"A Chicken for Breakfast at the Expense of Mr. Rebel": The Journal of Sergeant Nelson Howard, Company E, 13th Maine Infantry on the Texas Coast, 1863–1864

Portrait of Nelson Howard from the Lewiston, Maine, city hall. Photo courtesy of Rich Eastman.

Wading through heavy surf just off the Texas Gulf Coast at sunset on November 16, 1863, men from the 13th Maine Infantry went ashore on Mustang Island. The men were part of a Union army of some 6,998 soldiers who had come from New Orleans in a storm two weeks earlier, landed on Brazos Island, and marched on Brownsville. At ten o'clock on the morning of November 6, as a token Confederate force fled north for the Nueces River, the 94th Illinois Volunteers led the way into the streets of the border town, followed five hours later by a battery of Missouri artillery and the 13th Maine. Reporting his arrival in Texas, the commander of the Department of the Gulf, Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, wrote a very simple message to President Abraham Lincoln: "The flag of the Union floats over Texas today."¹

Not long before, Union attempts to occupy Texas had met disaster at Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863, in which 350 Federals were killed or captured. The entire Union expedition to reclaim the Lone Star State was forced to withdraw. A Union army that had been attempting to push up the Red River and occupy East Texas under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks had also been turned back in the Bayou Teche region of Louisiana. After these setbacks, General Banks set the occupation of the Rio Grande and the Texas Coastal Bend as the new objective.²

In the weeks and months to come, the Union army in Texas occupied Rio Grande City and sent raiding expeditions as far upriver as Laredo. At the same time, Union guerrillas struck deep into the mesquite wilderness of the Nueces Strip and as far north as the King Ranch on Santa Gertrudis Creek.³ The Union Rio Grande Expedition under the command of Gen. Napoleon J. T. Dana came to Texas to occupy the border and cut the lucrative Confederate cotton trade with Mexico and strangle Texas economically. While hoping to link up with Gen. James H. Carleton's California Column in the Texas Trans-Pecos, they would also wave the Stars and Stripes at the French imperialists in Mexico, whom Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward viewed as violating the principles of the Monroe Doctrine.⁴ Upon seeing French ships anchored at Bagdad on the Mexican side of the mouth of the Rio Grande, one Yankee in the Rio Grande Expedition angrily shook his fist in the air and proclaimed: "When Uncle Sam and his old woman get over their little family difficulty, you French rascals want to be right lively in getting out of that melon patch."⁵

At the same time, the presence of Federal troops in Texas could provide safety for German Texans who were being persecuted for their Unionists inclinations and resistance to the Confederate draft. Many destitute Texas Unionists found their way to the American consulate in Matamoros, where steamboat passage was arranged to New Orleans. Once in the Crescent City, several hundred joined the Union army and returned to Texas as part of the 1st Texas Union Cavalry. A Union war song entitled "Way down in Texas," was an everlasting refrain for the army in blue who came to the Lone Star State to win the war and save the Union:

Good News! Good news from Dixie land.From Dixie's land; from Dixie's land;Our flag is on the Rio GrandeAnd treason's going down.⁶

One of the Union soldiers who came to Texas and waded ashore on Mustang Island in that cold winter of 1863–64 was a twenty-four-year-old, five-feet-ten-inch, blue eyed, auburn-haired sergeant in Company E of the 13th Maine Infantry named Nelson Howard. Howard was born on April 29, 1838, to Seth...