Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  During the hours of darkness on December 31, Magruder's troops waded across into Galveston town. At dawn, the Confederates attacked and drove the Federal garrison to the extreme north end of the island. Meanwhile, the cottonclads steamed in against the flotilla of four Union ships in the harbor—a steamer, brig, gunboat, and transport.

  Federal gunfire sank Neptune in shallow water as she steamed in, but Bayou City ran in close, while Sibley's converted "marines" raked the Federal vessels with deadly fire. The U.S. steamship Harriet Lane struck her colors, after a vicious, close-in firefight in which all her officers were killed. The brig Westfield trying to maneuver out of the way, ran aground, and was scuttled by her crew. The gunboat and transport fled the behemoth cotton-armored Bayou City and were able to escape to the open Gulf. When this happened, the Federal garrison on the island surrendered. Magruder took 300 prisoners of war, and was commended by the President of the Confederacy.

  The Union held complete initiative off the coast, however, with command of the sea. There had been some skirmishing around Sabine Pass, where the Sabine and the Neches rivers both flowed into the Gulf. Recognizing this as a weak point, where the Federal naval supremacy could bear, Admiral David Farragut and Major General N. P. Banks drew up plans for a major campaign in 1863. Sabine Pass was to be seized, and 5,000 veteran troops put ashore. Farragut and Banks hoped to repeat earlier Union successes at New Orleans and Mobile.

  On September 8, 1863, four U.S. gunboats, leading a flotilla of 20 transports proceeded against Sabine Pass. This was a carefully planned assault, whose ultimate objective was the capture of Houston, Beaumont, and in turn,

  Galveston. At the very least, it was expected to open up a sustained campaign near vital areas of Texas. Major General William B. Franklin of the U.S. Army was in over-all command.

  A small Confederate post, Fort Griffin, defended the Texas side of the Pass. Here Odlum's Company F (Davis Guards) of the 1st Texas Heavy Artillery stood on watch. Neither Odlum nor his lieutenant, Smith, was present; the company, two old 24-pounder smoothbores, two 32-pounders, and two howitzers, and forty-two men, was commanded by the junior lieutenant, Richard (Dick) Dowling. In the vicinity, also, was the Confederate steamer Uncle Ben and a detachment of infantry from Company B, Speight's Battalion.

  While the landing force of 5,000 stood offshore with its escort warships, the four Union gunboats moved up the channel and bombarded Dowling's command. The shelling continued for an hour and a half. The Federal boats then withdrew, let the meaning of the bombardment sink in, and came back again. In similar situations outnumbered and outgunned Confederate posts had withdrawn.

  With great coolness Dowling ordered his battery to withhold its fire. He let the Federal warships come within 1,200 yards. Then, under heavy fire himself, Dowling poured fire from his old smoothbores into each Federal vessel in turn. The result was spectacular. U.S.S. Sachem was holed in the steam drum and fell out of action. Clifton's tiller rope was carried away, and the gunboat drifted helplessly aground under Dowling's battery. Clifton struck, running up a white flag.

  Shocked and battered, the remaining flotilla raced back out to sea. The armada and its 5,000 invasion troops eventually sailed back to New Orleans.

  U.S. naval forces lost two ships, 100 killed and injured, and 350 prisoners. Dowling's battery was untouched. In a few minutes, Lieutenant Dick Dowling had fought the most brilliant and decisive small action of the Civil War. No Federal effort was ever made in this area again.

  The outcome of Sabine Pass raised a great outcry abut the efficiency of the Navy in the North; coming with Bragg's victory at Chicamauga, it gave the Union a severe psychological shock. U.S. credit declined abroad; the dollar lost 5 percent of its value against gold.

  By order of Jefferson Davis, one of the two war decorations officially awarded by the Confederacy was specially struck for the Davis Guards.

  The Union forces, however, were not to be completely denied. Banks landed forces in the far south, over the beaches at Brazos de Santiago, just north of the mouth of the Rio Grande. A war base was set up at Point Isabel. In November 1863, Union General Dana moved into Brownsville with 6,000 men.

  Other descents were made further north on the Laguna Madre; the tiny ports of Corpus Christi and Aransas Pass were seized, also. At the end of 1863 Sabine Pass and Galveston were the only ports on the Texas coast still in Confederate hands.

  These Union operations actually had little effect on the state. The points on the Gulf were then remote from the populated centers of eastern Texas, and since the blockade was in force, their loss changed nothing. General Banks' mission was not to try to subjugate Texas. The Union sought control of the coast to prevent possible collusion and cooperation between the Confederate states and the French, who had moved into Mexico in force.

  The fear of French-Confederate cooperation was real in 1863. But it soon was apparent that the invaders of Mexico had too much to occupy them in that country to become entangled in the American Civil War. As the fear subsided, Banks gradually withdrew all his garrisons from the coast except the one at Brownsville. This controlled the lower border, and disrupted the Confederate cotton trade.

  N. P. Banks, who had scarcely more success in the Southwest than he had earlier enjoyed in Virginia, made one last great effort to carry the war into Texas. In the early weeks of 1864 Banks concentrated 25,000 splendidly equipped and supplied combat troops at Alexandria, Louisiana. This force was supported by a flotilla of gunboats. The Union strategy was to make a vast sweep through the richer regions of the Southwestern states, to cut a swath of destruction similar to the one Sherman planned for the Southeast. Union General Frederick Steele was to march south from Little Rock, Arkansas, with an additional 15,000 men and to join Banks' force along the Red River. The combined Union armies would then strike deep into Texas; the Confederate marshaling points and shops at Henderson and Marshall were strategic objectives.

  Kirby-Smith, commanding the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department, worked desperately to avert this disaster. Magruder stripped Texas of all the regular troops under his command, but these barely offset Kirby-Smith's own losses due to disease and desertion. The Texas units in the Confederate service marched east to Louisiana. In this crisis, however, Governor Murrah of Texas refused to release the state militia because of his quarrel with Richmond over states' rights.

  With a crumbling, ill-fed, and desperate army, the Confederate generals completely frustrated the Union plan. Sterling Price stopped Steele at Camden, Arkansas. Badly mauled by the Confederate cavalry, Steele, although he outnumbered Price by two-to-one, failed to join Banks' main force.

  General Richard Taylor, immediately facing Banks' 25,000, was reinforced with a conglomerate body of Louisianans, Missourians, and Arkansas units. Even with Walker's division of Texans and Tom Green's Texas cavalry brigade, he mustered only 11,000. His position appeared hopeless. However, he chose to attack.

  On April 8, 1864, Taylor smashed Banks at Mansfield, Louisiana, just forty miles from the Texas line. Although Banks repulsed a second attack at Pleasant Hill on April 9, both his nerve and the Union drive collapsed. The invading army retreated back to the Mississippi. There was never to be a Union song called "Marching Through Texas."

  Historians generally regard the defense of the Texas coast and borders as one of the greatest military feats of the Confederacy.

  In the late spring of 1864, the war in the Southwest degenerated into a sort of stalemate. But the fighting was not entirely over. There was yet to be fought one more bitter, little-known campaign, which included the last pitched battle of the War Between the States.

  Chapter 20

  THE CAVALRY OF THE WEST

  Headquarters Cavalry of the West,

  San Antonio, December 27, 1863

  Persons desiring to go into service will report to me at San Antonio without delay, where they will be subsisted and their horses foraged . . . .

  The people of the West are invited to turn out. Th
ey will be defending their own homes. Shall it be said that a mongrel force of Abolitionists, negroes, plundering Mexicans, and perfidious renegades have been allowed to murder and rob us with impunity? Shall the pages of history record the disgraceful fact, that Texians have tamely and basely submitted to these outrages and suffered the brand of dishonor. . . ? For the honor of the State, for the sake of the glorious memories of the past, the hopes of the future, you are called upon to rally to the standard and to wash out the stains of invasion by the blood of your ruthless enemies.

  JOHN S. FORD

  Col. Comdg.

  IN the fall of 1863, the United States Army began to consolidate its command of the Lower Rio Grande. General Banks' major purpose was to seal off the border between the Confederates and the French-dominated Empire of Mexico; it was not to use Brownsville for a marshaling point to invade Texas. But the appearance of thousands of bluecoats on the Rio Grande set off a chain of events not foreseen by the strategists either in Washington or Richmond.

  The flow of cotton out of the Confederacy was cut off, as Union General Dana sent 4,000 men westward along the Rio Grande. Neutral brokers in Matamoros held chests of medical supplies, new Enfield rifles, and gold for Texas; thousands of European ships lay waiting off the river mouth. Now, the trade route had to be moved far northwest through Eagle Pass, adding three hundred miles. The new trail also lay through desolate and dangerous country, swarming with Mexican bandits, Apaches, and Kickapoos. The cost, as well as time, of delivery doubled.

  The situation was intolerable to Texans living along the Rio Grande, as well as to cotton interests further north. Great pressure was put on "Prince John," General Bankhead Magruder, to act. But Nathaniel Banks had fixed Magruder by a clever feint in Louisiana in late 1863. Prince John did not dare open a war on the Rio Grande and leave the heartland exposed.

  Some of the greatest pressures were put on the Confederate government by prominent Brownsville citizens and other south Texas merchants. They wanted an expeditionary force raised, and they wanted it to be commanded by an old Texas Ranger they knew well—Rip Ford. There is considerable evidence that the said Ford not only abetted these efforts but probably instigated them.

  On December 22, 1863, the Texas Department commander wrote a confidential letter, addressed to "Colonel" John S. Ford. The letter requested that officer to raise a regiment of cavalry—a purely auxiliary force—to undertake a campaign on the Rio Grande. Thus began one of the most fantastic episodes in the War Between the States. Its central figure was one of the most colorful—and, perhaps, most typical—Texan leaders of all time.

  In 1863 John Salmon Ford was almost fifty. He had already lived through a fantastic career—medical doctor, lawyer, prominent journalist, state senator for two terms, mayor of Austin, and captain of Rangers. Born in South Carolina, educated in cabin schools in Tennessee, he arrived in Texas as a doctor of medicine in 1836. Ford was an old "Texian." He had a failed marriage behind him, and he was just twenty-one.

  Over the next five decades, he was to be the only man in Texas history who was involved in a major way in every action or controversy of his time. He was to be one of the fantastic, but forgotten, figures of the old frontier. Ford was star-following, pragmatic, restless, and apparently without an ideology of any kind. He was impatient, brilliant, and erratic—and yet compulsively self-disciplined when he had to be. He had prejudices but no philosophy. Above all, he instinctively went where the action was.

  He was a staunch Houston supporter for years, then a Know-Nothing leader, a Knight of the Golden Circle, and a Secessionist delegate to the Texas 1861 convention in turn. He shed roles easily, as popular ideas changed. Yet this leaves his image unclear, because Ford was a man of major strengths. Profane to the point of ingenuity, an inveterate gambler, free with both "his money and his pistol," Ford was a great captain, a leader of men, and a diplomat of considerable skill. He lived great times; he was the last of his line, and he died poor. Most of the great frontier captains did the same.

  Ford dropped a brilliant professional and political career in 1846 to serve with the Texas Rangers in the Mexican War. He loved a horse, the wide brush country, and the smell of danger. In Mexico with Jack Hays, he contracted the malaria that was to haunt him all his life. He also acquired a nickname that delighted him. He was the Ranger adjutant, and it was his duty to record the names of the dead. At the end of each casualty list, Ford wrote Rest in Peace. As the war and the reports lengthened, he shortened this to R. I. P. The sardonic Rangers named him Old Rip Ford.

  After the Mexican War, Ford saw more frontier service than any other officer of the state. He rode to El Paso in the distant west; he fought Comanches from the Canadian River in Oklahoma territory to Laredo. He played a major role in running the rebel Cortinas into Mexico in 1859. Through all this service, Ford was explosively energetic, capable, ruthless, and shrewd. He was tough enough to rule wild men. He showed a thirst for intrigue and a drive for power. Again and again, he employed reason to obtain his objectives, and chose to bargain rather than fight. But, rubbed the wrong way, he would fight—the bloody-minded battle-to-the-end of the frontier Anglo-Celt.

  As a Ranger captain, he showed he would desert his own concept of justice if this happened to conflict with the majority's frontier prejudices. Nor would he sacrifice his notion of right to administer merely legal justice. Ford also did things that seemed quixotic; they damaged his career. He had that blend of Presbyterian piety—R. I. P.—and blue-eyed brutality that Mexicans found it impossible to understand. He was not cruel; few Texians of the old school were cruel. But they would pistol a man for knocking off their hat. Ford posed the bluff, simple outward front and border vulgarity that pleased common men. But Oates, who edited his papers, came closer to the real mark: here was

  a man capable of inhuman drive and endurance, and of forcing it from others; "even more complex and profound than the polygonal public servant" he pretended to be. Ford's character and drives were significant, because he was a true Texian, a leader-type of the old frontier.

  In 1861, the Secession convention appointed Ford a colonel of state cavalry and sent him south to the Rio Grande. Here he performed two signal services, which Oran Roberts, the Old Alcalde, always held went unrewarded and overlooked. Fitz-John Porter held Fort Brown with a strong garrison. Instead of precipitating the Civil War, Ford chose to reason with Porter, and he reasoned him into departing Texas. Thus it fell to the state of Ford's birth to start the conflict.

  The first blood of the war was shed in Texas, however. On April 1, 1861, a Mexican named Ochoa declared against the county officers of the border area of Zapata, between Brownsville and Laredo on the Rio Grande, who had come out for the Confederate states. Ochoa gathered a band of men and hanged the country judge. He issued a pronunciamento against the Confederacy, thus dignifying a stand that probably had more of banditry to it than ideology. Ford sent his cavalry after Ochoa and killed twenty of his followers. The rest fled into Mexico. Technically, this little action could be rated as the first battle in the War Between the States.

  Ford commanded at Fort Brown through 1861. Again, he played the diplomat and probably set a pattern that prevented the Confederacy from becoming involved in Mexico. Ford understood the importance of the Matamoros gateway. Through the services of the British and Prussian consuls, he arranged a commercial treaty by which Mexico permitted Texan cotton to pass through. This was a tremendous accomplishment, done by playing on European hopes for the Confederacy and Mexican fears of invasion.

  He also advised Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, the transplanted Yankees who dominated commerce in south Texas, to transfer their steamboats to the Mexican flag. This stratagem would free them from Union interference while serving the Confederacy on the river, and off Brazos de Santiago. Both men, who were loyal Confederates throughout the war, did so, with much benefit all around.

  Ironically, Ford's diplomacy was better appreciated by neutrals and the enemy than his own people. Ford
could be devious, especially in dealing secretly with Mexican officers, and he was too devious by far to suit many of the Southern people in his command. It was protested that his advice to King and Kenedy removed valuable property from Confederate control. Ford grew in bad odor with many powers in the state. In late 1861, his command was dispersed to Colonel Earl Van Dorn's troops, and he was replaced at Fort Brown by Colonel Thorkelin de Lovenskiold, whose military reputation rested mainly on the fact that his brother was a Danish field marshal. The border was pacified; Ford was furloughed.

  When the Secretary of War of the Confederacy ordered a regularization of forces, with election of new officers in April 1862, Ford could easily have been elected colonel of the 2d Texas Cavalry. He chose not to stand, for reasons of his own. General Paul O. Hébert then offered him a regular commission as major, which Ford refused. Finally, Ford was appointed by the state as Superintendent of the Bureau of Conscription, a job which consisted mainly of running down draft dodgers and which he despised. Ford did not like the draft laws. He believed all good men had volunteered, and that the laws deferring petty office holders were unjust.

  In this post Ford's true military status was most unclear. His state appointment as a colonel was no longer valid, and he held no Confederate rank. Hébert, however, addressed him as "Colonel," and he saw that Ford was paid as a full colonel. Bankhead Magruder continued the practice in 1863.