The Crossing: Brownsville's Origins

Before there was a Brownsville there was a crossing. Spanish ranchers crossed the Rio Grande here for generations, grazing cattle on both banks, building the land grant economy that preceded any national boundary. When the Texas Republic won independence from Mexico in eighteen thirty-six, the Republic's claim extended to the Rio Grande, but it was a claim on paper: the river banks remained Mexican in custom, culture, and population.

The war of eighteen forty-six settled the boundary question by force. American soldiers built a fort on the north bank, fought two battles within five miles of the crossing, and established a military presence that Charles Stillman, always alert to opportunity, turned into a town. The officers who served with Taylor's army and at Fort Texas in those first weeks of the Mexican-American War included a remarkable collection of future Civil War generals.

Ulysses Grant was a lieutenant quartermaster with Taylor's army. Braxton Bragg commanded an artillery battery. James Longstreet was there, as was George Meade and Edmund Kirby Smith.

The war that would split the nation was fifteen years away. They were, in the spring of eighteen forty-six, all on the same side, aiming the same guns across the Rio Grande at the same enemy. Grant later wrote in his memoirs that he considered the Mexican-American War unjust, a conflict engineered by southern slaveholders to acquire territory for slavery's expansion.

He fought it anyway, and the experience prepared him technically for everything that followed. Brownsville was built at a crossing where very large forces collided. The crossing is still there.

Most of the forces are still colliding.