Kirby Smithdom: The Last Confederate Country

After Union forces captured Vicksburg and Port Hudson in July of eighteen sixty-three, cutting the Confederacy along the Mississippi River, General Edmund Kirby Smith found himself in command of something he had not expected to run: an almost entirely self-contained nation. His Trans-Mississippi Department stretched from Arkansas to the Rio Grande, from the Indian Territory to the Louisiana coast, covering more territory than many independent countries. But it was cut off from Richmond.

Supplies could not cross the river. Orders sometimes could, but they arrived weeks late and bore no connection to conditions on the ground. Shreveport was Smith's headquarters.

From an office in this city he reorganized his military districts, raised manpower by his own methods, developed his own finances, and negotiated directly with representatives of France and Britain. People in the Confederate east called his domain, with a mixture of contempt and grudging admiration, Kirby Smithdom. He was, in the contemporary phrase, a virtual military dictator, running a war that the government nominally directing it could not see.

Appomattox came on April ninth, eighteen sixty-five. Smith held out until May twenty-sixth, when he negotiated the surrender of his department. He signed the formal terms at Galveston, Texas on June second.

His was the last full Confederate field force to lay down arms. By that point the Confederacy had been over for weeks in every other theater. What remained was the western empire his headquarters had created, dissolved finally by a signature in a Texas port city, more than six weeks after Lee had signed at the courthouse in Virginia.