Joseph Orville Shelby was born December 12, 1830 in Lexington, Kentucky. He was classically educated at Transylvania University before moving to Missouri. Before the civil war He was a hemp rope manufacturer and espoused the pro-slavery cause and took active part in several shady schemes to make Kansas a slave state. At the beginning of the war he accepted a commission as a Captain of Cavalry in the Missouri Confederate militia, being bloodied at the Battle of Wilson Creek in 1861. He was made a colonel in 1862 and raised his own regiment of cavalry. This regiment grew to the size of a brigade of which he was made the General of at the age of 32 in 1863. He led this "Iron Brigade" on a famous raid on the longest cavalry raid of the war behind Union lines in Missouri. The 43 day raid from September 22 to November 3, 1863, saw Shelby and his 600 man brigade travel over 1,500 miles, inflict more than 1,000 casualties on Union forces, and capture or destroy $2 million worth of enemy supplies. He captured the federal garrisons at Neosho, Greenfield, Stockton, Hermanville, Warsaw, Boonville and Marshall, Missouri. In 1864 the Iron Brigade fought Union troops at the Battle of the Little Blue and the Battle of Westport where it twice saved the Confederate Army it was attached to from defeat. The end of the war found Shelby; now a Major General in Arkansas recruiting for his unit now encamped in Texas awaiting re-enforcement.
The dominoes started to fall when General Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia (which made up a quarter of the confederates under arms) surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. General Joe Johnston surrendered the Army of the Carolinas seventeen days later and General Taylor surrendered the Mississippi and Alabama forces at the beginning of May. This only left the confederates in the west, under the overall command of General Edmund 'Kirby' Smith. The confederate forces under Smith were hopelessly spread out over the vastest of Texas, the unregulated Indian Territories, the bayous of western Louisiana and southern Arkansas. All of the unit commanders assembled at the end of May in Marshall Texas for a staff meeting to decide how best to surrender. These men, including Generals Shelby, Buckner, Walker, Hawthorne and their staffs performed something of a coup d'état . They forced General Smith to resign and place General Buckner in command, with a plan to assemble their forces in the interior of Texas and carry on the war until they were all defeated in battle.
This was ultimately not to be; Buckner was captured and surrendered his troops in Louisiana before he could assume overall command. On June 2 General Smith finally did get to surrender to Union General Canby on a steamer in Galveston harbor. General Smith's last order was to send a courier to Maj Gen JO Shelby informing him to lay down his arms and surrender his Iron Brigade immediately to the nearest union force. The enraged Shelby instead rallied his men and offered them an alternative to surrender. In an impassioned speech to his assembled and reviewed his command at .He said, “Boys, the war is over and you can go home. I for one will not. Across the Rio Grande lies Mexico. Who will follow me there?!” With this he won over most of the men who had ridden with him for years.
Riding across Texas as the only disciplined body of men in the field for miles in any direction, they encountered a nearly lawless morass of looters, army deserters, refugees, Indian bands and bandits. The unit's strength varied from minute to minute new men constantly joining and others leaving with every new town they passed through. In Waco, they took possession of the abandoned military stores there including a complete wagon train of food and provisions, ten brand new howitzers form France, 2000 Enfield rifles still in the crates they left England in, and more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition. In Houston, his men put down a riot of stragglers who were destroying the lawless town. In Austin, he was joined by Texas Governor Murrah who they saved from looters along with $300,000 in gold and silver held by the Confederate sub-treasury there. Finally reaching the Rio Grande border at Eagle Pass a thousand men strong they took three days to cross all of their stragglers, lowering their flag for the last time on July 4th 1865.
They would find nothing but surprised in store for them across the border.
Source - General JO Shelby-Undefeated Rebel
Daniel O'Flaherty
1954- University of North Carolina Press
Join the Conversation