Battle of Palmito Ranch
The Battle of Palmito Ranch ended on the 13th of May, 1865, more than a month after Robert E. Lee had already surrendered at Appomattox Court House. The men who fought and died on the banks of the Rio Grande that day knew the war was functionally over. Their commanders on both sides had received word of Lee's surrender. Yet the guns still fired, the artillery still moved, and Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment still died. How a battle gets fought after a war has ended -- and why it still counts -- is a question that cuts to the heart of what war actually is when it starts to come apart.
By early 1865, Union and Confederate soldiers in southern Texas had quietly stopped trying to kill each other. The rival armies had settled into what one account calls a gentlemen's agreement, a tacit understanding that further fighting served no one. The Confederates needed their southern ports open to keep cotton moving to Europe, and the Mexicans across the Rio Grande were happy to facilitate that trade. Neither side saw the point in disturbing it.
Union Major General Lew Wallace tried to formalize the arrangement. He met with Confederate Brigadier General James E. Slaughter and Colonel John Salmon Ford at Port Isabel on the 11th and the 12th of March, 1865. Slaughter and Ford agreed that further combat would be tragic. But Slaughter's superior, Confederate Major General John G. Walker, rejected any ceasefire in what the source describes as a scathing exchange of letters with Wallace. The truce stayed informal: both sides agreed they would not advance on the other without prior written notice, but nobody signed anything.
The Union brigade holding blockade duty at the Port of Brazos Santiago numbered around 1,900 troops under Colonel Robert B. Jones of the 34th Indiana. That regiment alone counted 400 veterans who had served in the Vicksburg Campaign and had been reconstituted in December 1863 as a Veteran regiment. When Jones resigned to return to Indiana, a new commander arrived: Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, who led the 62nd United States Colored Infantry.
Theodore H. Barrett was thirty years old in 1865, and he had spent his entire military career without seeing combat. He had been an army officer since 1862, and he had volunteered for the newly raised colored regiments partly out of ambition for higher rank. He was appointed colonel of the 1st Missouri Colored Infantry in 1863, which was redesignated the 62nd U.S.C.T. in March 1864. Malaria contracted in Louisiana sent him on convalescent leave, and when he returned, the regiment had already been posted to Los Brazos de Santiago. He joined it there in February 1865.
Soon after the battle, Barrett's detractors described him as wanting a little battlefield glory before the war ended altogether. Others suggested he needed horses for the 300 unmounted cavalrymen in his brigade and planned to take them from the Confederates. A 1960 pamphlet by Louis J. Schuler advanced a different claim: that Brigadier General Egbert B. Brown had ordered the expedition to seize some 2,000 bales of cotton stored in Brownsville and sell them for private profit. Schuler's version has a factual problem -- Brown was not even appointed to command at Brazos Santiago until later in May.
Historian Jerry Thompson frames the Confederate motivation more plainly: honor, money, and what Thompson describes as racism. Ford had publicly declared he would never surrender to a mongrel force of Abolitionists, Negroes, plundering Mexicans, and perfidious renegades. And in Brownsville sat a large quantity of cotton belonging to Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, waiting to cross the river to Matamoros. A Union advance would mean confiscation.
Union Lieutenant Colonel David Branson led the first advance, commanding 250 men of the 62nd U.S.C.T. spread across eight companies, plus two companies of the 2nd Texas Cavalry Battalion. That regiment was composed largely of Texans of Mexican origin who had remained loyal to the United States. Branson's force moved from Brazos Santiago to the mainland, and the opening phase went well: three Confederate prisoners taken, some supplies captured.
The afternoon of the first day brought a Confederate counterattack. Captain William N. Robinson struck back with fewer than 100 cavalry, driving Branson back to White's Ranch. Both sides called for reinforcements overnight. Ford arrived with six French guns and more cavalry, bringing his total force to 300 men. Barrett came with 200 troops of the 34th Indiana.
On the second day, Barrett pushed westward past Palmito Ranch, with skirmishers from the 34th Indiana in advance. Around four in the afternoon, Ford attacked. He sent a couple of companies with artillery to hit the Union right flank while the rest of his force pushed straight on. After fierce fighting, the Union line broke toward Boca Chica. Barrett tried to form a rearguard, but Confederate artillery broke up every attempt to rally. During the retreat, which lasted into the 14th of May, 50 members of the 34th Indiana's rearguard company, 30 stragglers, and 20 dismounted cavalry were surrounded in a bend of the Rio Grande and captured.
In his official report dated the 10th of August, 1865, Barrett listed 115 Union casualties: one killed, nine wounded, and 105 captured. Confederate casualties came in at five or six wounded and none killed. Historian Stephen B. Oates, Ford's biographer, concluded that Union deaths were probably around 30, with many drowning in the Rio Grande or killed by French border guards on the Mexican side.
Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment is believed to have been the final man killed during the engagement at Palmito Ranch, which makes him the likely last combat fatality of the entire American Civil War. The detail is not trivial. Wars generate paperwork, pension rolls, monuments. The last death becomes, in a strange way, a kind of milestone.
Historian Jerry D. Thompson of Texas A&M International University worked through court-martial testimony and post returns from Brazos Santiago to produce the most granular casualty breakdown. The 62nd U.S.C.T. suffered two killed and four wounded. The 34th Indiana had one killed, one wounded, and 79 captured. The 2nd Texas Cavalry Battalion lost one killed, seven wounded, and 22 captured. That totals four killed, 12 wounded, and 101 captured on the Union side.
In 1896, the veterans of this fight had their pensions cut on the grounds that no legitimate war action had taken place. They appealed, and the assistant secretary to the commissioner of pensions overturned the cut, legally ruling those men the last Union casualties of the war. That ruling settled at least one version of the question.
One of the stranger threads running through Palmito Ranch is the role of the French. The Union forces were surprised during the battle by artillery that multiple witnesses said had been supplied by the French Army garrison occupying the Mexican town of Matamoros, upriver across the Rio Grande. Six French guns arrived with Ford's reinforcements on the second day.
Reports also circulated of shots fired from the Mexican shore, of Confederates being warned by sound signals from across the river about the Union approach, and of Imperial Mexican cavalry crossing into Texas. None of these reports have been definitively confirmed, despite a large number of witnesses attesting to them. The French were in Mexico as part of their imperial intervention, and Confederate commanders including Edmund Kirby Smith, John G. Walker, James Slaughter, and John Ford all fled across the border to Mexico after the campaign ended. They may have intended to ally with French Imperial forces, or with Mexican forces under the deposed President Benito Juárez.
Ford later returned from Mexico at the request of Union General Frederick Steele to serve as parole commissioner for disbanding Confederate forces. In July 1865, Barrett brought court-martial charges against Lieutenant Colonel Morrison for alleged disobedience and abandoning his colors. Ford appeared as a defense witness and helped absolve Morrison of responsibility for the defeat.
The fight at Palmito Ranch forces a harder question: when exactly did the Civil War end? Historian James McPherson and others locate the end at the collapse of the Confederate government, which they date to the capture of President Jefferson Davis on the 10th of May, 1865. That same day, President Andrew Johnson declared armed resistance virtually at an end. Edmund Kirby Smith formally surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department on the 2nd of June, 1865.
The last Confederate general to surrender was Brigadier General Stand Watie of the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, who laid down his command in Doaksville, Indian Territory, on the 23rd of June, 1865. On that same day, President Johnson ended the Union naval blockade of the Southern states.
Historian Richard Gardiner, writing in 2013, argued that there was no Confederacy in existence when the fighting at Palmito Ranch occurred, and that the ex-Confederates involved were aware Lee had surrendered. Gardiner called the engagement a post-war encounter between Federals and ex-Confederate outlaws, not a battle in any formal sense. The dispute has legal residue: on the 2nd of April, 1866, Johnson declared the insurrection over everywhere except Texas, where an incomplete new state government created a technicality. He extended the declaration to Texas on the 20th of August, 1866.
Some sources point instead to a skirmish at Hobdy's Bridge near Eufaula, Alabama, on the 19th of May, 1865, as the last land action, noting that Corporal John W. Skinner of Company C, 1st Florida U.S. Cavalry, was listed in Union records as the last Northern soldier killed in combat.
The marshy, windswept prairies near Brownsville have changed little since 1865. The battlefield site covers more than 5,400 acres and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997. A highway marker on the Boca Chica Highway, Texas State Highway 4, marks the approximate location where Palmito Ranch once stood. The Civil War Trust, a division of the American Battlefield Trust, has acquired and preserved three acres of the site.
The battle also carries histories that extend beyond the military outcome. Colonel Santos Benavides, the highest-ranking Hispanic officer in either army, led between 100 and 150 Hispanic soldiers in the Brownsville Campaign in May 1865. The 62nd U.S.C.T., composed of Black soldiers, had gone into the fight believing that capture meant death or re-enslavement. Instead, their prisoners reported, they were paroled and released alongside white prisoners, with their captors assuring them they would be treated as prisoners of war. When Ford surrendered his command, he told his men to honor their paroles and added that the Negro had a right to vote. Those words, recorded in the source, came from a man who had gone to war rather than submit to Black Union troops.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When was the Battle of Palmito Ranch fought?
The Battle of Palmito Ranch was fought on the 12th and the 13th of May, 1865, on the banks of the Rio Grande east of Brownsville, Texas. It took place more than a month after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April, 1865.
Who was the last man killed in the Civil War at Palmito Ranch?
Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment is believed to have been the last man killed during the Battle of Palmito Ranch, making him the likely final combat fatality of the American Civil War. In 1896, a pension dispute over the veterans of this battle was resolved when the assistant secretary to the commissioner of pensions legally ruled them the last Union casualties of the war.
Why did the Battle of Palmito Ranch happen after the Civil War ended?
Both Union and Confederate commanders at Brownsville knew Lee had surrendered, but Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith had not yet surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department. Historian Jerry Thompson concluded that Confederate Colonel John Ford was motivated by honor, the defense of his men's dignity, and the protection of a large quantity of cotton belonging to Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy stored in Brownsville.
Who commanded the Union forces at the Battle of Palmito Ranch?
Colonel Theodore H. Barrett of the 62nd United States Colored Infantry commanded the Union forces at Palmito Ranch. Barrett was thirty years old and had served as an army officer since 1862 without ever seeing combat before ordering the attack.
Who won the Battle of Palmito Ranch?
The Battle of Palmito Ranch was a Confederate victory. Colonel John Salmon Ford's forces drove the Union troops back toward Boca Chica, surrounding and capturing 50 men of the 34th Indiana's rearguard, 30 stragglers, and 20 dismounted cavalry in a bend of the Rio Grande.
Was the Battle of Palmito Ranch the last battle of the Civil War?
Most historians consider Palmito Ranch the last formal land battle of the Civil War, though the designation is disputed. Some sources identify a skirmish at Hobdy's Bridge near Eufaula, Alabama, on the 19th of May, 1865, as the last action, and historian Richard Gardiner argued in 2013 that the Palmito Ranch engagement was a post-war encounter rather than a true battle. The battlefield was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 3webNo. 2David Branson — Cornell University Library
- 4webHistorical Landmarks of Brownsville (Number 47)University of Texas Brownsville
- 6web'Ambush at Hobdy's Bridge' re-enactment May 16–17Jaine Treadwell — The Troy Messenger — May 9, 2015
- 8webNational Historic Landmarks Program: Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State, TexasStaff — National Park Service — June 2011