The Texas Lancers

For the last fifty years or so I gave been a prolific reader of American Civil War history. In wargaming terms it is my first love and I wholeheartedly agree with Stew that this Civil War is the best Civil War. One of my favourite (and possibly one of the least known) campaigns is Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley's invasion of New Mexico in 1862. 

In this bizzare operation Sibley intended to not only take control of New Mexico by occupying Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but then to move up into Colorado and secure the gold and silver fields for the Confederacy. On top of that he then planned to march to California and secure the Pacific ports to enable the South to break the Union blockade. All this was to be achieved by with a single brigade of 2,500 men in four regiments. Like many other Confederate generals he believed that thousands of new recruits from the occupied region would flock to the Southern cause.

On the surface Sibley seems no different to hundreds of senior officers on either side in the Civil War. Born in Louisiana in 1816 he was 46 years old in 1862. A West Pointer he had seen service in the Second Seminole and Mexican Wars. While on duty in Texas in the 1850s he invented the Sibley Tent, a conical tent used by the US and British Armies. He saw service in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas years and against the Mormons in Utah. He was on duty in New Mexico when the Civil War broke out. But Sibley had a serious problem with the bottle, a problem that would incapacitate him for days at a time.

Sibley got his brigade to Fort Bliss (modern day El Paso) in early January and set off on his adventure in February. The first objective was Fort Craig that if taken would eliminate all Union resistance south of Albuquerque, but more importantly Sibley was dependent on captured supplies to keep his troops and animals fed and the fort held a huge volume of them. The Confederates appeared before the fort in mid-February. Sibley knew he could not carry the fort by assault and tried to entice the Federals out, but they were not about to play ball. Then, when his army needed him the most, Sibley went on a bender, handed command to Colonel Tom Green and retired to an ambulance.

Green decided to move east around the fort and force the Yankees to fight for their line of communications to the north. In a sober moment Sibley approved of the plan and on 21 February ordered Colonel Scurry to lead the way into Valverde and secure the fords across the Rio Grande. Scurry soon clashed with Federal troops sent north to intercept them. The Texans, armed with shotguns and pistols could not compete with their rifle armed enemy and took cover in an old dry riverbed. Both sides brought up more troops and around 4:00 PM Tom Green brought up the last of the Texans and with Sibley back in his ambulance suffering from his self-imposed illness, Green took command of the field.

Leading Green's column was Captain Lang's Company B 5th Texas that were armed with lances. Lang asked Scurry if the could charge against a unit of Federal militia that stood about 500 yards away. Scurry said no, but Lang continued to press him. Finally Scurry relented and Lang led 50 lancers forward against the Yankee militia at the gallop. But these were no raw militia, they were a company of hardened, well drilled Colorado miners and frontiersmen who just happened to be dressed in militia grey uniforms who fired two well disciplined volleys that killed or 20 lancers and killed or wounded every horse in the company. The charge faltered. The survivors returned to their lines and threw down their lances, burning them later that night. So ended the only charge by lance armed cavalry in the American Civil War.

When I stumbled across the above of the image of the charge on the cover of one of my books recently, I thought "why not!" So here is Captain Lang and his company mid-charge.