Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Over the next five decades, he was to be the only man in Texas history who was involved in a major way in every action or controversy of his time. He was to be one of the fantastic, but forgotten, figures of the old frontier. Ford was star-following, pragmatic, restless, and apparently without an ideology of any kind. He was impatient, brilliant, and erratic—and yet compulsively self-disciplined when he had to be. He had prejudices but no philosophy. Above all, he instinctively went where the action was.
He was a staunch Houston supporter for years, then a Know-Nothing leader, a Knight of the Golden Circle, and a Secessionist delegate to the Texas 1861 convention in turn. He shed roles easily, as popular ideas changed. Yet this leaves his image unclear, because Ford was a man of major strengths. Profane to the point of ingenuity, an inveterate gambler, free with both "his money and his pistol," Ford was a great captain, a leader of men, and a diplomat of considerable skill. He lived great times; he was the last of his line, and he died poor. Most of the great frontier captains did the same.
Ford dropped a brilliant professional and political career in 1846 to serve with the Texas Rangers in the Mexican War. He loved a horse, the wide brush country, and the smell of danger. In Mexico with Jack Hays, he contracted the malaria that was to haunt him all his life. He also acquired a nickname that delighted him. He was the Ranger adjutant, and it was his duty to record the names of the dead. At the end of each casualty list, Ford wrote
Rest in Peace
. As the war and the reports lengthened, he shortened this to R. I. P. The sardonic Rangers named him Old Rip Ford.
After the Mexican War, Ford saw more frontier service than any other officer of the state. He rode to El Paso in the distant west; he fought Comanches from the Canadian River in Oklahoma territory to Laredo. He played a major role in running the rebel Cortinas into Mexico in 1859. Through all this service, Ford was explosively energetic, capable, ruthless, and shrewd. He was tough enough to rule wild men. He showed a thirst for intrigue and a drive for power. Again and again, he employed reason to obtain his objectives, and chose to bargain rather than fight. But, rubbed the wrong way, he would fight—the bloody-minded battle-to-the-end of the frontier Anglo-Celt.
As a Ranger captain, he showed he would desert his own concept of justice if this happened to conflict with the majority's frontier prejudices. Nor would he sacrifice his notion of right to administer merely legal justice. Ford also did things that seemed quixotic; they damaged his career. He had that blend of Presbyterian piety—R. I. P.—and blue-eyed brutality that Mexicans found it impossible to understand. He was not cruel; few Texians of the old school were cruel. But they would pistol a man for knocking off their hat. Ford posed the bluff, simple outward front and border vulgarity that pleased common men. But Oates, who edited his papers, came closer to the real mark: here was
a man capable of inhuman drive and endurance, and of forcing it from others; "even more complex and profound than the polygonal public servant" he pretended to be. Ford's character and drives were significant, because he was a true Texian, a leader-type of the old frontier.
In 1861, the Secession convention appointed Ford a colonel of state cavalry and sent him south to the Rio Grande. Here he performed two signal services, which Oran Roberts, the Old Alcalde, always held went unrewarded and overlooked. Fitz-John Porter held Fort Brown with a strong garrison. Instead of precipitating the Civil War, Ford chose to reason with Porter, and he reasoned him into departing Texas. Thus it fell to the state of Ford's birth to start the conflict.
The first blood of the war was shed in Texas, however. On April 1, 1861, a Mexican named Ochoa declared against the county officers of the border area of Zapata, between Brownsville and Laredo on the Rio Grande, who had come out for the Confederate states. Ochoa gathered a band of men and hanged the country judge. He issued a
pronunciamento
against the Confederacy, thus dignifying a stand that probably had more of banditry to it than ideology. Ford sent his cavalry after Ochoa and killed twenty of his followers. The rest fled into Mexico. Technically, this little action could be rated as the first battle in the War Between the States.
Ford commanded at Fort Brown through 1861. Again, he played the diplomat and probably set a pattern that prevented the Confederacy from becoming involved in Mexico. Ford understood the importance of the Matamoros gateway. Through the services of the British and Prussian consuls, he arranged a commercial treaty by which Mexico permitted Texan cotton to pass through. This was a tremendous accomplishment, done by playing on European hopes for the Confederacy and Mexican fears of invasion.
He also advised Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, the transplanted Yankees who dominated commerce in south Texas, to transfer their steamboats to the Mexican flag. This stratagem would free them from Union interference while serving the Confederacy on the river, and off Brazos de Santiago. Both men, who were loyal Confederates throughout the war, did so, with much benefit all around.
Ironically, Ford's diplomacy was better appreciated by neutrals and the enemy than his own people. Ford could be devious, especially in dealing secretly with Mexican officers, and he was too devious by far to suit many of the Southern people in his command. It was protested that his advice to King and Kenedy removed valuable property from Confederate control. Ford grew in bad odor with many powers in the state. In late 1861, his command was dispersed to Colonel Earl Van Dorn's troops, and he was replaced at Fort Brown by Colonel Thorkelin de Lovenskiold, whose military reputation rested mainly on the fact that his brother was a Danish field marshal. The border was pacified; Ford was furloughed.
When the Secretary of War of the Confederacy ordered a regularization of forces, with election of new officers in April 1862, Ford could easily have been elected colonel of the 2d Texas Cavalry. He chose not to stand, for reasons of his own. General Paul O. Hébert then offered him a regular commission as major, which Ford refused. Finally, Ford was appointed by the state as Superintendent of the Bureau of Conscription, a job which consisted mainly of running down draft dodgers and which he despised. Ford did not like the draft laws. He believed all good men had volunteered, and that the laws deferring petty office holders were unjust.
In this post Ford's true military status was most unclear. His state appointment as a colonel was no longer valid, and he held no Confederate rank. Hébert, however, addressed him as "Colonel," and he saw that Ford was paid as a full colonel. Bankhead Magruder continued the practice in 1863.
When Magruder wrote Ford confidentially about fighting on the Rio Grande, he then and later tried to secure Ford a commission. For reasons of its own, the Confederacy refused. The man who was to become Texas's best-known soldier in the Civil War—in his own time, that is, not later—was never carried on Confederate rolls.
Magruder could not suspend the conscription laws, nor divert men from the state or Confederate service to Ford officially. Exemptions were not granted for service in auxiliaries. This meant Ford had to recruit a sizable force in a thinly populated, manpower-drained west Texas from draft-exempts—men too old or too young. The nucleus of his force, however, was to be the inclusion of several state, militia, and paramilitary units on the southwestern frontier. Magruder and Ford conspired on this.
Ford could not give his new regiment an official name, so he called it the Cavalry of the West. He wore a battered black cavalry fedora, emblazoned with the CSA emblem. He called himself Colonel, and made it stick.
He raised the Lone Star flag and the Stars and Bars at San Antonio, nailed up placards, and sent couriers north, south, and west. His call reached from Burnet County to the Nueces. Men began to come in.
The many small militia and Indian-fighting units in the area would have marched under his orders. But only a few could be withdrawn. In Blanco and other counties above San Antonio, the Comanche danger was so acute that the frontier hung by a thread; as Ford wrote Magruder: "The withdrawal would result in an immediate abandonment of that part of the frontier."
Only units from Karnes and Guadalupe counties, to the southeast below San Antonio, were taken, along with Captain Tom Cater's company of men from Burnet, Williamson, and Travis counties. Walthersdorff's battalion and Dorbant's and Heermann's companies were left on the Balcones Scarp. Major Albert Walthersdorff himself, however, was detached to San Antonio to act as Ford's "tactician." The German officer was a huge man, who could lift a recruit and shake him with one hand.
Three things made west Texans pour into San Antonio. The seizure of Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley by the Federal XIII Army Corps under Major General Dana had aroused the state. When the 19th Iowa unfurled its colors on Brazos Island and splashed across the shallow arm to Texas soil, the fear of invasion, with all the horrors Northern armies were bringing to the South, became acute.
Colonel James Duff's 33rd Texas Cavalry fell back from Brownsville. Some of Duff's state troops, including one whole company, deserted into Mexico. The "butcher of Fredericksburg" moved back across the Nueces. Colonel Santos Benavides, a prominent Laredoan who had declared for the South, defended above Rio Grande City with a small force. Generals H. P. Bee and James E. Slaughter, the ranking Confederate officers in south Texas, had neither forces nor inclination to engage the battle-hardened Iowa and Illinois regiments. Meanwhile, Union cavalry—Colonel E. J. Davis's 1st Texas—rode reconnaissances in force. They pushed Benavides back upon Laredo, and galloped a hundred miles north, raiding the King ranch headquarters and running off beef cattle. The appearance of these bluebellies in a region remote from the war caused understandable alarm across the underpopulated frontier.
But two other factors ignited the spirit of resistance. Davis's force was composed of Mexicans and traitors to the state, as Unionists were called. The U.S. XIII Army Corps also contained two Negro regiments. Thus Ford cannily called for volunteers to fight "mongrel abolitionists and perfidious renegades." Resentful Texans poured in. Dozens of European immigrants, remote in region and feeling from the Southern heart of Anglo-Texas, arrived. Young boys stole horses and guns and made for San Antonio. Confederate cavalry had to provide its own horses; Ford could only supply his men with corn. He got this, at times rather brutally, by sequestration if farmers refused his copious supplies of paper money.
One of Ford's officers, scandalized, said, "Fifty-seven children have joined my battalion." Ford merely stated he would enlist any man he could without violating "law and propriety." His view of both was broad. He set the lower age of enlistment at fifteen, but did not question good-sized youngsters about their age. In some thirty days, the Cavalry of the West recruited 1,300 boys and men.
Major Walthersdorff faced a brigade of baldheads and troopers who had not learned to shave. He did the best he could.
Ford asked for two field guns; these were never sent. He needed tether-ropes, but had no hard money to buy any. His official plan of supply was horrifyingly complicated: baled cotton was being stored along his route to the Nueces; he was to pick it up and haul it to the Rio Grande. The cotton would then be sold for cash, and cash would buy the Cavalry of the West whatever it might need in Mexico.
On the march to the river, Ford was also to assimilate and take command of certain Confederate forces in the region—Major Matt Nolan's riders at Corpus Christi, Ware's battalion at San Patricio, Giddings's battalion at Eagle Pass, and Benavides's regiment at Laredo. The titles of these units should not be misconstrued—some "battalions" consisted of two tiny companies, and companies rarely exceeded the strength of a modern platoon. A full company of horse was 50 men.
If Ford gathered in every unit, he could muster perhaps 1,800 men. Against this force, the new commander at Brownsville, General J. F. Herron, deployed some 6,479, supported by twelve field pieces and sixteen heavy guns.
Ford was delayed at San Antonio until mid-March. He explained his problems in a letter to an officer of Magruder's staff: "I regret not having been able to take the field. . . . I had serious obstacles to surmount. Exhausted resources, a population almost drained of men subject to military duty, oppositions from rivalry, and the nameless disagreeable retardations incident to an undertaking of this character . . ." The oppositions came from one Lieutenant Colonel S. B. Baird, commanding the remnants of the 4th Arizona Cavalry, which despite its name was made up of Texans. The Arizona outfit was assigned to Ford's command. Baird held a regular commission in the Confederate army, and refused to serve under a rankless officer. Magruder supported Ford, and Baird was transferred. Command of the unit fell to
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Showalter, who, "when not under the influence of liquor was as chivalrous a man as ever drew a sword." Dan Showalter agreed to obey Rip Ford.
The Colonel did assemble a remarkable staff. Captain C. H. Merritt was quartermaster; he was a cotton man released by the Cotton Bureau. Captain W. G. M. Samuels rode down from north Texas to be ordnance officer—if and when the Cavalry of the West got ordnance. Major Walthersdorff was tactical officer. Major Felix Blücher, grandnephew of the Prussian co-victor at Waterloo, was made chief of staff. Blücher was a skilled surveyor and geographer and knew Texas south of the Nueces as only a German geographer could. He had command of five languages and no command of an alcohol problem. He was later cashiered.