Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico: An Unwritten Leaf of the War

SHELBY’S EXPEDITION TO MEXICO

An Unwritten Leaf of the War

By John N. Edwards

Edited and with an introduction by Conger Beasley Jr.

The University of Arkansas Press

Fayetteville

2002

Copyright © 2002 by The University of Arkansas Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

23     22     21     20     19        5     4     3     2

Designer: John Coghlan

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edwards, John N. (John Newman), 1838–1889.

Shelby's expedition to Mexico : an unwritten leaf of the war / by John N. Edwards ; edited and with an introduction by Conger Beasley Jr.

p. cm. — (Civil War in the West)

Originally published: Kansas City, Mo. : Kansas City Times Steam Book and Job Printing House, 1872. With new introd.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 1-55728-732-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1.  Shelby's Expedition to Mexico, 1865. 2.  Shelby, Joseph Orville, 1830–1897.  I. Beasley, Conger. II. Title. III. Series.

F1233 .E27 2002

917.204'7—dc21

2002007386

ISBN-13: 978-1-61075-377-7 (electronic)

In memory of John Shelby Masterman

1928–1999

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Editor’s Note

Introduction: The Splendid Paladin: The Life and Times of John N. Edwards

Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico; An Unwritten Leaf of the War

Notes

Bibliography

Index

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The Civil War in the West has a single goal: to promote historical writing about the war in the western states and territories. It focuses most particularly on the Trans-Mississippi theater, which consisted of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River), Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), and Arizona Territory (two-fifths of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico), but it also encompasses adjacent states, such as Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that directly influenced the Trans-Mississippi war. It is a wide swath, to be sure, but one too often ignored by historians and, consequently, too little understood and appreciated.

Topically, the series embraces all aspects of the wartime story. Military history in its many guises, from the strategies of generals to the daily lives of common soldiers, forms an important part of that story, but so, too, do the numerous and complex political, economic, social, and diplomatic dimensions of the war. The series also provides a variety of perspectives on these topics. Most importantly, it offers the best in modern scholarship, with thoughtful, challenging monographs. Secondly, it presents new editions of important books that have gone out of print. And thirdly, it premieres expertly edited correspondence, diaries, reminiscences, and other writings by witnesses to the war.

It is a formidable undertaking, but we believe that the Civil War in the West, by focusing on some of the least familiar dimensions of the conflict, significantly broadens understanding of that dramatic story.

The names of Joseph O. Shelby and John N. Edwards are familiar to anyone who has studied the war in the Trans-Mississippi. Some participants in the war as well as some historians believe Jo Shelby was the greatest cavalry commander of the war, North or South. Shelby has also been praised as a master of irregular warfare, and to that extent has been favorably compared to John S. Mosby. But whatever the modern judgments of Shelby, what he was or seemed to be was crafted to a large extent by John Edwards. Edwards served as Shelby’s adjutant during the war and as his chronicler after the conflict. He wrote two books about Shelby, Shelby and His Men (1867) and Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico (1872), that record the wartime and immediate postwar history of the intrepid commander and his Iron Brigade. Most scholars regard the latter volume as the more reliable and valuable of the two.

As the reality of Confederate defeat slowly set in during the spring of 1865, not a few Rebels announced that they would never live under Yankee rule. Instead of returning to their homes, as did the vast majority of soldiers, public officials, and civilian refugees, they fled the South. They scattered in every direction, to the American West, to Canada, to Europe, to South America. Hundreds of undefeated Rebels, including Shelby, Edwards, and many men from the Iron Brigade, crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. Much of what we know about the lives of the Confederates in Mexico comes from Edwards, and the story of their self-imposed exile, which lasted two years for Shelby and most of his band, is as much a part of the war in the West as are the battles and campaigns they waged between 1861 and 1865. First published in 1872 and reissued in 1889, Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico has been out of print for more than a century. Its republication in this series makes an important document in the history of the Civil War available once more to a wide audience.

This edition of Edwards’ book is also better than the original, insofar as it has been skillfully edited and annotated by Conger Beasley Jr. Beasley has identified people, places, and events that Edwards failed to describe in adequate detail, and he has provided background information that puts sometimes puzzling episodes in historical context. Most importantly, Beasley has written an eloquent introduction that tells us about the author of this riveting book, John Edwards. No biography exists for Edwards, and that is unfortunate. Edwards was as fascinating a character who led just as adventurous a life as his hero, Shelby. Someday, Edwards will doubtless have his story told, but until then, Beasley’s excellent sketch may serve to introduce him to the world and to reintroduce one of the most fascinating odysseys in American history.

Anne J. Bailey

Daniel E. Sutherland

Series Co-editors

EDITOR’S NOTE

An editor’s hand hopefully remains transparent, even in the midst of the most arcane and garbled texts. It is not his or her job to rework the original, but to function as a kind of harmonium through which the spirit and authenticity of the original can pour forth, unaltered and unimpaired. John N. Edwards wrote in a prose style emblematic of the times in which he lived; he tended, with irrepressible enthusiasm, to rhetorical flights that sound contrived and sentimental compared to the austere, hard-boiled renderings we are accustomed to today. He gushed and swooned over matters, such as women, warfare, and the knightly qualities of Confederate warriors, that we have come to regard, in the twenty-first century, with a far more steely eye. And yet, for all his showy flashes, there is something deeply appealing about the story he has to tell. Maybe it has to do with the tumultuous events pertaining to the Civil War in the West, events of which he was an integral part; whatever, he spins a vivid tale, epical in scope, packed with scores of memorable characters, and we cannot fault him too much if the manner in which he tells it seems a bit strained and outmoded to our jaded ears and sensibilities.

Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico was first published in 1872; it was then reprinted in 1889 by his widow, Jennie Plattenburg Edwards, shortly after his death that same year. Edwards was a newspaper man, accustomed to deadlines, and he wrote in haste, sloppily at times, eager to get it all down, hell-bent on filling out his allotted word-count. The text of this new edition remains as originally published, except where I have corrected obvious misspellings, inserted missing words, and compensated for typesetting errors. In the end notes, I have identified people, terms, and references germane to the story. A few of the references, such as poetry quotes and popular figures of the era, proved impossible to track down, and I have left them unannotated, which, for any editor, is always a source of frustration.

I first ran across a copy of Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico some thirty years ago in a used bookstore in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. A first reading piqued my curiosity about the author, the subject, and the book that evolved between them. I remember thinking to myself how incredible the story was, how grandiose and spectacular, and how much it needed to be disseminated to a wider audience. That wish has now come true, and I am grateful to the University of Arkansas Press for making it so.

My heartfelt thanks go to Kevin Brock, formerly of the University of Arkansas Press, for initially entertaining the idea; to Daniel Sutherland, coeditor of the Civil War in the West series, for his superb editorial input; to press director Larry Malley for steering the project through to completion; to Sheridan Logan, one of the revered elders of my hometown, St. Joseph, Missouri, for whetting my curiosity about all things pertaining to John Edwards and Jo Shelby; to Marshall White of St. Joseph, regional historian extraordinaire, who generously opened his private library and archives to me; to Al Kinsall, of Eagle Pass, Texas, director of the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Documentados de la Historia de Coahuila y Texas, who plugged so many gaps about Shelby’s Rio Grande crossing; and to Betsy Beasley, whose interest and enthusiasm for matters concerning the Border Wars have for so many years sustained and inspired me.

Conger Beasley Jr.

St. Joseph, Missouri

February, 2002

INTRODUCTION

THE SPLENDID PALADIN

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN N. EDWARDS

1

John Newman Edwards—to give his full name—was born in Front Royal, Virginia, on January 4, 1838. His parents were John and Mary A. (Newman) Edwards, both from Virginia, both from sturdy Anglo-Scots lineage. Background details regarding that lineage are sparse. We know the Edwards family immigrated to Virginia in the eighteenth century. We know, too, that the family’s hot-blooded temperament was displayed by the aptly named Colonel Conquest Wyatt, who, at the age of ninety, avenged an insult by pinning his adversary to a door with a knife thrust through the ear.¹

After a common school education in Warren County, young John Edwards studied Latin and Greek in Washington, D.C. His mother, a woman of strong intellect, encouraged his earliest writing efforts; at age fourteen, he composed his first story.

At the urging of Thomas J. Yerby, an older relative, the family moved to Lexington, Missouri, in the mid-1850s. Young John was first a printer, then editor, of the Lexington Expositor, a weekly newspaper owned by a local planter-manufacturer named Oliver Anderson. While still in his teens, during the Missouri-Kansas border dispute, John Edwards wrote inflammatory editorials castigating Yankee squatters working to establish Kansas as a free state. Unfortunately, the few remaining copies of these issues were destroyed in a raid on Lexington by Union guerrillas early in the war.²

The young John Edwards did not resemble a fire-breathing secessionist. He was short, slight, soft-spoken, with sandy hair and a quiet demeanor. The mustache he grew to make himself look older drooped delicately from his upper lip. He was inhibited around women and consigned them to a lofty pedestal, thus divesting them of any humanizing qualities. In his writings, says historian Dan Saults, no woman sweats, swears, or swills—she only swoons.³

Shelby's expedition from Arkansas to Mexico City.

Around 1855, after moving to Missouri, Edwards met Joseph Orville Shelby, originally from Kentucky, cousin to future cavalry terror John Hunt Morgan, cousin to future Missouri governor B. Gratz Brown, cousin to future advisor and confidant of Abraham Lincoln, Francis Preston Blair. Short, slim, intense, eight years Edwards’s elder—a nervous, edgy man with a piercing stare and clipped manner of speaking—Shelby, nicknamed Jo for the initials of his first and middle names, was a blue-chip member of the gentry of entrepreneurs and hemp planters who controlled the economic and social fortunes of the central Missouri River valley. Jo Shelby was wealthy, John Edwards was poor, says Dan Saults, but they liked the same things: drinking, fishing, hunting, talking, planning for a time of troubles that lay not far ahead.⁴

Edwards doted on the fierce, intractable Shelby. Early on, he appeared more than willing to sacrifice his own ego to elevate the image of the Confederate leader into a paragon of military and manly virtue. Or perhaps Edwards projected upon the older man all the salient virtues he deemed requisite in a chivalric Southern warrior. Whatever, he followed him into the Kansas border skirmishes, downplaying his own remarkable courage while establishing a solid foundation for the early Shelby legend. What had been a local conflict between Yankee abolitionists and pro-slavery sympathizers for nearly seven years (1854–1861) was about to erupt on a national scale. Shortly after South Carolina troops shelled Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in April of 1861, Jo Shelby formed a company of horse-mounted volunteers in the river town of Waverly—the heart of the heart of secesh Missouri, settled by planters from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Under his energetic leadership, the outfit distinguished itself at the battle of Wilson’s Creek in August of 1861, and later that same year at the first battle of Newtonia. In both these encounters, Shelby, according to John Edwards, displayed an almost infallible divination of his enemy’s designs, and a rare analysis which enabled him, step by step, to fathom movements and unravel demonstrations as if he held the printed programme in his hand.⁵

We do not know for sure, but it is likely that Edwards linked up with Shelby in the spring of 1862, when Shelby rode through the Waverly-Lexington area on a recruiting expedition. The intricacies of that symbiotic relationship took shape almost immediately. So completely did Edwards subsume his personality in the glittering image he created for the gifted Shelby that we know a great deal about the latter and very little about the former. Edwards’s reticence to speak about his own exploits leaves huge gaps in the record that can only be filled by guesswork and inference. He and Shelby were friends, but to what degree we do not know. Despite the difference in their social stations, Edwards was present at Shelby’s wedding in 1858. Obviously, Shelby was a man whose qualities of character touched a responsive chord in the feelings of the younger man.

By all objective standards, Jo Shelby was gifted with every good thing that mattered to the male psyche in the 1860s: good looks, buoyant health, boundless optimism, personal magnetism; plus, at age twenty-one, his father left him an $80,000 trust fund. He was the finest looking man I ever saw, black hair and handsome features, an Arkansas foot soldier wrote after the war. He looked like somebody.⁶

Shy, sensitive, impressionable, thoroughly imbued with the code of the bayard chevalier, John Edwards went to work for the man, not just as an adjutant, but as a hagiographer of sorts. The terse, plain-spoken Shelby was reluctant to write the obligatory accounts expected of a field commander; Edwards, a natural chronicler, took over this function. What better way to put the best possible spin on his hero’s exploits than to write his own version of the official records, which future historians would consult? Edwards’s account of the battle of Lone Jack in eastern Jackson County in August of 1862 marks his debut as Shelby’s adjutant and amanuensis. Thereafter, Shelby’s reports of major and minor conflicts possess a verve, zest, and wealth of literary allusions that could only have flowed from the fecund literary brain of the former Lexington Expositor editorialist.

John Edwards may have been something of a fabulist when it came to factual objectivity in his delineation of Shelby’s efforts on behalf of the Confederate cause west of the Mississippi, but there is no denying his own personal bravery. He had more horses shot out from under him than anybody in Shelby’s command, including Shelby himself. By all accounts he was fearless in battle, always present where the action was hottest. He was only a boy but he soon became the hero of Shelby’s brigade, Major J. F. Stonestreet wrote after the war. It was a grand sight to see him in battle. He was always where the fight was thickest. He was absolutely devoid of fear.⁷

We would know nothing about his conduct were it not for testimonies such as these. Throughout the war, Edwards steadfastly refused to put anything of himself into his narratives; they were always about others. Why this was we can only speculate. A natural modesty, an ingrained sense of reticence, a troubling fear that even the slightest mention of his own exploits might detract from the ongoing enshrinement of his idol—whatever, there are times when Edwards’s aversion to personal utterance seems pathologically disturbing.

In April of 1863, during a raid on the southeast Missouri town of Cape Girardeau, a shell fragment tore away the inside of his leg, and Edwards lay all night on the field without medical care. He was found by federal soldiers and was personally cared for by General John McNeil. He languished in a prison camp near St. Louis for several weeks before being exchanged, in time to rejoin Shelby’s brigade for the disastrous assault on Helena, Arkansas, on July 4, 1863.

There is no mention of this ordeal in Edwards’s magnum opus about Shelby’s wartime exploits, Shelby and His Men (1867). All kudos and accounts, gripes and accusations, are attributed to other people. How Edwards felt about anything, we are hard-pressed to discover. Instead of speaking to the reader in a personal voice, he conceals his innermost thoughts by parroting nineteenth-century rhetorical clichés in a flashy stage whisper. Edwards had a gift for exaggeration, and no ear for contemporary conversations, says Daniel O’Flaherty, Jo Shelby’s biographer. His characters spoke a language never heard on land or sea outside the pages of Sir Walter Scott, his literary model.⁸

He also distorted the facts. Not content with the impressive statistics of Shelby’s 1863 raid into central Missouri, Edwards skewed the figures to make Shelby look even better. During forty-one days and fifteen hundred miles of riding, Edwards says, the raiders killed and wounded 600 Federals, captured and paroled as many more. They destroyed ten forts and nearly eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property, plus a million dollars’ worth of supplies. They seized three hundred wagons, forty stands of colors, twelve hundred rifles and revolvers, six thousand horses and mules. All this in a thirty-four-day period between September 22 and October 26, by a cavalry force of 1,200 men, at a cost, says Edwards, of only 150 killed and wounded.⁹

The raid was successful, though in all likelihood not as successful as Edwards claims. Federal commanders reported far fewer casualties. Total Federal losses, says historian Stephen B. Oates, were about 240 killed, wounded, missing, and captured.¹⁰

Eighteen sixty-four was a grueling year for Shelby’s Brigade—the Fourth Missouri Cavalry Brigade, better known by this time as the Iron Brigade. In March, Union general Nathaniel Banks with some 27,000 men, plus a fleet of gunboats, moved up the Red River to destroy the lucrative cotton supply centers in northwest Louisiana and East Texas. On March 23, a second Federal army under General Frederick Steele marched south out of Little Rock to rendezvous with Banks at Shreveport. Opposing Banks was a small force under General Richard Taylor. Steele’s column, slogging through Arkansas, clashed with several Confederate units, one of which, led by John S. Marmaduke, included Shelby’s Brigade. The Rebels inflicted heavy losses on Steele’s troops at Camden and Jenkins’ Ferry. In Louisiana, Taylor’s army of about 13,000 met Banks at Sabine Crossroads (April 8) and Pleasant Hill (April 9) and threw his forces back against the Red River. By the first of June, 1864, the Union campaign was in shambles.

In September there was Price’s Raid, the last major effort by a Confederate field command to entice Missouri into the southern fold. Ostensibly for political reasons, Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, selected General Sterling Price to lead the expedition, when it was obvious to everyone that Jo Shelby, despite his inexperience with large bodies of men, would have been a better choice. The raid called for speed, audacity, and discipline—precisely the qualities that Price lacked. True to form, the Confederate commander—gouty and obese, topping out at three hundred pounds—squandered whatever hope he might have had of dealing the Yankees a major blow with a costly assault on a fortified federal position at Pilot Knob in southeast Missouri. Instead of attacking St. Louis and possibly causing General William T. Sherman to divert troops from his Georgia campaign to defend the vital Missouri metropolis, Price turned west to Jefferson City. Cowed by the defenses ringing the capital, he bypassed it and trundled west like a tortoise, bogged down by a huge wagon train swollen with booty stolen from the very people he was trying to attract to the Confederate cause.

Two Yankee armies, one pursuing west from St. Louis, the other east from Kansas, converged on the sluggish invaders. The climax came on October 23, 1864, at the battle of Westport, in the heart of present-day Kansas City, Missouri, when the Confederates were routed by a flank attack. Amidst the chaos of his retreating army, Price, riding in a carriage driven by a black servant, sent a note to Shelby saying he was the only person who could save the army from annihilation. And save it Shelby did, more than once, during the long, harrowing retreat to the Arkansas line, as he fought against staggering odds at places such as Mine Creek and Newtonia. Every hill-top was a battlefield, and every bottom stretch drank the blood of some of his soldiers, Edwards wrote of those awful days, with little exaggeration or bravado.¹¹ An outbreak of smallpox further decimated the ranks; at this bleak time, the heroism of John Edwards shone forth like a beacon. When the dark days came, wrote Major J. F. Stonestreet, it was John Edwards who, more than anybody else, inspired hope in the hearts of the men, cheered and encouraged them, and spurred them on to renewed exertions.¹²

The spring of 1865 found the remnants of Shelby’s Brigade bivouacked in southwest Arkansas. Word of Robert E. Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox was greeted with dismay by many members of the Trans-Mississippi army. The prevailing sentiment, at least initially, was to prolong the fight. After fleeing Richmond in early April, Jefferson Davis was rumored to be making his way west to link up with the fifty thousand troops still under the command of Edmund Kirby Smith. Diehards such as Edwards envisioned a strategic retreat into Mexico, where the troops could regroup. Just when this thought occurred to anyone is difficult to determine. Edwards says, in Shelby and His Men, that the idea was first seriously discussed at a conference of Southern governors and Trans-Mississippi generals held in Marshall, Texas, at the end of April.¹³ News of Joe Johnston’s surrender to Sherman in North Carolina had just trickled in, triggering mass defections. Jefferson Davis seemed to have disappeared off the map. Kirby Smith—pious, soft-spoken, sporting a patriarchal beard—appeared to be wavering in his resolve to continue the struggle. Spurred on by John Edwards, Shelby proposed that Kirby Smith relinquish command; the remnants of the Trans-Mississippi army would then assemble along the line of the Brazos River, where, in Edwards’s words, they were to fight step by step to the Rio Grande, when, in the event of everything else failing [they] would take service with one or the other of the contending parties in Mexico and establish either an Empire or a Republic.¹⁴

Instead, on June 3, 1865, in an act of perfidy excoriated by Edwards, Kirby Smith surrendered all Confederate troops west of the Mississippi. The Civil War was officially over. Those Confederates still remaining in the field were instructed to proceed to the nearest U.S. Army depot, lay down their arms, and secure paroles. Despite a few defections, the Iron Brigade remained intact. Shelby called the troop to order and asked for volunteers to enter Mexico under the aegis of establishing a Confederate presence south of the Rio Grande. Such a move raised a host of international issues regarding sovereignty and the spectre of imperialist aggression. A cadre of battle-tested troops, well-equipped and superbly led, at loose in a country already torn by factional strife, could significantly alter the balance of power.

But the official government message regarding a possible exodus to Mexico was ambivalent. Early in 1865, Shelby had received a curious message from his cousin, General Francis Preston Blair, confidant of Lincoln, saying that the U.S. government would not be averse to having a force of ex-Confederates cross into Mexico and join forces with Benito Juarez, then fighting against a joint Franco-Austrian effort to establish a European monarchy on Mexican soil, in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Upon entering Mexico, would the men of the Iron Brigade be regarded as saviors or renegades? Whichever, they were riding into a cauldron of international conflict that would take all of their skill and experience to survive.

As they rode through Texas, Shelby’s force, acting independently or upon request, put down outbreaks of civil strife in towns such as Tyler, Waxahachie, and Houston. In Austin, his command fought a vicious gun battle with thugs attempting to rob the state treasury. During the long march from northeast Texas to the Rio Grande, the brigade maintained regular military discipline, riding in columns during the daylight hours, with scouts out ahead and flankers trailing alongside. The men abided by Shelby’s strict orders not to forage off the local population; at night, pickets and sentries patrolled the outer perimeter of their camp. From Austin, the men moved through San Marcos and New Braunfels to San Antonio, where they arrived on June 16, 1865.

San Antonio was packed with Confederate personalities fleeing from Federal forces. Louisiana governor Henry Watkins Allen, Missouri governor Thomas C. Reynolds, Judge John Perkins, Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, General John Magruder, and General Edmund Kirby Smith were all in town weighing their options regarding exile in Latin America. Word had arrived that Federal authorities were arresting politicos back in the former Confederate states and jailing them without writ of habeas corpus; the mood in San Antonio was defiant and uncompromising.

Shelby used his stay in San Antonio to rearm and reprovision his command. New enlistees joined the ranks, swelling their numbers to several hundred. Just how many troopers rode with the Iron Brigade at any given time between San Antonio and Mexico City is a matter of conjecture. John Edwards cites 1,000, then reduces the tally to 400. Historian Roy Bird puts the number at the end of the march at exactly 813.¹⁵ Robert L. Kerby, author of Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, says the total amounted to no more than 300 soldiers, plus 200 civilians.¹⁶ A few days later the brigade moved out, headed for El Paso del Aguila, Eagle Pass, on the Rio Grande, so named because of an eagle that flew back and forth across the river to its nest in a cottonwood on the Mexican bank. Across the river from Eagle Pass lay the Mexican village of Piedras Negras, the place of black stones. Between the two flowed a milky brown stream, wide and deep, which Mexicans called the Rio Bravo del Norte and gringos the Rio Grande.

In charge at Piedras Negras was Governor Andres Viesca, Juarista governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila. He had two thousand men under his command, at least twice as many as Shelby, but he must have had a few misgivings as he watched the Confederates go into camp on a bluff above the river, with their artillery pointed in the direction of the Mexican town. The politics of the situation were complex. The men across from him were ex-Confederates, reportedly in favor of the imperial usurper, Archduke Maximilian of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who, with the connivance of Napoleon III and units of the French army, had toppled the popularly elected Benito Juarez and sent him into exile to the desert provinces of the north.

Viesca was elegant and polished, eager to make a deal. After a two-day palaver, he made an offer he did not think Shelby could possibly refuse. In return for Shelby throwing in with Juarez, Viesca offered him military control of the provinces of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas—practically all of northeast Mexico—with Viesca retaining civilian authority. That night, in camp on the Texas side of the river, Shelby put the proposal to a vote of the entire brigade. To a man, they voted against joining Juarez, opting for Maximilian instead.

Ponder for a moment what might have happened had the men of the Iron Brigade cast their vote for Juarez. It is pure speculation, but the course of North American history might have turned out differently. Confederates had long envisioned a refuge in northern Mexico where they could reestablish their traditional way of life. French troops to the south would have welcomed a buffer between them and the Yankee nation. Shelby’s troops could very well have policed the area, purging it of outlaws and brigands; whether the Union would finally have sent troops across the river to unseat Shelby is impossible to say. General Philip H. Sheridan, in charge of the occupying forces in Texas, revealed many years later at a dinner attended by Shelby in Washington, D.C., that he was eager to match his skills against the legendary Rebel.¹⁷ The Monroe Doctrine, formulated early in the country’s history, decades before the country possessed the muscle to enforce it, was one of the sacred cows of U.S. foreign policy; with a hundred thousand men still in uniform at the close of the Civil War, it is quite plausible that Sheridan would have been sent across the river to uproot a neo-Confederate fiefdom.

Shelby would have been virtual dictator of three Mexican provinces, something that went against the grain of his character. Granted, he was a martinet; granted, he drove his men unmercifully, but they in turn revered him and did what he told them. Even discounting the possibility of a Philip Sheridan intervention, the odds were stacked against a successful Shelby rule in northeast Mexico. Once he had neutralized the French threat in the south, Benito Juarez would have turned his attention to the newcomers in the north. Moreover, Shelby’s men, no matter how comfortable their life in these desert states, would have wanted to return home. They were Protestants in a Catholic land, Anglos in an Hispanic environment, agriculturalists from the fertile valleys and broad rivers of the Middle Border.

Instead of throwing in with Juarez, who was backed by the U.S. government and destined to emerge triumphant in the struggle with the foreign power, Shelby’s men voted to enlist in yet another Lost Cause. This doughty band of beau sabreurs, so fulsomely celebrated by John Edwards, was also racist, scornful of dark-skinned people; when put to the test, they demonstrated that they were patently unwilling to support a Mexican leader of Indian descent. Instead, they were swayed by the sham chivalries of the European interlopers, presided over by a weak-chinned prince and his mentally disturbed wife, daughter of the king of Belgium, who stirred reveries of knightly fealty in tough, pragmatic men who should have known better. They were imperialists, the vanguard of a new breed of American pioneers, eager to extend their influence into foreign places. Of Shelby, says Edwards, His ideas were all of conquest. If he dreamed at all, his dreams were of Cortez.¹⁸ In one bold stroke then, Shelby set the diplomatic tone of the new postwar America—expansionist, confrontational, fortune-seeking, acquisitive—and all this a good thirty years before the blatant land grab of the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Historian Edwin Adams Davis puts this pivotal moment on the banks of the Rio Grande into perspective: So when the vote was taken at Eagle Pass, the men who had been living in a heroic, though bloody fantasy were willing to gamble on a bloody, unrealistic future rather than on a more realistic opportunity, in order to continue their supposed heroics by marching into a foreign country, not in the cause of democracy, but in the cause of kings and queens. . . . It was heroic, magnificent, but it was not sound, considered judgment.¹⁹

The exact date that Jo Shelby led his men across the Rio Grande into Mexican territory is not known. John Edwards does not say; Edwin Davis claims it was the Fourth of July;²⁰ historian Robert Kerby thinks it was June 26, 1865.²¹ Whatever, the date was memorialized with a touching ceremony. The brigade drew up in dress parade along the north bank of the Rio Grande (though not even the location is known for certain; it could very well have been on the Mexican side). Out front of the first rank floated the Stars and Bars, the last flag to fly over an organized Confederate force; the flag, tattered and rent, had been presented to the brigade two years earlier by the women of a small Arkansas town. Each of the five colonels—Ben Elliott, D. A. Williams, George Gordon, Alonzo Slayback, and Yandell Blackwell—took hold of a corner or edge of the banner and splashed on foot into the river. At the last moment, Jo Shelby, overcome with emotion, placed the black ostrich plume that had decorated his campaign hat onto the flag. Weighted with a rock, the flag was then lowered into the water.

2

How long the brigade remained in Piedras Negras after crossing the Rio Grande is not known. Edwards is fuzzy about dates at times. A lot happened during their stay in the border town, including a nasty shoot-out over an accusation that some of Shelby’s men had stolen horses in Texas and ridden them over the border. Once he recovered from the shock of Shelby’s refusal to become Benito Juarez’s northern military commander, Viesca tried to cut several more deals, including the purchase of Shelby’s entire battery of ten cannon. Shelby knew that on the long march to