Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

428
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
half. Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a relative of Napoleon’s by marriage, arrived
in the spring of 1864 to ascend the throne as emperor of Mexico. 5
In order to forestall French occupation of the mouth of the Rio Grande and to
stop the traffic in military stores and cotton, the Union’s Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P.
Banks dispatched a force from the Department of the Gulf to seize the lower river
in the fall of 1863. On 6 November, federal troops raised the United States flag
over Brownsville for the first time since March 1861. The few hundred Confederates
in the region withdrew north of the Nueces River, or up the Rio Grande toward
Eagle Pass. As they moved upriver, the route of Southern cotton for export had to
shift westward more than three hundred miles, adding further expense to already
heavy freight costs. With two contending parties, Union and Confederate, on the
north side of the river and two, the Liberals (Juárez) and the Imperialists (Maximilian),
on the south, the lower Rio Grande soon attracted a class of men whose ethics
were elastic, often in the extreme. 6
Events far from the Rio Grande valley also had a decisive influence on Union
operations there, the kind of effect that outlying military departments on both sides
of the conflict felt throughout the war. The failure of General Banks’ Red River
Expedition in the spring of 1864 and the withdrawal that summer of the XIX Corps
from Louisiana to Virginia led to the abandonment of all but one of the federal
beachheads in Texas in order to reinforce garrisons along the Mississippi River.
Texas and its cotton were alluring targets for a Union expedition, but the agriculture
and commerce of a dozen loyal states, from western Pennsylvania to Kansas,
depended on federal control of the Mississippi. 7
As Union troops withdrew from the Texas coast, a Confederate force reentered
Brownsville on 30 July, once again affording cotton shipments a short but still
arduous route to Mexico. Only the federal post at Brazos Santiago, near the mouth
of the Rio Grande, remained. It was a secure position on an island, approachable
from the mainland by only one route. In the fall of 1864, four regiments constituted
the garrison: the 91st Illinois and the 62d, 87th, and 95th United States Colored
Infantries (USCIs). The 62d had begun its existence as the 1st Missouri Colored
Infantry, organized near St. Louis in December 1863. The 87th and 95th USCIs
were Louisiana regiments, raised in and around New Orleans as part of General
Banks’ Corps d’Afrique. 8
At the beginning of November 1864, a new commanding general arrived at
Brazos Santiago: Brig. Gen. William A. Pile, who had helped Adjutant General
Lorenzo Thomas recruit black troops, including the 1st Missouri Colored Infantry,
5 Enrique Krause, Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (New
York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 169–74; Paul Vanderwood, “Betterment for Whom? The Reform
Period, 1855–1875,” pp. 371–96 in The Oxford History of Mexico, eds. Michael C. Meyer and
William H. Beezley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially pp. 375–83.
6 Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority, p. 177; Townsend, Yankee Invasion of Texas, pp. 14–19;
Ronnie C. Tyler, “Cotton on the Border, 1861–1865,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73 (1970):
461–63. Examples of rascality on both sides of the border in early 1864 are in OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt.
2, pp. 8–10, 216–17.
7 Stephen A. Dupree, Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General
Nathaniel P. Banks in the West (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7.
8 OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1, pp. 185–86, and pt. 4, pp. 266–67, 366; Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium
of the War of the Rebellion (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959 [1908]), pp. 1718–19, 1733, 1736–37.