This text is part of:
[154] of Washington, they no longer recognized the capitulation of San Antonio, and that all the Federal troops which happened to be on their territory must be considered as prisoners of war. Van Dorn was charged with the execution of this order, which was a violation of a sacred pledge. Sibley was waiting at Indianola to embark on the Star of the West, the same transport-ship which, a short time before, had vainly attempted to revictual Fort Sumter. Being ignorant of the fate of that vessel, which had been seized in the port of Galveston, he had already got into the boats that were to take him and his soldiers on board, outside the bay of Matagorda, when instead of the Star of the West he saw several Confederate steamers loaded with troops under the command of Van Dorn. He was obliged to disembark; and being without means of defence, he had to submit to the conditions imposed upon him. After being kept for some time prisoners, the Federals were released on parole until they could be exchanged. Waite and the officers who were with him in San Antonio experienced the same fate. There was still left a detachment of the Eighth Regulars, consisting of about three hundred men, who were slowly returning from the posts situated in the neighborhood of El Paso del Norte; on reaching Central Texas, they found the insurgents in possession of all the depots upon which they were to subsist; and being soon surrounded by Van Dorn, who had come to meet them with fifteen hundred men, they were obliged to lay down their arms at San Lucas Springs, on the 9th of May. In making his preparations, while Secretary of War, for the surrender of the Federal army stationed in the South-west of the Union into the hands of his accomplices, General Floyd had not confined his operations to Texas, where we have seen the treason of Twiggs and Van Dorn fully successful. He had sent Colonel Loring to Santa Fe to take command of the regular forces, numbering twelve hundred men, stationed in New Mexico, with Colonel Crittenden as second in command; these two officers were entirely devoted to the cause of the South, and we shall soon find them again with Floyd at the head of Confederate armies. The news of the breaking out of the civil war only reached that distant
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.