Synopsis
Acclaimed historian Anthony Arthur tells one of the most remarkable but surprisingly unknown stories of the post–Civil War era in full for the first time. Here is the unforgettable account of how a famous Confederate general forged a defiant new life out of crushing defeat, and how he finally achieved forgiveness and respect in his own reunited land.
General Jo Shelby had been a daring and ruthless cavalry commander, renowned and notorious for his slashing forays behind Union lines. After Appomattox, Shelby, declaring that he would never surrender, headed for Mexico. With three hundred men, some from his fighting “Iron Brigade” regiment, others adventurers, fortune hunters, and deserters, the man Arthur refers to as “the last holdout of the Confederacy” made the treacherous twelve-hundred-mile trip.
In thrilling and vivid detail, General Jo Shelby’s March describes the dusty and dangerous trek through a lawless Texas swarming with desperadoes, into a Mexico teeming with Juárez’s rebels and marauding Apaches. After near fratricide among his fraying band of brothers, Shelby arrived to present a quixotic proposal to Emperor Maximilian: He and his fellow Americans would take over the Mexican army and, after being reinforced by forty thousand more Confederate soldiers, the government itself. Though a dramatic, doomed, and brave endeavor, Shelby’s actions changed both himself and American history forever.
Anthony Arthur then reveals the astonishing end of Shelby’s career: his return to America and his renouncing of slavery, his nomination by President Grover Cleveland to become U.S. marshal for western Missouri, his eventual fame as a model of nineteenth-century progressivism.
General Jo Shelby’s March is a riveting book about a uniquely American man, both brave and brutal, a hero and a hothead, whose life’s startling last chapter is a microcosm of the aftermath of our most divisive war.
Publishers Weekly
Die-hard Confederate cavaliers take the fight to Mexico in this boisterous post- Civil War adventure. Historian Arthur (Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair) sings the exploits of Shelby, a wily rebel cavalry commander who rejected the verdict of Appomattox and led his 300-man Iron Brigade into Mexico, then roiling with war between the French-backed emperor, Maximilian, and Benito Juarez's republican army. The Xenophonesque trek mired them in another lost cause. Battling Juarista soldiers and Apache bushwackers, they fought their way to Mexico City only to have Maximilian nervously spurn Shelby's offer to raise an army of 40,000 Americans; they then dispersed to various doomed pursuits, including schemes to bring Southern settlers to colonize Mexico. Heavily reliant on the colorful writings of Shelby's friend John Edwards, Arthur's narrative paints Shelby's band as the last paladins. They are forever protecting decent townsfolk against ruffians, fighting duels on points of honor, and making stands against hopeless odds; they even rescued a beautiful American woman from a bandit's clutches. (The author downplays clashing notes, like a Civil War incident in which Shelby's men massacred dozens of unarmed blacks.) Arthur's account is a bit shallow--and the Confederate romanticism a bit thick-- but it makes for a colorful picaresque. 8 pages of b&w photos; map. (Aug. 17)