Col. John C. Moore, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 9.2, Missouri
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[200] agreements they made and the resolutions they adopted were without practical effect. There were meetings of the high military officers who ought to have understood the situation—which was fight or surrender—and they were more undecided and divided in opinion than those of the civil officers.

Shelby at last left his division at Marshall and went to Shreveport. There he got a meeting of the military men —Churchill, Hawthorn, Preston, Flournoy and others—at which it was agreed and counselled that the army should be concentrated on the Brazos and should fight step by step to the Rio Grande, thereby giving the States east of the Mississippi opportunity to act, and if the worse came to the worst the army could make terms with one government or the other in Mexico. This was Shelby's proposition.

But before this time General Smith had been engaged in a correspondence with Gen. John Pope of the Federal army on the subject of a surrender. General Pope wrote from St. Louis on the 19th of April to General Smith, informing him of the surrender of General Lee and the probable surrender of General Johnston, and offering him the same terms that had been granted General Lee if he and his army chose to lay down their arms. This summons he sent through his chief-of-staff, Col. John J. Sprague. General Smith replied, May 9th, declining to surrender, and stating that he had 50,000 effective soldiers under his command. Ten days later he informed Colonel Sprague that his army had disbanded itself. ‘From one extremity of the department to the other,’ he said, ‘the troops, except Shelby's heroic division of Missouri cavalry, have dissolved all military organization and returned to their homes.’ And in a postscript he said, referring to the infantry: ‘Since writing the above I have information that the Missouri and a portion of the Arkansas troops still retain their organization.’ In fact,