True Life: I’m a Confederate Colonist in Emperor Maximilian’s Court

In June 1865, Confederate General Joseph O. Shelby led the remnants of his once-vaunted Iron Brigade through Texas. At Eagle Point, legend holds that the men ritualistically sank their emblem in the Rio Grande and crossed the border into French-controlled Mexico. There, with the blessing of puppet-monarch Maximilian, they would establish a Confederate colony dubbed “Carlota.” The move drew the ire of the American government; in fact, it strained interaction between Maximilian’s regime and the United States so severely that American military forces nearly intervened. Even so, rather than complying with the wishes of Robert E. Lee—to make the process of surrender and social reintegration as seamless as possible—Shelby and company were determined not to formally relinquish their Confederate status and to return to antebellum social, economic, and cultural norms. They built homes, carved new plantations from the land, and recruited other southerners to join them. Perhaps most important of all, they set about trying to institute de facto wage-slavery in a nation where bondage de jure had been abolished.

At its core, this essay explores an experiment in Civil War citizenship and culture. It blueprints how a group of Confederate diehards attempted to remake the cultural place and social hierarchy of the idealized Old South in new geographic space. In other words, this essay documents how some Rebels refused to surrender to the armies or government of the United States in 1865; instead, they designed and tested an alternative ending to the Confederate experiment—one in which the edicts of Reconstruction did not apply, the symbols of southern and Confederate culture were refitted to suit Mexican territory, and through which the frequently overlooked “Civil War in the West” was actually both an American and international affair.