Kirby Smith

General Edmund Kirby Smith (May 16, 1824March 28, 1893) was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded the Trans-Mississippi Department (comprising Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, western Louisiana, Arizona Territory and the Indian Territory) from 1863 to 1865. Prior to the American Civil War, Smith served as an officer of the United States Army.

Smith was wounded at First Bull Run and distinguished himself during the Heartland Offensive, the Confederacy's unsuccessful attempt to capture Kentucky in 1862. He was appointed as commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department in January 1863. The area included most actions east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. In 1863, Smith dispatched troops in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the Siege of Vicksburg.

After Vicksburg was captured by the Union in July, the Trans-Mississippi Department was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, and became virtually an independent nation, nicknamed "Kirby Smithdom". In the Red River Campaign of Spring 1864, he commanded victorious Confederate troops under Major-General Dick Taylor, who defeated a combined Union army/navy assault under Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks.

On June 2, 1865, Smith surrendered his army at Galveston, Texas, the last general with a major field force. He quickly escaped to Mexico and then to Cuba to avoid arrest for treason. His wife negotiated his return during the period when the federal government offered amnesty to those who would take an oath of loyalty. After the war, Smith worked in the telegraph and railway industries. He also served as a professor of mathematics at the University of the South in Tennessee. He botanized plant specimens and bequeathed his collection to the University of Florida.

Early life and education

Edmund Kirby Smith was born in 1824 in St. Augustine, Florida, as the youngest child of Joseph Lee, an attorney, and Frances ( Kirby) Smith. Both his parents were natives of Litchfield, Connecticut, where their older children were born. The family moved to Florida in 1821, as the senior Smith was appointed as a Superior Court judge in the new Florida Territory, acquired by the U.S. from Spain. Older siblings included Ephraim, born in 1807; and sisters Frances, born in 1809,. and Josephine, who died in 1835, likely of tuberculosis. He was interested in botany and nature, but in 1836, Smith's parents sent their second son to a military boarding school in Virginia, and strongly encouraged a military career. He later enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

In 1837, his sister Frances married Lucien Bonaparte Webster, a West Point graduate from Vermont and career Army artillery officer, whom she met when he was stationed at Fort Marion in St. Augustine. His commanding officer at the fort was the young Smiths' uncle. Webster later served in the Mexican–American War and died of yellow fever in 1853, when stationed on the Texas frontier at Fort Brown.

On July 1, 1841, Smith entered West Point and graduated four years later in 1845, ranking 25th out of 41 cadets. While there he was nicknamed "Seminole", after the Seminole people of Florida who had successfully resisted removal by the United States. He was commissioned as a brevet second lieutenant in the 5th U.S. Infantry on July 1, 1845. Smith was promoted to second lieutenant on August 22, 1846, now serving in the 7th U.S. Infantry.

Early military career

In the Mexican–American War, Smith served under General Zachary Taylor at the Battle of Palo Alto and the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. He served under General Winfield Scott later, and received brevet promotions to first lieutenant for Cerro Gordo and to captain for Contreras and Churubusco. His older brother, Ephraim Kirby Smith (1807–1847), who graduated from West Point in 1826 and was a captain in the regular army, served with him in the 5th U.S. Infantry in the campaigns with both Taylor and Scott. Ephraim died in 1847 from wounds suffered at the Battle of Molino del Rey.

After that war, Smith served as a captain (from 1855) in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, primarily in Texas. (From that year on through the war, Smith was accompanied by the youth Alexander Darnes, then 15, a mixed-race slave owned by his family, who served as his valet until emancipation and who may have been his half-brother.) "Alexander Darnes and Kirby Smith Share Rare History"
, Jacksonville Historical Society.

Smith also taught at West Point after the war. He collected and studied materials as a botanist; like many other military officers, he was also a scientist. He donated to the Smithsonian Institution some of his collection and reports from his time at West Point.Julie B. Maglio, "Sculpture of Confederate General to be removed from Statuary Hall in D.C."
''Hernando Sun'', May 31, 2016. Smith continued his botanical studies as an avocation for the remainder of his life. He is credited with collecting and describing several species of plants native to Tennessee and Florida. Smith was assigned to teaching mathematics at West Point, from 1849 to 1852. According to his letters to his mother, he was happy with this environment.

Returning to troop-leading assignments, Smith served in the Southwest. On May 13, 1859, he was wounded in his thigh while fighting Comanche in the Nescutunga Valley of Kansas. also known as the Battle of Crooked Creek (Kansas). When Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, Smith, promoted to major on January 31, 1861, refused to surrender his command at Camp Colorado in what is now Coleman, to the Texas State Troops under Colonel Benjamin McCulloch; he expressed his willingness to fight to hold it. On April 6, he resigned his commission in the United States Army to join the Confederacy.

American Civil War

On March 16, 1861, Smith entered the Confederate States Army as a major in the regular artillery; that day he was transferred to the regular cavalry with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After serving briefly as Brigadier-General Joseph E. Johnston's assistant adjutant general in the Shenandoah Valley, Smith was promoted to brigadier-general on June 17, 1861. He was given command of a brigade in the Army of the Shenandoah, which he led at the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21. Wounded severely in the neck and shoulder, he recuperated while commanding the Department of Middle and East Florida. He returned to duty on October 11th as a major-general and division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Army of Tennessee

In February 1862, Smith was sent west to command the eastern division of the Army of Mississippi (often referred to prematurely as the Army of Tennessee). Cooperating with General Braxton Bragg in the invasion of Kentucky, he scored a victory at the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky on August 30, 1862, but did not link up with Bragg's army until after the Battle of Perryville. On October 9, he was promoted to the newly created grade of lieutenant-general, commanding the 3d Corps, Army of Tennessee. Smith received the Confederate " Thanks of Congress" on February 17, 1864, for his actions at Richmond.

Trans-Mississippi Department

On January 14, 1863, Smith was transferred to command the Trans-Mississippi Department (comprising Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, western Louisiana, Arizona Territory and the Indian Territory) and he remained west of the Mississippi River for the balance of the war, based part of this time in Shreveport, Louisiana. As forces under Union Major-General Ulysses S. Grant tightened their grip on the river, Smith attempted to intervene. However, his department never had more than 30,000 men stationed over an immense area and he was not able to concentrate forces adequately to challenge Grant nor the Union Navy on the river.

Following the Union capture of the remaining strongholds at Vicksburg and Port Hudson and their closing of the Mississippi to the enemy, Smith was virtually cut off from the Confederate capital at Richmond. He had to command a nearly independent area of the Confederacy, with all of the inherent administrative problems. The area became known in the Confederacy as "Kirby Smithdom". He was thought of as a virtual military dictator, and negotiated directly with foreign countries.

In the spring of 1864, General Taylor, directly under Smith's command, soundly defeated General Banks at the Battle of Mansfield in the Red River Campaign on April 8, 1864. After the Battle of Pleasant Hill on April 9, Smith joined Taylor and dispatched half of Taylor's army, Walker's Greyhounds, under the command of Major-General John George Walker, northward to defeat Union Major-General Frederick Steele's incursion into Arkansas. This decision, strongly opposed by Taylor, caused great enmity between the two men.

With the pressure relieved to the north, Smith attempted to send reinforcements east of the Mississippi. But, as in the case of his earlier attempts to relieve Vicksburg, it proved impossible due to Union naval control of the river. Instead he dispatched Major-General Sterling Price, with all available cavalry, on an unsuccessful invasion of Missouri. Thereafter he conducted the war west of the river principally through small raids and guerrilla activity.

By now a general (as of February 19, 1864, one of seven generals in the Confederate Army), Smith negotiated the surrender of his department on May 26, 1865. While Brigadier General Stand Watie and the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles regiment did not surrender until 23 June 1865, Smith was the last full general to do so and signed the terms of surrender in Galveston, Texas, on June 2, nearly 8 weeks after Robert E. Lee's surrender. He immediately left the country for Mexico and then to Cuba, to escape potential prosecution for treason. In August that year, General Beauregard's house near New Orleans