens. Texas had a slave population of more than 180,000, and Arkansas and Missouri each had more than 100,000 enslaved black people. With the coming of emancipation and the enlistment of former slaves into the Union army, many of these men flocked to the colors and played significant roles in the campaigns of 1863 and 1864. Of Louisiana’s black men of military age, 24,052, or 31 percent, joined the army, and in Arkansas, that number was 5,526, or 24 percent. From Texas, however, a state that largely avoided Federal invasion and occupation and therefore held its slaves until the war was ended, only 47 black men enlisted, a mere .001 percent of its prewar slave population.¹

In addition to its great size, the area was, as Texas senator Williamson Simpson Oldham characterized it, the most productive on the globe. The trans-Mississippi was the fastest growing part of the South, with a burgeoning cotton culture in Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana’s sugar and molasses production was by far the largest on the North American mainland. Missouri produced more corn than any other Southern state as well as significant quantities of wheat and oats; it raised more hogs than any other slave state and ranked behind only Kentucky in its number of horses. More beef cattle ranged the Texas prairies than any other state in the prewar Union—more than 3.5 million head. According to Oldham’s estimate, the region was capable of producing most of the necessaries of life as well as nearly, if not all the minerals necessary for the manufacture of the materials of war. Property, exclusive of the value of slaves, was assessed at $3 billion, and at the start of the war the trans-Mississippi had in storage in excess of 3 million bales of cotton. Thus, wrote Lt. Col. Richard Bache Irwin, adjutant general of the Department of the Gulf, The importance of cutting off the trans-Mississippi region as a source of supply for the main Confederate armies was obvious.²

The agricultural potential of the Far West, the discovery of the fabulous mineral wealth, and the Mormon dream of a homeland beyond the reach of religious persecution—spurred by the nation’s political ideology of Manifest Destiny—drew tens of thousands of immigrants to the new territories beyond the line of statehood, leading to the establishment of the Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota Territories in 1861, the Idaho and Arizona Territories in 1863, and the Montana Territory in 1864. As migrants flowed into these lands, the transportation links—over which people and manufactured goods made their way west in exchange for precious metals and raw materials that fed the eastern economy—gained increasing importance. This burgeoning rate of movement into and across their lands was, of course, a cause of great alarm among Native American populations.

The trans-Mississippi’s strategic location was also significant diplomatically and economically to both the North and South. England and France, in particular, suffered great economic hardship because of the Union navy’s blockade of Southern ports and consequent deprivation of Southern cotton, which threatened to bring them into the war on the side of the Confederacy. Texas’s Rio Grande frontier offered the only border with a foreign nation, giving the South, through Mexico, a doorway to the world through which cotton could be exchanged for vital matériel after the Federal naval blockade effectively closed Southern ports to European trade.

The region also held out the chimera of a two-ocean republic, with both the rich Colorado goldfields and the Pacific Ocean beckoning to the west. Texas, in fact, through its decade as an independent republic and as a state in the Union until the Compromise of 1850, had claimed the eastern half of New Mexico as well as a sliver of Colorado as its own. Confederate possession of the New Mexico Territory offered a staging area for military initiatives that might well have tipped the balance of the war. The Colorado Territory lay just beyond the border, on the map and in Southern imaginations, at least, only a short march up the Rio Grande. And the goldfields of California and the ports of San Diego and Los Angeles, Confederate visionaries dreamed, could break the Federal blockade and give access to the fabled China trade.³

The region was also potentially vital in the defense of the Mississippi River, the most strategically important corridor of the war. Although all the major riverine cities—Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Hudson, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans—lay on the river’s left bank, relief might have come to any of those points from Arkansas or Louisiana, if only the South could have mustered its resources. Breaking the siege of Vicksburg or Port Hudson or recapturing New Orleans might well have provided the impetus that the Confederacy needed to win its independence, but of course none of these events occurred. Much of the trans-Mississippi theater remained sparsely settled, and some was not settled at all, and could spawn logistical nightmares, with campaigns lost because of the impossibility of obtaining or transporting supplies as often as to enemy action.⁴

Almost from the beginning, however, a contrast existed between the way the Union and the Confederacy viewed the war in the trans-Mississippi. While Federal armies achieved success in coordinating operations on both sides of the Mississippi, organizational obstructions imposed by the War Department in Richmond contributed to the failure of Confederate armies in the trans-Mississippi to contribute to the defense of the Mississippi River. No Rebel operation conducted on both sides of the Mississippi was directed by a single commander. Rather, generals on one bank had to rely upon the willing cooperation of the generals on the other. Of course, this never occurred. In April 1861, the Davis administration created the District of Texas, with Col. Earl Van Dorn in command, and on 22 July the District of Arkansas—including most of Western Louisiana—was assigned to Brig. Gen. William J. Hardee. Indian Territory was formally organized in November 1861. But these districts operated under no central authority. On 25 June 1861, Davis appointed Leonidas Polk to the command of Department No. 2, which straddled the river, indicating that Richmond was willing to integrate military operations of the trans-Mississippi with those of the rest of the Confederacy. No such cooperation came about, however, and on 26 May 1862 the administration restructured its department system, creating the Trans-Mississippi Department as a separate administrative unit to report directly to the War Department, and appointing Maj. Gen. Thomas Theophilus Hunter Holmes to its command. To Holmes fell the authority to cooperate with Confederate forces to the east or not, at his discretion.⁵

Late in 1862, when the Mississippi River was threatened by Federal advances from above and below, the Confederate War Department pressed Holmes to combine his forces with those in Mississippi, but the lethargic trans-Mississippi commander failed to comply with the insistent urging, remaining inactive in Arkansas while Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant moved inexorably toward Vicksburg. With the fall of that Confederate Gibraltar, the Union gained uninterrupted passage of the river, although some 15,000 men were required to defend riverine commerce against Rebel batteries and sharpshooters along its banks. Senator Oldham made the claim, in fact, that the Confederates, with a mobile strike force of cavalry and light artillery, could have maintained an effectual blockade of the river that would have compelled the enemy to abandon every position held by him between Memphis and New Orleans.⁶

Unlike the Confederate command structure in the West—which was divided east and west with authority sharply delineated by the river—the Union divided its armies in the trans-Mississippi between north and south, with Maj. Gen. Henry Wager Halleck’s (later Brig. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis’s and then Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield’s) Department of the Missouri and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Prentice Banks’s Department of the Gulf working independently of each other but with the common cause of opening the Mississippi. To President Abraham Lincoln and Halleck, in particular, the struggle beyond the river was part of a coordinated effort to restore the seceded Confederate states to the Union, to secure Southern cotton and other resources, to interdict Confederate trade through Mexico, and to defuse the threat presented by Napoléon III’s political and military influence south of the Rio Grande.

During the siege of Chattanooga, the U.S. War Department created the Division of the Mississippi to be commanded by Grant, from which Schofield’s and Banks’s departments were excluded. These could have been made a part of Grant’s new command for, unlike the Confederates, these Union departments enjoyed excellent communications that made the passage of troops across the river a relatively simple matter. As long as Union forces held Saint Louis, the key to the trans-Mississippi, they had access to Missouri’s rail hub, and, with the fall of Memphis, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson, the Union navy gained access to the mouths of the Red, Arkansas, and White Rivers. The principal effect of the fall of these bastions was, in fact, not the Confederate loss of communication across the river, which had virtually ceased within the first months of the war, but the access that it gave the Union navy to the heartland of Arkansas and Louisiana. Only as Federal troops begin to move south where they were checked by the poverty of the country, made worse by the devastation of war.

As Maj. Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan expressed the reasoning behind the Union’s persistent and costly efforts to occupy the trans-Mississippi, especially Texas, the United States was struggling for a republican existence against organized rebellion, and when nearly all the heads of the governments in Europe (except Russia) wished, and did believe, that republicanism was not a success, the Emperor of the French undertook the bold expedition to subvert the Republic of Mexico. To Sheridan, the French occupation of Mexico was a part of the rebellion; and believing that the contest in our own country was for the vindication of republicanism, I did not think that that vindication would be complete until Maximilian was compelled to leave.⁷

After the fall of Vicksburg, Halleck based his concept for western campaigns on the use of the Mississippi as the base of future operations east and west. Union armies, he believed, could exploit their position between the two halves of the severed Confederacy, concentrating against first one and then the other. The Union general-in-chief desired to conduct his army’s first offensive operations in the trans-Mississippi, expecting that Union control of Little Rock and the Arkansas River would free the large Union force occupied in Missouri to join Union armies operating in Virginia and Tennessee.

This strategy offered political advantages, as well, for, Halleck believed, if these organized rebel forces could be driven from Arkansas and Louisiana, the states would immediately be restored to the Union. Texas would follow almost of its own accord. Despite Senator Oldham’s claim that no part of the people of the Confederacy were more united, or more devoted to the cause of Confederate independence than were those of the Trans-Mississippi Department, the region was far from monolithic in its devotion to the secessionist cause. While the prosperous slave-owning planters of the river valleys of Arkansas and Missouri were ardent in their support of disunion, the small farmers of the hill counties generally varied between a neutral stance and outright Unionism, and Saint Louis and its environs—because of the city’s trading ties with the Northeast and its growing industrial strength—was also staunchly pro-Union. Immigrant populations—and Germans in particular—tended to favor the Union as well, leading to a fratricidal, irregular warfare in the region, unknown in scale in the rest of the country.

Even in secessionist Louisiana and Texas, pockets of Unionist sentiment upset the political stability and gave the Lincoln administration hope that they might be quickly reconstructed following Federal military occupation. The reconstruction of these states would have garnered support for the administration’s policies against its political opponents on both left and right. Although this expectation proved illusory, it did help to define Union strategy in the trans-Mississippi.⁸

While the U.S. government recognized the immediate and long-term importance of the region and formulated strategy accordingly, the Confederate government was myopic. For all the trans-Mississippi’s size, resources, and strategic location, in the words of Maj. Gen. Joseph O. Shelby’s adjutant, Maj. John Newman Edwards, One thing could never be learned at Richmond, or, if learned, never acted upon—and that was the great importance of the Trans-Mississippi Department. A delegation of Arkansas citizens wrote to Jefferson Davis in the spring of 1862 that because of his administration’s neglect, the trans-Mississippi was bound to be the theater of a separate war, beyond the reach and cut off from all aid by the Confederacy, whether of men, arms, or ammunition. To Edwards, in fact, it was Richmond’s foregone intention to abandon it as soon as possible.

Edwards’s conclusion was obviously an overstatement, but in February 1863, Davis organized the Trans-Mississippi Department, assigning Lt. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, an effective administrator but a flawed strategist and tactician, to its command. After the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, this region became a virtually independent domain, somewhat derisively known as the Kirby Smithdom. Davis and Smith worked out a semiautonomous status for the department, and, despite complaints from some western officers that Richmond micromanaged the trans-Mississippi, its commander was given extraordinary powers, both civil and military, to conduct its affairs.⁹

Even so, the trans--Mississippi began and ended storm-cradled life as an orphan, both physically and psychologically far removed from the stirring events to the east. One reason that the theater failed to establish a hold on either the political, military, or popular imagination in the South was that it lacked a strategic focal point. In the East, military operations were dominated by the battle cry of Onward to Richmond; in the West, the war was defined by the reopening of the Mississippi River and the drive into the vital Confederate heartland. While the cockpit of the war in the East was largely defined by a ninety-mile axis running from Washington, D.C., to Richmond, Virginia, and even the more fluid Western theater was largely confined to a line running from Nashville to Chattanooga to Atlanta to Savannah, in the trans-Mississippi no such strategies were possible because no such vital objective existed. As the Duke of Wellington had written in regard to the amorphous nature of the United States in 1812, I do not know where you could carry out an operation which would be so injurious to the Americans as to force them to sue for peace. The region, still a frontier in many ways, contained no vital point and no corridor such as the Mississippi River. No trans-Mississippi city rivaled even the modest population of Richmond, Atlanta, Chattanooga, or Nashville. Instead, campaigns—including the vicious partisan warfare waged behind the Union lines in Arkansas and Missouri—were simultaneously sprawled out over half a continent, and while armies in the Eastern and Western theaters most often consisted of between 50,000 and 100,000 men, in the trans-Mississippi what was designated as an army could consist of no more than a single brigade, and only seldom did an army of more than 10,000 men take the field. Likewise, casualties in the trans-Mississippi were far fewer. As an example, Maj. Gen. John George Walker’s Texas Division, arguably the most active division in the theater—seeing combat at Milliken’s Bend, Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins’ Ferry—sustained a total of 2,175 casualties, nearly 40 percent of its number in 1864 alone, but these losses pale in comparison to those of, for example, John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade, which suffered a 61 percent casualty rate of its 4,400 men.¹⁰

The combat experienced by troops in the trans-Mississippi was perhaps less arduous than that of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Tennessee, or the Army of the Tennessee, but they operated efficiently under peculiar difficulties unknown east of the Mississippi and deserved major credit for their courage, their perseverance, and their self-sacrifice. Following the initial enthusiasm for service in Virginia, most trans-Mississippi soldiers expressed their ardent preference for returning to or remaining in their home region. Political representatives bitterly resented seeing their region’s resources for defense—human and material—requisitioned by the Davis administration for service east of the river.

In addition to serving as a source for food and matériel, the trans-Mississippi furnished the Confederacy with some of its premiere fighting units, including Hood’s Texas Brigade (including the Third Arkansas Infantry, respectfully referred to as the Third Texas); the Eighth Texas Cavalry, better known as Terry’s Texas Rangers; the Louisiana Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia—Lee’s Tigers—and the famed Missouri Brigade of the Army of Tennessee. Some, like Senator Oldham, thought soldiers from the trans-Mississippi should have remained at home to defend their own states and communities, and department commander Edmund Kirby Smith complained that the country west of the Mississippi has been exhausted of its fighting population to swell up the ranks of our armies in Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The region, Oldham told the Senate, was as important as any part of the Confederacy; but regiments after regiments have been transported east of the Mississippi, and far beyond the Allegheny mountains to fight battles in Virginia. To continue to send troops raised in the trans-Mississippi to the eastern fronts, Oldham believed, was wrong and impolitic and unjust.¹¹

Conversely, Federal soldiers who served in the trans-Mississippi were drawn from all parts of the Union: New Englanders and Midwesterners as well as men from far-off California. The motivation of these soldiers—North and South—to enlist and fight in the trans-Mississippi was not at all different from that of their brothers-in-arms east of the river. Those who served the Union did so, as Marine private Henry O. Gusley wrote, because our beloved country [is] torn by treason and divided by civil war, and ourself in the ranks of defenders of the constitution and the laws. Today we are helping to represent that constitution and to uphold it in one of the traitor-States.¹²

First Lt. Oliver Perry Newberry of the Thirteenth Missouri (U.S.) Infantry declared that this is not a war for conquest or power but one to save a government founded by the best men the world ever saw. He had volunteered to help preserve the Union, and only when our flag shall wave in every hamlet in this our native land, he declared in a letter to his mother, will I return home satisfied that my life has not been spent in vain.

The question of upholding the Union was of much greater consequence in the thinking of the average Federal soldier than was the abolition of slavery. As Private Gusley, then a prisoner of war, wrote to the editor of the Galveston Tri-Weekly News, the great mass of the people of the north do not uphold the administration on the principle of abolishing slavery, but that the restoration of the Union is the grand incentive. Ovando J. Hollister, the captain of a company of Colorado volunteers, noted that the Union army in the trans-Mississippi contained representatives of every shade of the idea, from the opposer of slavery on principle, to the tolerator of slavery on the ground of expediency, and the worshiper of slavery from long association. To him, however, the destruction of chattel slavery in the United States is an inseparable adjunct of the present upheaval and as such we must necessarily war against it.¹³

But for many Union soldiers, especially those from New England, abolition became the principal motivation for continuing the fight. Pvt. Rufus Kinsley of the Eighth Vermont Infantry (later to become a lieutenant in the Second Louisiana Native Guard, a black regiment), although charmed by the beauty of the Louisiana plantation country, hated the institution of slavery. "But with all the beauty of this lovely place, the curse is here, he wrote in his diary. The south is being burned with fire, and drowned in blood. Her villages are desolate, her lands, the richest in the world, laid waste, the wings of commerce idle, all her interests, material, social, political, tied to the hideous monster—slavery—which is marching with rapid strides to its death. Strange they are so infatuated they will not sever the connection. Well, let them hang together. I am content. Slavery must die; and if the south insists on being buried in the same grave, I shall see in it nothing but the retributive hand of God. I thank God I lived to see the day when the south is beginning to burn; and that it is my privilege to help kindle the fires."¹⁴

Other forces drove the Federal soldiers, too. Somewhat more cynically, the fact that the mouth of the Mississippi River and its great entrepôt, New Orleans, would be in the hands of a foreign government if the Confederacy were to triumph, Midwesterners, seeing the means of marketing their produce threatened, seemed to be as ready to go to war for the river as for the Union.

For their part, most trans-Mississippi Confederates fought at first for independence and for their rights, however they defined them. When the war commenced there was a unanimity, and patriotic enthusiasm in support of it, Senator Oldham claimed, which the world never equaled before. When their state called on them, wrote Sgt. William Lott Davidson of the Fifth Texas Cavalry, Texans left their homes, property, loved ones, their wives, children, mothers, and sweethearts and went into the ranks of their struggling countrymen to uphold their honor and sustain their cause. No selfish motives actuated them but they enlisted for the war solely for their country’s good. To his great surprise, Captain Hollister learned in a conversation with a group of Texans taken prisoner at the battle of Glorieta that the North presumed to tamper with the Constitution and infringe upon their rights. Hollister, of course, disagreed, but, he wrote in his memoir, the idea has been so thoroughly beaten into them that nothing can convince them of its falsity. One of the prisoners told him, You have the argument, but by God I know I’m right, a position Hollister felt perfectly illustrated the spirit of the South’s experiment in secession: Pride of will is substituted for reason, and the chivalric courage, which no one denies them, is desperately expanded to make a bad matter worse. Hollister determined that a war of extermination is all that will ever restore American unity. They hate us intensely.¹⁵

Most Southerners most certainly did hate Northerners. It is strange to me that a just God will suffer such a people and such a country as we have to be murdered and destroyed and wasted, wrote one Texas infantry officer, by such a carping a race of scoundrels as compose the Yankee army. The Federals were putting forth every effort to make us tribute to their malevolent designs, wrote William Henry King, who had just enlisted in the Twenty-Eighth Louisiana Infantry. Justice would excuse us were we to treat such enemies as we are now combating, as outlaws and highway robbers, he continued. They are waging against us a war of conquest and rapine; for plunder and political power they have left their homes and made us special objects of their unholy passions, and with a ferociousness characteristic of a barbarous people, are striving to enslave that they can tyrannize over us. They claim they are only striving to perpetuate the ‘glorious Union transmitted to us by our fathers’; in answer to which it is sufficient to state, the means they have adopted are utterly subversive of the end they profess to seek. A Republican government—based on the coercion of one-third of its subjects, is a misnomer too palpable to require an argument. A Texas cavalryman, recently exchanged from a Union prison, believed his captors sought the South’s subjugation, the overthrow of its institutions, and the general destruction of the country. To him, the Yankee mercenary fought only to despoil Southern homes. While one fights for Union, two fight for Greeley’s doctrine, and three for booty and plunder, he opined.¹⁶

Most of the men of the Confederate army of the trans-Mississippi looked upon their eastern counterparts as patriot sons of the south, who nobly endeavored to roll back the swift tide of invasion in Virginia and Tennessee. The men who served west of the Mississippi were the same material as those who went east, but they have been largely forgotten, while their brothers in arms who served in the theaters east of the river have been immortalized. The combat experienced by troops in the trans-Mississippi was less arduous than that of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Tennessee, or the Army of Tennessee. They operated efficiently, however, under peculiar difficulties unknown east of the Mississippi River and deserved major credit for their courage, their perseverance, and their self-sacrifice. Following the initial enthusiasm for service in Virginia, most trans-Mississippi soldiers expressed their ardent preference for returning to or remaining in their home region. Political representatives bitterly resented seeing their region’s resources for defense—human and material—requisitioned by the Davis administration for service east of the river.

But for all of that, the soldiers of the trans-Mississippi remained true to their cause and maintained the respect of their brothers-in-arms east of the river and of the civilians who they steadfastly defended. On 24 January 1865, the men of Hood’s Texas Brigade, the Grenadier Guard of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army, issued a proclamation, congratulating the men of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi for having, during the past campaign, driven the enemy back from their frontiers, and calling on them to stand firmly by their armies, protect the wives and children of the absent soldiers, and to tolerate no man who will go back in the Union with the Yankees. And following the Rebel victory at Mansfield, Kate Stone, a sharp-tonged refugee in Tyler, Texas, gave all of the credit to our gallant southern soldiers—who can praise them enough? In her diary entry for 15 April 1864, she pledged, we will never laugh at our soldiers on this side of the Mississippi again.¹⁷

But despite their similarities in patriotism, motivation, and enthusiasm for their cause, the men who fought east of the river could be contemptuous of their fellow soldiers in the West. It makes me mad to think of affairs in Arkansas, wrote Capt. Alexander E. Spence of the First Arkansas Infantry, attached to the Army of Tennessee. I think our army over there might as well be disbanded for all the good they do.¹⁸

Some Federal soldiers, too, commented on the differences between Confederate troops serving east and west. Regarding the Rebels captured at Vicksburg, 2nd Lt. Benjamin F. McIntyre of the Nineteenth Iowa Infantry remarked that they were a gritty folk and did not display the fear and cowardice of those with whom we had to deal in Arkansas and Missouri. He made the claim, in fact, that the men of the Vicksburg garrison consider it an insult to be classed with Arkansas troops. Following the long-established theme of discounting the valor and patriotism of Western soldiers, some historians contend that the manpower of the trans-Mississippi was inferior, not only in numbers but in quality. Not only were most of the men from the region sent east, but, according to John Keegan, the best ones at that. Those who remained, he contends, were not of the first quality, either in leadership, equipment, or human fighting power.¹⁹

To the contrary, the soldiers of the trans-Mississippi believed that they were of the same quality as their comrades east of the river. In the opinion of one of Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s Missourians, never was there a better body of troops anywhere. Brig. Gen. William Lewis Cabell, an 1850 graduate of West Point, claimed that no man ever commanded better soldiers than Arkansas soldiers. Further, he believed that no soldiers were ever subjected to greater privation or faced graver danger. Col. Winchester Hall of the Twenty-Sixth Louisiana Infantry thought that the men of the trans-Mississippi were as fine a body of men as fought at Antietam or Chickamauga and believed that the men of his command were inspired with the same enthusiasm that swelled in the breasts of the followers of Cleburne or Forrest. Perhaps the strongest statement in praise of the soldier west of the river came from Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, commander of the Texas Division. His soldiers were impatient of discipline, he wrote, but braver men never lived. The troops serving in the trans-Mississippi were the same material as those who made name and fame for Texas across the Mississippi. Fathers serving in Tennessee had sons here with Green, Walker or Polignac; one brother would be marching and fighting, ragged and barefoot, in Virginia, while another followed the flag through the swamps of Louisiana. They were the same blood and of the same families with those who composed Hood’s brigade and Terry’s Rangers, which organizations deserve to rank in valor with the legions of Caesar and the battalions of Napoleon.²⁰

Some troops, both Confederate and Federal, who served in the trans-Mississippi felt defensive about not having been in the more glamorous theaters to the east. The volunteers of the so-called California Column, who spent the war guarding the Santa Fe Trail, staged a minor rebellion when they were informed that they would serve in the West. So eager were they to get to the Eastern front that they requested that the War Department withhold more than $30,000 from their pay to underwrite the cost of their transportation to Virginia, where they might serve their country in shooting traitors instead of eating rations and freezing to death around sage brush fires. These Californians stated that they would gladly pay "for the privilege of going to the Potomac and getting shot. Soldiers understood, too, that the campaigns in the Eastern theater captured the public’s attention. The battles being waged in Virginia may so eclipse our movements here that any information I may send you will be skipped over as unworthy of a passing glance, and, perhaps with justice," wrote Pvt. Robert Gass of the 175th New York Infantry to the editor of the Troy (N.Y.) Whig, "as there is certainly nothing transpiring that will compare, in the remotest degree with the unparrelled [sic] events which are now reddening the soil of the Old Dominion with blood. Capt. David Pierson of the Third Louisiana Infantry agreed. Matters of great importance are transpiring in other quarters, he wrote, and when camp rumor reported that his regiment was to be transferred to Virginia, he responded that we all want to go."²¹

Confederate soldiers held differing opinions about their government’s interest in the trans-Mississippi. But if the battles and campaigns in Louisiana were less known and thus less considered than the proud record of those great corps of the Armies of the Potomac, of the Tennessee, and of the Cumberland, wrote Lt. Col. Richard B. Irwin, yet the story of the Nineteenth Army Corps is one whose simple facts suffice for all that need to be told or claimed of valor, of achievement, of sacrifice, or of patient endurance.²²

By the summer of 1864 the war in the trans-Mississippi had come to a virtual end. Except for the saber rattling on the Rio Grande, designed to keep Napoléon III’s imperial ambitions in Mexico in check, the United States had wisely decided to abandon the region in order to concentrate on operations in Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama. As Holmes is believed to have said of Grant once he became general-in-chief of the Federal armies, It is not the wish of his government to disturb us now; we are an army of prisoners and self-supporting at that.²³

1

HAS IT COME SO SOON AS THIS?

SECESSION AND CONFEDERATE STATEHOOD

. . .

Throughout the presidential campaign of 1860, the dominant question across the Lower South was not whether to secede, should Abraham Lincoln be elected, but whether to wait for a concerted action among all of the cotton states. Opinion on this question generally divided along the line of the conservative Whig supporters of John Bell, who favored waiting, and the more radical Democratic followers of John C. Breckenridge, who favored an immediate break with the Union. The majority of the citizens of the slave states of the trans-Mississippi South fell in the former category. Most initially advocated concurrent action with other Southern states, believing that unity among them would give the region the political influence necessary to overcome the increasingly powerful Republican Party’s policy of halting the growth of the South’s peculiar institution into the western territories and thus doom slavery to extinction.

In the divisive atmosphere that characterized the 1860 election, the wildfire of secession set Louisiana ablaze with excitement. On 29 October, one week before Lincoln’s election, William Lowndes Yancey addressed a New Orleans crowd, fanning the state into rebellion. The Alabama firebrand’s speech was followed by a torchlight procession, which, according to New Orleanian John Dimitry, filled the streets with Southern airs and cries. Lincoln’s election, according to Dimitry, fell like a shock of icicles upon Louisiana. Louisiana’s governor, Thomas Overton Moore, convened the state’s general assembly, calling the legislature into extra and special session on 10 December to discuss leaving the Union. According to Moore, until then a moderate, the election made such an assembly imperative. On 7 January 1861, in the plebiscite to elect delegates for the convention, 4,258 Louisianans—including many of the most conservative old-line Whigs—cast their ballots in favor of candidates favoring immediate secession, while 3,978 preferred to wait for the cooperation of the other slave states.¹

Even before the secession convention met, volunteer military organizations sprang up across Louisiana. These were composed not only of fire-eating Democrats but also of the sons of wealthy Whig planters and the elite of the old Creole population. These independent companies clearly needed systematic organization, but the state’s adjutant general informed the governor and legislature that a minimum of $1 million would be required to arm the state’s volunteers for war, and the state’s arsenal at Baton Rouge contained insufficient weapons and powder to arm even a single brigade. Louisiana’s militia moved quickly on 9 January to seize the state’s Federal military installations. Volunteers steamed down the Mississippi River to take Forts Jackson and Saint Philip, which defended New Orleans from below, and a second expeditionary force took control of Fort Pike at the Rigolets Pass at the mouth of the river. On the same day, the Washington Artillery battalion steamed upriver to capture the arsenal at Baton Rouge. The bloodless capture of these installations demonstrated to Louisianans the state’s sovereignty and increased their already feverish martial ardor. A board of military commissioners authorized the enrollment of volunteers for the state’s defense, as well as the enlistment of 500 regular troops.²

The secession convention met in Baton Rouge and on 26 January passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 113 to 17. The convention then adjourned, having appointed a delegation to attend the convention to be held in Montgomery, Alabama, on 4 February 1861, to form a Southern Confederacy. The state’s secession was generally received with enthusiasm, and even most conditional Unionists were ready to cast their lot with the new Confederacy. After the vote David Pierson, one of the few delegates to vote against the secession ordinance, pledged to assist as far as in my power lies in the defense of our Common Country and homes which is threatened with invasion and annihilation. Pierson, like other conservative Whigs throughout the South, volunteered because he thought it his duty to do so.³

In neighboring Texas, no sooner had Lincoln’s election been announced than the Lone Star flag began to replace the Stars and Stripes. More than a month would elapse, however, before Texas followed Louisiana out of the Union. Although Texas was as ardent in its desire for Southern independence as its sister states, its governor, Sam Houston, was opposed to breaking the Union. A protégé and fierce political adherent of Andrew Jackson, Houston was, like his mentor, an ardent Unionist. On 14 November 1860 he declared, So long as the Constitution is maintained by Federal authority and Texas is not made the victim of ‘Federal wrong,’ I am for the Union as it is.⁴

In the summer of 1859 Houston had been elected governor as an independent candidate, while regular Democrats won a large majority in the legislature. Despite strident public calls for a secession convention, only the legislature could call one, and only the governor could call the legislature into special session. Houston refused to do so, hoping the ardor for secession would cool. Instead, unable to check the tide of secessionist feeling in Texas, he offered the delaying tactic of recommending a submission of the question to a vote of the people at a general election.

On 21 November 1860, frustrated by the governor’s failure to act, Atty. Gen. George M. Flournoy, Texas Supreme Court chief justice Oran Milo Roberts, editor and Texas Ranger John Salmon Rip Ford, and other prominent Texans ignored the rules and called for a state-wide secession convention to meet on 28 January. Realizing he could not halt the movement, Houston, on 17 December, called for a special session of the legislature to convene on 21 January—one week before the meeting called by the citizens—hoping that it would declare the citizens’ convention illegal. He was to be disappointed, however, because the legislature endorsed the convention and even made the House chambers available for its use.⁵

The convention proceeded as planned, with Roberts as president, and Houston in attendance. On 1 February 1861 the convention, by a vote of 167 to 7, passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America, and the delegates appealed to the intelligence and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the ordinance in a popular referendum to be held on 22 February.⁶ Nevertheless, Houston continued to resist. Although he signed the resolution into law on 4 February 1861, he protested against the assumption of any power by the convention.

Other Texans opposed secession, too, and many suffered for this stance. Of the state’s 122 counties, 18 voted against secession, and 11 others cast as much as 40 percent of their vote against. Most of these counties were located along the northern and western frontier, where slave ownership was relatively rare. The counties along the Red River, in fact, considered seceding from Texas and establishing a free state. In response, the slave-owning minority, fearful of abolitionist influence from Kansas, lynched suspected Unionists in Grayson, Wise, and Denton counties. Texas’s western frontier—the so-called Hill Country—likewise voted against secession. The communities west of Austin and Waco, with less than thirty inches of rain annually, soils unconducive to cotton planting, and no rivers suitable for the transportation of cotton to market, needed little slave labor. Texas’s western border was defended by 2,700 U.S. soldiers, stationed there for protection against Comanche and Kiowa raiders, and the withdrawal of these Federal troops was expected to cause an increase in Indian depredation. The garrisons of the frontier forts were poised to scotch a secession movement as soon as it got under way. The major distinction between the rest of the state and the northern and western frontiers, however, was the ethnic makeup of the settlers in the north and west. The failed liberal insurrection of 1846 had impelled a large influx of German immigrants to the region—small farmers, artisans, and intellectuals—many of whom were strongly pro-Union and antislavery.⁷

Despite such dissent, for Texas, secession had become a reality. Even before the referendum could be held, the state convention sent delegates to Montgomery to participate in the establishment of the Confederate States of America, and it had authorized the seizure of all Federal property in Texas, including the arsenal at San Antonio. The convention reconvened on 2 March 1861, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Texas’s independence, to tally the referendum’s returns. By then, the provisional government of the Southern Confederacy had been instituted, and Texan John Henninger Reagan had been named postmaster general. Of the 60,526 popular ballots cast in Texas, 46,129 favored secession.⁸

Next the secession convention set about drafting a new state constitution and required all state officials to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, but Houston believed that such actions were beyond the purview of the convention and therefore unconstitutional. Although Houston declared his determination to follow the ‘Lone Star’ with the same devotion as of yore, he refused to take the Confederate oath, stating that rather than yield to usurpation and degradation, he would give up his position as the state’s chief executive. The office of governor was declared vacant, and Edward Clark ascended to the position.⁹

On 8 June, Governor Clark proclaimed that a state of war existed between the Confederate States and the United States of America, and he exhorted the men of Texas to battle: You are now engaged in a struggle for your liberty. Of its propitious termination, there can be no doubt; but in order to make the contest decisive, and of short duration, it is necessary that your most powerful energies should be called forth.

In the ferment of the secession crisis, the men of Texas were in a perfect maelstrom of excitement, rushing to organize volunteer companies and anxious lest the war be over before they won their share of the glory. During the secession convention, newly formed military companies from all over the state tendered to it their services.¹⁰

At the same time, 165 officers and 2,558 enlisted men—15 percent of the regular U.S. Army—were garrisoning twenty permanent installations in the vast military Department of Texas, which was then commanded by Brig. Gen. David Emanuel Twiggs, the second-ranking officer in the U.S. Army. Twiggs, then seventy years old, had been absent from his command on sick leave for most of 1860, but he had returned to San Antonio and resumed command on 13 December 1860. A Georgian, Twiggs was generally thought to be a secessionist who would not use military force to resist the state’s separation from the Union. As long as he remained in command, Twiggs was hooked on the horns of a legal and moral dilemma. On the one hand, he was subject to Article of War No. 52: Any officer … who shall … shamefully abandon any fort, post, or guard which he … may be commanded to defend shall suffer death or such other punishment as shall be ordered by sentence of a General Court Martial. On the other, as Twiggs declared to the general-in-chief, brevet Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, I am a Southern man, and all of these States will secede. As Twiggs was undoubtedly aware, when South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana seceded, the Federal property located within their borders had been turned over to secessionist authorities, and no U.S. officer involved in the transfer had been censured. Certainly, he told Scott, I will never fire on American citizens.¹¹

Twiggs sought instructions from Scott, who waited until 28 December to reply, in a masterpiece of double-speak: In cases of political disturbance involving local conflict with the authority of the general government, the general-in-chief considers that the military questions, such as you suggest, contain a political element, with due regard to which, and in due deference to the chief executive authority, no extraordinary instructions concerning them must be issued without the consent of such authority. Claiming to have labored hard at formulating a strategy by which Twiggs might satisfy both his honor and his desire to avoid the shedding of civil blood, Scott admitted to having failed, telling Twiggs only that he left the administration of your command in your own hands. As the administration of outgoing U.S. president James Buchanan strained to avoid the appearance of a hostile stance toward the South, Twiggs was bound by Scott’s instructions to protect government property without waging war.¹²

Despairing of the situation, on 15 January Twiggs requested that he be relieved of command. His successor, the secession convention’s Committee on Public Safety assumed, might not be so forgiving of disunion. Col. Carlos A. Waite, Twiggs’s second-in-command, was known to be of strong Union sympathy, and the secession convention feared that Waite would evacuate the U.S. troops in Texas to New Mexico, destroying the military installations in west Texas, taking with them the arms and ammunition vital to Texas’s defense, and presenting a threat to the state’s western flank. Before Twiggs’s resignation was accepted, the state’s Committee on Public Safety sent three commissioners to discuss the evacuation of Federal posts and the surrender of Federal arms in Texas. The commissioners reported that Twiggs was strongly in favor of Southern rights and that he had revealed to them all of his correspondence with the War Department, which verified that he would not be instrumental in bringing on civil war.¹³

As a face-saving gesture, however, Twiggs had resolved to remove his troops to Kansas, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory, and he would not surrender their side arms, transportation, or extra clothing. Given Twiggs’s determination to evacuate his troops, under arms, to an area from which they would pose a threat to Texas, the committee reluctantly determined to order Col. Ben McCulloch, its appointee as commander of the District of Texas, with as large a force as he may deem necessary, to San Antonio to stop Twiggs. We must obtain possession of that which now belongs to Texas of right by force, wrote the committee’s chairman.¹⁴

By the afternoon of 15 February McCulloch’s volunteers were in place. If Twiggs’s command should express a desire to depart the country peaceably, the committee instructed McCulloch, he was to allow them to do so under honorable terms, but he was to exercise his best judgment and discretion in any emergency which may present itself. The next morning the volunteers, mostly former Texas Rangers and members of the Knights of the Golden Circle, moved into San Antonio. Although many northerners believed Twiggs was party to a conspiracy to surrender the garrison and its stores, McCulloch, wrote volunteer R. L. Williams, played the game as though it were in earnest, and occupied every commanding position as we advanced. Having commanded his men not to fire unless fired upon, McCulloch occupied the city’s main plaza. The U.S. troops were under orders to remain in their quarters, and in a very short time the Texas volunteers were sure that no resistance would be offered.¹⁵

Twiggs’s personal quarters were a mile outside town, and when he returned there, he was arrested and escorted to McCulloch with the demand that he deliver up all military posts and public property held by or under [his] control. Twiggs agreed that the 160 U.S. soldiers in San Antonio would surrender all public property, an inventory estimated at $1.3 million in value, and that all forts in Texas would be turned over to Texas state troops. The garrisons from the Indian frontier and the guardians of the road to California were ordered to converge at the port of Indianola, by way of San Antonio. Those on the Rio Grande frontier were to rendezvous at Brazos Santiago, to be transported by water to Indianola and thence, by chartered steamers, to New York.¹⁶

Twiggs’s surrender of the Alamo did not terminate the threat of military confrontation in Texas. Anticipating potential trouble from army officers not so solidly in the secessionist camp as Twiggs, the Committee of Public Safety, on 5 February, had appointed Ben McCulloch’s younger brother, Henry Eustice McCulloch, and Rip Ford, both veteran Rangers, as colonels, assigning the younger McCulloch to command of the Northwestern District of Texas and Ford to command of the Rio Grande military district. The two officers were sent to accept the surrender of the Federal installations in their respective districts, and if, despite Twiggs’s orders, surrender were not forthcoming, they were to seize them by main force. Ford, with his six companies, arrived at Brazos Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande on 21 February. After a brief display of resistance, the small Federal garrison surrendered Brazos Island. The next day Ford marched upstream to Fort Brown, where he was surprised to learn that the post’s commander, Capt. Bennett H. Hill, an ardent Unionist, threatened to have him arrested for treason. At the very least, Captain Hill refused to give up Fort Brown, which was well-manned, heavily armed, and adequately fortified, until he had received absolute assurance that orders to surrender it came directly from Winfield Scott and the War Department. The outnumbered Ford wisely returned to Galveston, where he raised four additional companies and returned with them to Brazos Santiago. A bloody confrontation was narrowly avoided when, on 3 March, Scott’s assistant adjutant general, Maj. Fitzjohn Porter, arrived at Fort Brown and convinced Hill, by then a hero in the North, to surrender. Although a confrontation was nearly touched off by what Ford’s volunteers considered to be the indignity upon Texas soil of the garrison’s feu de joie in honor of Lincoln’s inauguration, the Federal soldiers departed Fort Brown for the coast without further incident. Porter also directed the commandants of Ringgold Barracks and Fort McIntosh to turn over their posts to Texas agents and march for the mouth of the Brazos, and by mid-March the ten Federal companies that had patrolled the Rio Grande had evacuated their posts, and Rip Ford’s six mounted companies had taken their place.¹⁷

At the same time, Henry E. McCulloch, having also raised a battalion of 600 mounted

Reviews for Theater of a Separate War

[bobbre · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book attempts to be a comprehensive work on the American Civil War west of the Mississippi River. To an extent it succeeds, while still leaving areas for improvement.One of those areas deals not with the book’s content but with a lackluster effort of proofreading. There are instances where repetitious text occurs in successive paragraphs, muddied references to directions, and sometimes confusing narrative.To me, a serious deficiency is the lack of any useful maps. The one map provided does have several locations denoted but they are not numerous. While some battles described are given limited but adequate coverage, others are delved into more deeply, such as those in Louisiana, yet there are no accompanying maps to help develop a picture of what areas were deemed critical to defend, and more importantly why they were so.The opening of the work concerns itself with the move for secession of the states in the trans-Mississippi region and does describe the politics involved. What is lacking is a concomitant discussion of the Federal steps (if any) to retain those areas for the Federal government.Another of the problems encountered is that there is a lack of describing events that occurred simultaneously and how they impacted each other. I found this troublesome since a campaign might cover several months only to have the next chapter discuss actions happening before those in the previous chapter, or else extending to a time after the war ended.I realize that the scope of the book is vast, and I do applaud the author in taking on such a challenge. Overall, the book does provide insights into the personalities involved, the atmosphere of the region, the involvement of and cost to native peoples, and many other aspects not normally covered in books about the ACW. I recommend this work if one desires a readable overview of that theater of the war.