The case study on FEMA’s website says the park was built in the late 1990s as part of a mitigation plan after flooding in the area. Suri says he’s not aware of when or why the Eagle Pass park was named after Shelby. marshal for the Western District of Missouri. And decades later, President Grover Cleveland appointed Shelby as U.S. The next year, President Andrew Johnson pardoned all Confederate soldiers. “He comes back to the US and declares himself a hero because he never bent his knee to Yankee power,” Suri says. By 1867, the year Maximilian was executed, Shelby and most of his followers had returned to the US. The group’s time in Mexico was short lived. Maximilian I, the French-installed emperor ruling Mexico at the time, rejected the group’s offer of military services, but provided them land for a colony of exiled Confederate soldiers that was known as La Carlota, after the emperor’s wife. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesĪ colony in Mexico was home to hundreds of exiled Confederate soldiersĮagle Pass may have become known as a graveyard for the Confederacy, but for Shelby and the troops who accompanied him into Mexico that day in 1865, their cause lived on. He was known for wearing a plumed hat and often praised for his prowess on the battlefield. “They just have no idea.”Īn illustration depicts Shelby in battle. Did he play football with the Eagles?’” Taylor says, referring to the local high school team. “I’ll ask people, ‘Do you know who Shelby is?’ They’ll say, ‘I never heard of him. ![]() One thing he is sure about: Most residents of Eagle Pass aren’t familiar with the history behind the man the park was named for. Taylor says he isn’t sure when exactly Shelby Park got its name, or who was behind the effort to name it. For years he was the curator at the city’s Fort Duncan Museum. Taylor, 67, grew up in Eagle Pass and takes pride in knowing and sharing the city’s history. … Nobody really thought about it,” Taylor told CNN. Reenactors would even travel to the border city to relive it. But the myth of that moment has endured, earning a nickname for Eagle Pass as the “grave of the Confederacy.” For years, a painting depicting the scene hung in the Eagle Pass City Hall. says rumors have swirled over the years that the flag was later retrieved from the waters. “He withdrew the black plume from his hat brim and laid it gently within the folds of the flag before it vanished beneath the muddy water,” Arthur wrote. As the group stood in the Rio Grande, they plunged the Confederate battle flag into the river rather than letting Union forces get their hands on it. In the prologue to his 2010 book “General Jo Shelby’s March,” the late historian Anthony Arthur painted a dramatic picture of Shelby and his troops leaving Eagle Pass and heading south. ![]() How a Texas border city became known as the ‘grave of the confederacy’ park or Cesar Chavez park, was an assertion of power, and the irony is that assertion has now become militarized in that space again,” he says. The naming of that park, rather than naming it Martin Luther King Jr. “What this is really about is about power for groups that have power and don’t want to give up power. The park’s name, Suri says, reveals more about the current dispute than any argument in the immigration debate. “The reason these exiles are important is they kind of (are used to) legitimize this discussion of secession…which is really sticking your middle finger up at the federal government and saying, ‘we’re going to do it our way, and you can’t make us do it differently.’” “I see those attitudes now as well,” says Suri, who holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. But there’s a clear resonance between this moment and Shelby’s rarely recalled chapter of American history, Suri says. Most people likely aren’t familiar with Shelby’s story. ![]() “What struck me about it is the irony of all this,” says historian Jeremi Suri, who wrote about Shelby and other Confederate exiles in his 2022 book, “Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy.” Joseph Orville Shelby was a Confederate general who famously fled to Mexico in 1865 rather than surrendering to Union forces.
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