August 1, 1865---The Inevitable Events: "As we have fought like men, like men we will make peace."

AUGUST 1, 1865:       

By the height of the Summer of 1865, the Civil War was passing into history.  Throughout the North, men were being mustered out of units wholesale, and being sent home to anxious, prideful families. 

The great Armies of the United States --- The Army of The Potomac and The Army of The Tennessee --- vanished virtually overnight, and the lesser Armies --- of The James, of The Ohio, and the others --- shrank to fractions of their former size. 

By the end of the summer, the U.S. Army as a whole would contract from 1,300,000 men to only one-tenth that size, 137,000 men. And yet, the remnant would still be nearly ten times the size --- 16,000 --- of the Army in 1860, a sign that things had not, and never would, return to how they had been. The power and presence of the Federal Government, limited to the Post Office Department in 1860, would be a daily presence in the lives of most Americans from this point forward.

This would particularly be the case in the South, where, for the next decade,  Federal troops would be garrisoned, guaranteeing the rights of Freedmen.

The arrival of “Union” troops in many areas previously inviolate disturbed most white Southerners, and spurred some to further resistance. For though the “war” was over, the fighting went on in momentary flashes. 

Throughout the former Confederacy, in backwoods pockets and in the hill country, groups of men, reduced to outlawry like Jesse James, continued to resist. Most of these holdouts, rebels with no cause left, would not last the winter. But others would, and brief wars with forgotten names went piecemeal until the early 1880s.

In the borderlands of West Virginia and Kentucky, the Hatfields and the McCoys shot at each other in a private Civil War that had become a family affair. 

In Missouri, Archie Clement continued to lead the remnant of William Quantrill’s battalion in pointless burn-and-plunder raids against fellow Show Me Staters, and would until he died in a gun battle with a Federal force in December.   

Other Missourians fought little wars of personal vengeance against each other for crimes committed during the war.

In Tennessee and Kentucky, and in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and in Texas, scores were being settled by the score, often with ropes, whips, chains and guns.  Unionists hunted Confederates who had rewards on their scalps.  The insurgency that Lincoln, Grant and Sherman feared came to pass, though it was shriveled and the end was never in doubt.

Tens of thousands of paroled Confederates refused to take the Loyalty Oath to the United States, and would until October 2, 1865, when Robert E. Lee signed his own. 

And more than a few ex-Confederates greeted the “Yankees” enthusiastically, seeing in the reach of Federal power a road toward normalcy. Desperate for stability, and looking toward a more meaningful future, many local Confederate leaders joined with the Union garrison forces to find and disarm the holdouts, either through rational argument or through more violent means. 

The lesson was clear:  Raiding, bushwhacking, and outlawry were not going to be tolerated in civilized climes. 

Slowly and painfully, the irredeemable among the remaining men under arms were pushed west to the frontier where, out of violence, they created an era of American legend.  

In the northwestern corner of Louisiana, in Bossier and Caddo Parishes, though, it was as if nothing had changed.

Bossier Parish had been the first organized governmental unit of the United States to secede on November 26, 1860, as soon as word of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached the area. That very day, they authorized what became the first Confederate military unit, the Bossier Minutemen.

In neighboring Caddo Parish, they burned Robert E. Lee in effigy after Appomattox.  

When the eastern Confederacy collapsed, the Confederate Governor of Louisiana, Henry W. Allen, a wounded Civil War veteran, declared his Capital City-in-Exile, Shreveport, the Capital of the Confederacy. With the capture of Jefferson Davis on May 10^th, Governor Allen became, for all intents and purposes, the Acting President of The Confederacy.   

Though General Edmund Kirby Smith’s surrender of the Trans-Mississippi included Shreveport, and specified the removal of Governor Allen from office, neither Allen nor his Confederate allies chose to abide by the agreement made in Galveston, an agreement they had had no part in creating. 

Smith’s disorderly “sham surrender” left northwestern Louisiana in a netherworld between peace and war. For two full months, the residents of the region remained defiant, living under the Blood-Stained Banner with the Bossier Minutemen at the ready.

Hearing of the capitulation of Austin, Texas on this day, Governor Allen at last read the writing on the wall. Appearing in front of Shreveport’s City Hall (his Capitol building), Allen addressed his Confederacy:

We must, he began, “submit to the inevitable” and “begin life anew.” These words drew boos from the crowd, but Allen continued,

"My countrymen, we have for four long years waged a war we deemed to be just in the sight of high heaven. We have not been the best, the wisest, nor the bravest people in the world, but we have suffered more and have borne our suffering with greater fortitude than any people on the face of God's green earth. Now let us show the world that as we have fought like men, like men we will make peace. Let there be no acts of violence, no heart burning, no intemperate language, but with manly dignity, submit to the inevitable events." 

Allen left the podium, weeping, to the sound of cheers. That afternoon he departed for Texas, and thence to Mexico, where he died in honor in 1866.

 
Only a few hours after Allen’s departure, the first Federal troops entered Shreveport. Most of the local Confederate militia laid down their arms without a fight.