The Texas border city that saw the Civil War's final battle
More than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Union and Confederate troops were still fighting near Brownsville, Texas. The clash at Palmito Ranch on May 15, 1865, which the Confederates won, is regarded by some historians as the last battle of the war. The same ground had opened another war two decades earlier.
In 1846 President Polk sent General Zachary Taylor, with a young Ulysses S. Grant among his officers, south to the Rio Grande, where Taylor built Fort Texas. That April a patrol of 63 American dragoons was surrounded and forced to surrender by a much larger Mexican force, and Polk declared that American blood had been shed on American soil; Congress voted for war on May 13. Mexican troops besieged the fort, and the first battles of the Mexican–American War, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, were fought just outside today's city. The fort's commander, Major Jacob Brown, died of his wounds, and Taylor renamed the post Fort Brown in his honour.
The town itself was laid out in 1848 by Charles Stillman, a Connecticut trader who had run a successful riverboat business, after the treaty ending the war made the area part of Texas. Disputes with the land's former owners, including the rancher Juan Cortina, dragged on until the US Supreme Court sided with Stillman in 1879.
During the Civil War, Brownsville sat at the end of the so-called Cotton Road. Confederate cotton was smuggled across the river and shipped to Europe from a Mexican port, dodging the Union blockade. When Union forces arrived in November 1863, the retreating Confederates blew up Fort Brown with 8,000 pounds of explosives, but they retook the town the following year.
In 1906 the city was the scene of a notorious injustice. After a shooting in town, President Theodore Roosevelt dishonourably discharged all 167 Black soldiers of the regiment at Fort Brown without a hearing. Investigations in the 1970s cleared them, and the discharges were reversed. Today Brownsville has about 187,000 residents, nearly 94% Hispanic, and a subtropical climate.
Source: Brownsville, Texas
