Army of The Trans-Mississippi - The Army

The Army

The Army of the Trans-Mississippi was the major Confederate field army for the Department of the Trans-Mississippi during the American Civil War. The army originally numbered well over 50,000 troops, but less than 43,000 by the wars end. Major campaigns fought in this Department included Sibley's New Mexico campaign, Banks' Red River campaign, and Price's Missouri campaign, amongst others.

The Army of the Trans-Mississippi was the last major Confederate command to be surrendered. General E. Kirby Smith did so on May 26, 1865, although many of his troops had already "gone home."

It was in Trans-Mississippi that the post-war Battle of Palmito Ranch was fought, May 12–13, 1865. A victory for the Confederate forces, the battle was actually fought several days after the war had actually ended. Although the war in trans-Mississippi was officially over, the declaration of the end of hostilities could not yet be counted on. The last remaining Confederate land-combat force of the war, the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles (led by Cherokee Nation leader, and Confederate Brigadier-General, Stand Watie) surrendered on June 23, 1865.

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Famous quotes containing the word army:

    Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
    Václav Havel (b. 1936)

    Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)