And in the end.…

The last battle of the Civil War was fought at Palmito Hill, some twelve miles downriver from Brownsville, May 13, 1865.

After retreating from Brownsville, the federal forces had taken an ineffective holding position at Brazos Santiago, where they then remained through the rest of the war. Some of the Union officers plotted quietly with the Mexican border chieftain Cortina, whose political position had been made precarious by French imperialist victories over the poorly armed patriots of Benito Juarez. Cortina was to capture Brownsville with his own troops in return for a commission as a brigadier general in the United States Army. The stand-firm leadership of Colonel Rip Ford brought these plans to naught.

Finally, in March, the Texan and Union forces signed a truce, agreeing that further bloodshed along the Rio Grande would serve no useful purpose in the far larger war rapidly reaching its climax in the Deep South.

When news came early in May of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, about two thousand bales of Confederate cotton remained on the riverbank in Brownsville. Northern cotton speculators in Matamoros, eager to get their hands on the cotton, persuaded the Union general that he should proceed to take it in the name of the Union even though such a move would violate the truce.

Under Colonel T. H. Barrett, sixteen hundred Union troops moved upriver toward Brownsville. News of Lee’s surrender had thinned Rip Ford’s Texas forces, but he was still able to muster about three hundred men, including the intrepid Benavides. He marched downriver and met the federals at Palmito Hill. Incredibly, his three hundred determined riders not only defeated the Union force but actually chased it seven miles before Ford called a halt.

“Boys,” said that gallant man, “we have done finely. We will let well enough alone and retire.”

This was his quiet benediction to four tragic, needless years of conflict.

It was ironic that even though the Confederacy already had lost the war, it won its final battle in a futile blaze of glory on a desolate, sandy stretch of coastal wasteland fifteen hundred miles from Richmond.