May 16, 1865---The Lincoln Assassins Conspiracy Trial; The Battle of Monticello Road

MAY 16, 1865:           

The Battle of Monticello Road: 

Despite General M. Jeff Thompson C.S.A.’s surrender at Chalk Bluff, Arkansas on May 11^th, not all Confederates fell in line. Here and there throughout the South isolated groups of men, most now under no authority but their own, continue to skirmish with Federal patrols. One of these skirmishes takes place along Monticello Road, in Jefferson County, Arkansas when ten men in Confederate uniforms representing Anderson’s Cavalry Battalion engage 30 men of the 13^th Illinois Cavalry. One Confederate is taken prisoner before the remainder ride off. In response, a strong garrison force is placed in the area. 

  

The New York Times publishes an exhaustive edition of the Lincoln Conspirators’ Trial transcript to date.  It can be read here.

May 15, 1865---The Ladies Union Association

MAY 15, 1865:  

 Emilie Davis tells her diary:

[T]his is a busy day the fair comences today i have bin working hard all the afternoon at the fair in the evening.

The Ladies Union Association (LAU) was a wartime social service organization that eventually developed a broader social work perspective (under various iterations) during the Progressive Era.  The LAU chapter to which Davis belonged was established to provide necessaries and small luxuries to the men of the U.S.C.T. The Fair of which Ms. Davis speaks had been postponed due to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and funerals, but once begun this day it did not end until the last day of May. 

 

During a Missouri guerrilla raid, Jesse James is shot through the lungs. It takes him months to recover. 

 

May 14, 1865---The Battle of Palmito Ranch (Day Three)

MAY 14, 1865:           

The Battle of Palmito Ranch (The Battle of Palmetto) (Day Three):                    

Union troops scoured the northern bank of the Rio Grande in darkness searching for the missing Sergeant David Clark. As they rode about with lanterns, Colonel Rip Ford’s Confederates took potshots at them from the darkness. Though no one was killed, the night shooting was undoubtedly unnerving. In effect, the Battle of Palmito Ranch degenerated into a game of Blind Man’s Bluff with guns. Finally, at 4:00 A.M., the frustrated Colonel Barrett ordered his men back to Brownsville, and Colonel Rip Ford ordered his men back into camp, claiming victory.

The unharmed Sergeant Clark was later brought to Brownsville by Mexican authorities.

Of the one thousand men who took part in this desultory three day battle the forces were divided about equally. 101 Union troops (mostly U.S.C.T.) were captured, about a score wounded, and four killed. The Confederates suffered 6 wounded and three captured, but no one was killed. 

Colonel John Salmon “Rip” Ford later said of his men, “There was no disposition to visit upon [the U.S.C.T.] a mean spirit of revenge." Many of Ford’s Texans were Hispanic, and they did not blench when Ford asked them to “respect the Negro’s right to vote” after the war.

Within 24 hours an armistice was worked out, and the captured Union troops were paroled. On May 26^th, General Kirby Smith surrendered all Confederate forces in the Department of The Trans-Mississippi. 

Palmito Ranch is nearly universally considered the “Last Battle of The Civil War” (though it wasn't; it was just the last large engagement).  It served no purpose whatsoever, except to cost the life of John J. Williams (along with three other men), and to allow the ex-Confederates-to-be to be able to say that the Confederacy “won” the day.  On balance, it was a terrible price to pay for bragging rights.

May 13, 1865---The Battle of Palmito Ranch (Day Two)

MAY 13, 1865:            

The Battle of Palmito Ranch (The Battle of Palmetto) (Day Two):          

The strange Battle of Palmito Ranch continued with the first hint of light in the Texas sky, as reinforced Union troops attempted to burn the Confederate supply dumps along the riverside.

The battlefield around Palmito Ranch was largely flat and featureless Texas-Mexico prairie slashed by the oxbows, curves, and meanders of the Rio Grande. Skirmishes occurred in isolated pockets along a front five or six miles deep and five or six miles wide. In effect, the Battle of Palmito Ranch was a grouping of independent actions occurring at different points along the north bank of the river and at different times during the day.

In one part of the field, disgusted Confederates or Federals might be surrendering at any given moment, while several river swerves away, Federal and Confederate forces might be at each others’ throats. There was virtually no coordination of forces, poor battlefield communications, and relatively little shooting for long stretches.

A minor breach in U.S.-French relations occurred when the Confederates wheeled out a battery of six French cannon, given to them courtesy of Maximilian I, the French-backed Emperor of Mexico. The aftermath of the cannon shots was noisier than the shots themselves. Weeks after the battle, the Johnson Administration penned a furious Diplomatic Note to the French Government, a Note which the French promptly referred to their Foreign Office for handling. Lost in a paperwork shuffle for months, the Note was finally shipped back across the Atlantic to the attention of Maximilian’s Government, who dubiously mislaid it. By the time the Note was answered in 1867, Maximilian I had been overthrown, and the United States had to content itself with a pro forma apology from the democratic Juarez Government, who had been fighting Maximilian all along and could and would assume no responsibility for the French cannons being on the wrong side of the river.  

More troublingly, the Civil War saw its last “official” combat death when a Hoosier of the 34th Regiment Indiana Infantry, Private John J. Williams, was killed during the day.

          

The battle was almost over as night fell, but Colonel Thomas Bennett U.S.A. attempted an overnight attack on the forts guarding the Rio Grande fords, only to be driven back by forces commanded by Colonel John Salmon “Rip” Ford C.S.A., a supporter of black civil rights. 

One prisoner, the last P.O.W. of the war, Sergeant David Clark U.S.C.T. was taken by Ford’s men during this night action. Although he was quickly released --- on the Mexican side of the river --- Colonel Bennett, a staunch abolitionist, did not know this, and ordered that he be sought out in the inky black darkness of borderlands Texas.  

May 12, 1865---The Battle of Palmito Ranch (Day One)

MAY 12, 1865:           

“What more is wanting?” --- a Prosecutor in the Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy Trial

I

Two places claim the fame of hosting the “last formal surrender” of Confederate troops east of the Mississippi River. Given the time lag of communications in the 19^th Century, no one knows which was the “first last” surrender and which was the “last last” surrender, only that they both occurred on this day:

In Kingston, Georgia, General William Tatum Wofford C.S.A. surrendered all troops in the Military Subdistrict of Northern Georgia.  

In the isolated western North Carolina town of Franklin, known as “the most inaccessible portion of the Confederacy,” the 69^th Regiment C.S.A. (also known as the Highlanders or Thomas’ Legion of Cherokee Warriors) strikes its colors to Union forces upon hearing of the surrenders of Lee, Johnston, Taylor and Forrest.  The nearest railroad to Franklin was located six miles east over isolated mountain paths in Morganton. There was no telegraph system in the entire region. A runner brought the news that the war had ended after a difficult traverse of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The surrender at Franklin, N.C. The papers were signed in flag-draped Dixie Hall to the left

II

The Battle of Palmito Ranch (The Battle of Palmetto) (Day One):      

Far away from both western North Carolina and northern Georgia, a battle between the Blue and the Gray erupted along the banks of the Rio Grande River near Brownsville, Texas.

The Battle of Palmito Ranch was considered a freak battle even in its day. The Union and Confederate forces in the area had largely been observing an informal cease-fire for many months. Such fighting as there was generally pitted the Americans in alliance with the Mexican Nationalists against the Imperial Forces of Mexico’s French-backed army.

U.S. forces held Brownsville, but C.S. forces held the river fords, and though there was essentially no reason to contest the fords, the Union Commander, Colonel Theodore Barrett decided to break the Confederate hold on the river.

Why he did so is still questioned. Negotiations to close out the war and accept a Confederate surrender had begun in March 1865 on the General Officer level, and though they were lagging, there was no real chance that local hostilities would reignite, except if by forced intention. Barrett, who had had little combat experience, it is thought, wanted to get his “last licks in” before the war formally ended by surrender. It is also thought that he wanted to seize the Confederate-held cotton fields and warehouses near the river (perhaps for profit, perhaps as a bargaining chip in negotiations, perhaps to deny the cotton to Mexican raiders).

In the afternoon, Barrett’s men, the 62^nd U.S.C.T. began skirmishing with Confederate pickets along the river. Confederate cavalry drove the Union forces back, and combat, which had been light, ended for the day.  

III

What more is wanting?  Surely no word further need be spoken to show that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy . . .  Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty of this conspiracy as John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound on Abraham Lincoln.

The first testimony takes place in the trial of the Lincoln Assassination conspirators this day. All the Defendants plead Not Guilty to all charges.

The Prosecution begins its arguments by proffering evidence of the direct involvement of Jefferson Davis in the conspiracy.

Little of what is presented has anything much to do with the actions of the Defendants themselves.

IV

Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith C.S.A. disappoints the denizens of the newly-minted capital city of the Confederacy when he announces that he will be moving the Headquarters of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi from Shreveport, Louisiana to Houston, Texas. Smith, like Jefferson Davis, refuses to believe that the 40,000 troops spoken of in the Trans-Mississippi are phantoms. He assumes he can organize and direct a war in Texas more effectively in Texas. This would be true if only he had an army.

As soon as he organizes his local troops and they begin to march west, his army (of about 6,000) begins to disintegrate. Every morning hundreds of men are reported AWOL, and some units are down to one or two troopers, often a sergeant and a color-bearer. By the time he reaches Texas, even the redoubtable Kirby Smith will be forced to acknowledge the obvious. 

"Kirby Smithdom":  Smith, as Departmental Military Commander, ran the Trans-Mississippi as a military dictatorship, overriding the local Governors and State Legislatures, but he was much less successful in controlling the citizenry and the widely-scattered troop concentrations