Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

South Texas, 1864–1867 427
Brownsville, Texas, from across the Rio Grande. The bales of cotton stacked on the
Mexican shore indicate Brownsville’s economic importance to the Confederacy.
a neutral country. Shipping boomed, with wagons carrying baled cotton across the
forbidding landscape of southern Texas to pay for munitions of war that entered
Mexican seaports. One merchant in England delivered forty-two hundred Enfield
rifles for $24.20 each, for which he expected payment in cotton at thirty cents a
pound: in all, more than fifteen tons of cotton. In the course of the war, as many as
three hundred fifty thousand bales may have left the Confederacy by crossing the
Rio Grande. The Mexican town of Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, swelled to a
population of some forty thousand. Its seaport, Bagdad, also thrived. 4
A few weeks before Texas left the Union, rival Mexican parties known as Liberals
and Conservatives concluded a civil war of their own that had lasted for
more than two years. At issue was the constitution of 1857, a secular document favored
by the Liberals that, among its other provisions, disestablished the Catholic
Church. Guerrilla warfare, massacres, and reprisals characterized the conflict. By
the time the Liberals won, the country lay exhausted. An empty treasury caused
Benito Juárez, the new president, to suspend repayment of Mexico’s foreign loans.
This prompted the creditor nations, Britain, France, and Spain, to take direct action.
In December 1861, a naval fleet from the three powers landed troops at Veracruz
and occupied the port. When Britain and Spain learned a few months later
that the French emperor, Napoleon III, intended to conquer the entire country and
install a puppet government, they withdrew their contingents. Lacking the legitimacy
conferred by prominent allies, French troops nevertheless marched inland,
meeting fierce resistance that blocked their path to Mexico City for a year and a
4 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 4, 3: 569–
70, 572–74 (hereafter cited as OR); Ernest W. Winkler, ed., Journal of the Secession Convention
of Texas, 1861 (Austin: Texas Library and Historical Commission, 1912), pp. 61–66 (quotation, p.
62); David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 178; Jerry Thompson and Lawrence T.
Jones III, Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier: A Narrative and Photographic
History (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2004), p. 17; Stephen A. Townsend, The Yankee
Invasion of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), pp. 5–7.