Ford, on a nervous, prancing horse, shouted at his Texans: "Men, we have whipped the enemy in all previous fights. We can do it again." The troops cheered, and this drew Yankee fire into the thicket. Ford yelled, "Charge!"
He led three hundred horsemen galloping into the Federal flank. According to Carrington, the yell the Cavalry sent up could be heard above the guns over three miles of prairie. Shrieking, shooting, they struck the Union skirmish line and broke it into a hundred fleeing parts. There was nothing more frightening to scattered men on foot than to be overtaken by a thundering cavalry charge. The veteran New Yorkers and Hoosiers never had a chance. Barrett ordered a general retreat, but in his fear and confusion forgot to call in his extended picket line. The Cavalry rode these men, who stood and tried to fight, down to the last man.
Three times during a seven-mile retreat toward the Brazos de Santiago, Barrett tried to halt and fight. But nothing was harder to turn around than a general retreat. Ford kept his horse artillery close behind. It threw shells into the Federal stands. The Cavalry rode around them and broke them up. At dusk, with the rearguard stumbling with exhaustion, firing wildly against the circling pursuit, the broken Union command reached the salt waters of Boca Chica. They splashed across in bits and bunches. The color sergeant of the 34th Indiana wrapped the regimental flag about his body and tried to swim to Brazos Island. A Texan bullet killed him, and Ford's horsemen seized the flag from the water.
The last event of this weird day, which took place over a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, was the ride of General Slaughter. Slaughter had not ridden to Palmito Hill, but had stayed in Brownsville to watch the Mexicans. Now, at the head of Carrington's battalion, he dashed up to Ford and demanded that Ford continue to punish the Yankees. Ford refused; he was not going to send his men against Brazos Island in the dark. Slaughter then rode furiously to Boca Chica, pushed his horse withers-deep in the tide, and emptied his revolver at the stumbling Yankees—three hundred yards away. The battalion behind him watched in amazement and no little disgust.
Ford that night drew back above Palmito and took count. The victory was staggering: no Confederates were dead, although there were a number of wounded men. By comparison, the 34th Indiana had lost 220 out of the 300 soldiers on its rolls. Union dead lay all over the battlefield, and strung over the seven miles to the sea. Other bodies floated in the Rio Grande; they were drowned Union infantry who had tried to swim the river to escape the terrible charging horse. Ford had also taken 111 men and 4 officers as prisoners of war. He released these men, and later, in his memoirs, stated that no distinction was made between genuine Yankees from New York and the Negro soldiers and Southern renegades—all were "agreeably surprised" at being released.
This was not the whole truth. The prisoners who made it back to Brazos Island told a different tale. They had seen many of Haynes's Texas Unionists shot down after they had surrendered, though Jack Haynes himself was spared. Most of these Southern deserters had died fighting rather than surrender.
The survivors also told Barrett something that must have grated on his soul. Several of Ford's men said they knew the "war was played out," and they would have surrendered if Barrett had come forward and demanded it with white troops. But they would never surrender "to niggers." A bitter pride prevailed.
Palmito Hill was the last pitched battle of the Civil War. There were reasons on both sides that made it preferable to forget, and so it was.
A few days after the battle, General E. B. Brown of the Union Army sent Colonel Ford a flag of truce and a message. Ford was informed that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox more than a month before. Ford cursed violently for a spell, then began to laugh. He agreed, not to surrender but to an exchange of courtesies.
Federal officers rode into Brownsville. Ford entertained them at his house. One Union major remarked that if his wife knew what he was doing, she would not speak to him. In these last days, there was more than a little understanding among the soldiers, North and South, and a shared weariness that transcended bitterness. But the major's remark, and similar things General Lew Wallace had said about his conviviality with Confederates at Point Isabel, prophesied that bad times would come, from civilians, after the war.
Rip Ford hugely enjoyed taking a party of Federal officers across to Matamoros, where they attended an Imperialist military revue as his guests. The French were badly startled. Although French officers held lively discussions in those days about defeating the U.S. Army in battle, an end to the American war boded ill for the French presence in Mexico. Ford, who cordially detested the French, delighted in keeping them mystified as to real events.
General Sheridan had embarked from City Point, Virginia, with 25,000 Federal troops, bound for the Rio Grande. Ford knew the war was over, but Slaughter, in command, was intransigent. Slaughter refused to surrender; he wanted to take the command south and formally join the Mexican Imperialists, in the hope that the Confederacy would rise again under the French aegis. Ford and the majority of the Cavalry of the West were not interested. Ford turned down General Mejía's offer to send lancers disguised in civilian clothes to help him hold Brownsville.
Over Ford's objection, Slaughter sold the Confederate artillery to Mejía for 20,000 silver pesos. Apparently, Slaughter planned to keep this money, or at least keep control of it, in the name of the South. Ford insisted that the
Confederacy was dead and that former Confederate property rightfully belonged to the troops. In this, the entire Texan army agreed with him.
Ford now arrested General Slaughter at pistol-point. The silver was confiscated and distributed among the Cavalry for back pay. Only a small number of the troops, still in Brownsville, received money. Ford took $4,000 for himself; this was, however, less than his arrears. Slaughter then signed over his command to Ford on May 26, 1865.
Ford dismissed the Cavalry the same day, and took his family south of the border with Mejía's consent. The Federals marched into Brownsville unopposed.
Kirby-Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department on June 2. For the next month, prominent Confederates passed over the Rio Grande. Officers thronged Maximilian's capital; a grandiose colonization project was begun on the Mexican Gulf coast. These plans fell through; Maximilian, soon to be deserted by the French, had no help to give, nor were the Southerners comfortable in a foreign land. When the Union offered paroles and declared an amnesty in July, most soon returned. Fever, clericalism, autocracy, racial antipathy, and homesickness brought them north. Rip Ford came back to Brownsville on July 18. He was courteously received by General Sheridan, and helped other Confederates return.
There were some diehard souls in the Cavalry of the West. They joined with other groups, some from far Missouri. They mounted for the last time on Texas soil, then rode south to join Maximilian's army. At the Rio Grande, they wrapped their faded Southern battle standards in canvas and buried them in the silty sand.
These men left their bones in many lands, from Mexico to France. The flags of the Cavalry of the West, unresurrected, rotted away.
Chapter 21
THE CONQUERED
Yankees went to war animated by the highest ideals of the nineteenth-century middle classes. . . . But what the Yankees achieved . . . was not a triumph of middle-class ideals but of middle-class vices. The most striking products of their crusade were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South. Among the masses of Americans there were no victors, only the vanquished.
KENNETH STAMPP, NORTHERN HISTORIAN
THERE was no formal surrender in Texas after Palmito Hill. The Confederate army and state government simply melted away.
Generals Kirby-Smith, Magruder, Slaughter, and Governor Murrah all took refuge in Mexico. The soldiers disbanded and went home. Human detritus from the war filled the roads and clustered in the dusty towns. The blaze of courage had burned out; the Southern sun had long passed high noon; everywhere there was a stunned feeling of despair. The people ha
d put too much into the war, and were sapped.
The returning soldiers were scarred by bitterness, not only at defeat but by a gnawing feeling that their sacrifices had not been shared. Inept and unscrupulous politicians had wasted the South's resources, while the home front had let them down during the war. In mass meetings at La Grange and in Fayette County, soldiers seized and distributed Confederate and state property to indigent military families. Stores in San Antonio were pillaged; the state treasury was robbed. All government had collapsed. However, property in private hands was not molested by the veterans, bitter as they were.
The great mass of poor farmers in the corn belt were sullen about the present and frightened for the future. In 1865 almost every farmer in Texas could be classified as "poor white." All progress had ceased for a total of four years. The farmers had borne the brunt of the bloodshed and sweat during the war; they now tended to blame their troubles on the slaves. The hatred of Negroes above the falls of the Brazos and Colorado was a flaming thing.
The planter class was demoralized. Its entire capital, moral and financial, had been shot away. The Southern way of life had received a stunning defeat, not quickly, not cleanly, but through a degrading conflict of attrition. All money, deposits, and bank stocks of this class were gone, as well as their prime source of wealth, their Negro slaves. The loss of illusions and ideals was profound.
The economy and future of Texas lay in ruins. Fully one-fourth of the productive white male population was dead, disabled, or dispersed. Almost every form of real wealth, except the land itself, was dissipated or destroyed. The world was not to see such wholesale ruin again until the wars of the next century.
On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United. States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. This was the historic "Juneteenth," afterward celebrated by Texas Negroes as Emancipation Day.
Thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French. The other thousands congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the state. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior. They camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. All Texans conceded that the main war issue—secession—was dead, killed by the force of arms. Nor was there any real opposition to the end of slavery, which had become a driving force behind the Union crusade.
Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the state with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by. A certain sense of history, which is more the remembrance of humiliations and defeats than recollected glories, entered the Texan soul, in a way non-Southern Americans never understood. Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as "right." They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texas saying, "If Goliath had been a Yankee, little David would have lost," expressed more than a thousand words.
The Texans were stubborn and prideful people; they consciously thought of themselves as a powerful, conquering race. Their ancestors had beaten the British and defied the world. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Now, they were the conquered. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm that the war had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy, too.
The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The state was placed under military rule. Army tribunals replaced the civil courts—not without some justice, since no Union man or Negro could hope for fairness from a Texas jury. Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. The great majority of commanders acted reasonably and kept their troops within bounds. A significant number did not. More galling than the actual atrocities, however, was the fact that many Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.
The great majority of the high-minded young men from Massachusetts or Illinois who had saved the Union went home; few idealists, in any age, seek occupation duty.
This was one of the great tragedies of the era. The North was superbly equipped to win the conflict; it was poorly prepared to usher in the peace. Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.
Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town. No soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville. Men who were, or posed, as Union sympathizers could get almost any favor from the occupation forces. Men who were known Confederates, which included 90 percent of the population and all its local leadership, were frequently humiliated publicly, if they came hat in hand to beg some favor of the occupying army.
None of this was historically unusual in the aftermath of war; in all fairness, few occupying armies ever stayed within such bounds. There was almost no looting of private property, and few executions for any reason. But this kind of thing had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts, and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texan soul.
With Granger's Juneteenth proclamation the slaves were free. The total slave population of the state had increased by 35 percent during the war; thousands of blacks had been sent south by worried owners in Louisiana and Arkansas. Now, more than 200,000 Negroes were cast adrift in one of the greatest social revolutions of all time. The first instinct of the plantation slave was to pick up and go. But he had nowhere to go. Thousands jammed the roads and trails, wandering from county to county, finally thronging into the settlements where the Freedmen's Bureau offices were being set up. This Bureau, created by the Federal Congress in March 1865, was given control of all Negro affairs. It set up its own tribunals and courts, and even attempted a system of Negro schools. In the first months the Bureau was honest; it tried to assist and protect the freedmen. However, since it interfered between former slaves and former masters, it was fiercely resented by whites.
Slaves were eager to test the limits of their new freedom. They were naturally euphoric, and expected to be led into some new Promised Land. But nothing like a red dawn appeared in the state, or in the South. The slaves made no attempt at reprisal for past wrongs, but they did refuse to work under new terms or to obey orders. They left the land, and thousands of plantation acres fell into disrepair and disuse. Somewhere, a joyful but tragic rumor started that every freedman was to get forty acres and a mule. Bureau officers tried to dispel this notion, but for many months with limited success.
In July 1865, A. J. Hamilton, a former Texas Congressman who had stood with the Union, returned with a Presidential appointment as Provisional Governor. Jack Hamilton was an honest, deeply conservative man. He had no rancor or hatred for his state, and his entire purpose was to bring it back peacefully into the Union.
Hamilton appointed Unionists to office so far as he was able. James H. Bell, a former supreme court justice, was made Secretary of State, William Alexander appointed
Attorney General. But Hamilton could not find enough qualified Unionists to go around, and he hesitated to appoint hacks for purely ideological or political reasons. He declared a general amnesty for any Texan who would take a new oath of allegiance to the United States, and he began to appoint men he personally knew to be honorable and capable as local officials. Hamilton had little power, however, to interfere with the military, which was a law unto itself; and he did not try to set aside the military courts.
At this time, Texas was under Presidential Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson had set only three conditions for the reentry of the state into the Union with full self-government. These were the abolition of slavery by law, the repudiation of the secession ordinance of 1861, and the repudiation of all Confederate debts and obligations. This was a wise and farsighted policy, containing nothing of vengeance in it. Nor was there anything in it that Texans could not immediately accept. It would have restored the Union as it had been in 1861, with two essential changes: the discrediting of the right of secession and of chattel slavery for all time.
This was essentially the Lincolnian policy toward the South. Abraham Lincoln had gradually assumed tribunician powers to preserve the Union after 1861. He expanded the powers of the Presidency, which in reality meant he had prevented the Congress from participating in policy-making during the war. Whatever damage this did to traditional American representative democracy, few things better stood the inspection of history. Lincoln did not succumb to the current Northern malaise of crusade. He saw his mission as that of restoring the American people, not further dividing them. He did not see the war as holy, or himself as an avenging angel. At his last Cabinet meeting, he "thought it provident that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned and there were none of the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us. If we were wise and discreet we should reanimate the states and get their governments in successful operation with order prevailing and the union recreated before Congress came together in December." Lincoln was not Caesar, nor was he hostile to the Republican Congress. But he knew that radicalism and a punitive spirit were rising in the North, and he feared them.
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