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A City Rolling In Wealth

Waters of Discord The Union Blockade of Texas during the Civil War. Much of the fighting in Texas during the Civil War took place in the state's coastal counties and on the adjoining Gulf of Mexico waters, and nearly all of these engagements were involved with the Union blockade of the Texas coast. This book examines all major blockade-related land and sea engagements in and near Texas, and also looks at the political intrigue and spying activity with the French in Mexico.

On 14 April 1861, US President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation blockading the ports of the Confederacy. The purpose of his action was twofold — to cut off armaments, supplies and necessities, such as food, to the Confederacy and to strangle its exports, primarily its vast cotton crop. One estimate of the efficacy of the Union blockade, which in full fruition utilized 500 ships, was a reduction of cotton exports during the war of 95 percent. In the three years before the war, the South had shipped 10 million bales, versus 500,000 during it.

The blockade was not only an issue for the South. It was also critical to European nations where there was a cotton shortage. There, textile mills had come to rely upon the Southern crop. Foremost among these nations was England, so much so that some English naval officers were allowed to go on leave in order to captain blockade runners into Confederate ports. However, these ships by their nature were light and fast, and carried less cargo than regular merchant ships. As a result, though they initially often got through, their net effect on imports and exports was minimal. Something else had to be done. Of all the Confederate states, only Texas offered a geographical advantage for evading the blockade, as it shared a border with Mexico. When the flow of foreign trade was reduced to a trickle, efforts to exploit the Mexican connection were inevitable.

The principal city in south Texas during the Civil War was Brownsville, which lies at the southern tip of the state, directly across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico, a trading center of long standing. Both are inland cities connected to the Gulf of Mexico by the Rio Grande, which, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the Mexican War, was declared an international waterway open to both countries. Blockading the 189 harbors of the Confederacy could only be accomplished over time, and, initially, the blockade had no effect on Brownsville. However, on 25 February 1862, when the Union sloop of war, Portsmouth, appeared at the mouth of the river, the impact of the blockade of the Rio Grande was realized. Within a few days, the Portsmouth had captured two blockade runners. An emergency meeting of key Southern leaders was held in Brownsville.

At the suggestion of Colonel Rip Ford, Mifflin Kennedy and Richard King, whose company dominated the Rio Grande commercial traffic, placed their ships under the Mexican flag to gain neutral status for them. Henceforth, virtually all cotton exports and imports of war materials along the Rio Grande went through Mexico or under the Mexican flag. Located 25 miles northeast of Brownsville was a tiny Mexican coastal village, peculiarly named Bagdad, sometimes called Boca del Rio or "Mouth of the River". It soon became critical to the Southern cotton trade.

An estimate of the population of Bagdad in 1850, made by William Neale, who had established stagecoach service between Matamoros and Bagdad, was "300 souls", including about 15 foreigners. At this time, ships didn't land regularly at Bagdad. Neale's unprofitable stage line provided the only transportation for passengers from there to Matamoros.

Although Bagdad's location, in close proximity to Texas, was ideal as a potential export and import point for the South, its natural circumstances were otherwise much less desirable. For example, ships that drew more than three or four feet of water could not land there, so they had to anchor several miles offshore. Passengers and cargo could only be transported ashore by smaller boats. Even then, seas were sometimes too rough for the vessels to make it. The only other commercial activity in Bagdad at the time was fishing. By 1862, Bagdad's peaceful sleep was about to be interrupted.

According to Neale, within less than three months in 1862, Bagdad "loomed up as if by magic into a thriving town". This boom period for Bagdad and the border was later nostalgically referred to by the locals as El Tiempo de los Algodones, "the Time of the Cotton". The Confederacy's desperate need to export it's cotton had brought unexpected prosperity to Bagdad and the border.

Between 1862 and 1865, the population of Bagdad exploded, jumping from 300 to 15,000. An observer's account from September 1862 reported 20 ships lying offshore. As various European nations became aware of its new role in the cotton trade, they hastily deployed their merchant fleets. Vessels of various registries — German, Danish, Dutch, French, English, Spanish and even American, all made their way to Bagdad. Ironically, some Southern cotton ended up being sold to the North, where, among other purposes, it was used to outfit Union soldiers.

In March 1863, one observer counted 92 ships anchored at Bagdad. By late 1864 and early 1865, as many as 200 to 300 ships were there on any given day. During this period, the price of cotton at Matamoros, from where it went by boat or cart to Bagdad, soared with the demand reflected by the increased number of ships. The price went from $0.16 a pound in August 1862 to as high as $1.25 in 1865.

In his memoir, William Neale wrote that Bagdad became a "city rolling in wealth" where capital "came pouring into the boiling pot like hail falling from heaven". Everywhere there was construction, and the daylight hours were filled with the sound of hammering and sawing. Neale noted that "upward of two hundred of the best kind of carpenters" came to Bagdad and found work. Skilled or unskilled, there was work for everyone. Even a man with a small boat capable of hauling only one bale of cotton could make a nice daily wage transporting a few bales to one of the waiting ships.

Prices in Bagdad rose so fast that, within one week, a structure that had been built for $2,100 sold for $12,000, and resold for $18,000. Bagdad had become a wartime boomtown, and Neale's stage line, with 10 stages a day between it and Matamoros, became a profitable enterprise.

Some visitors during the war recorded observations about the town. At the beginning of 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle of the British Coldstream Guards, en route to duty as a military observer with the South, reported seeing bales of cotton waiting for transport, stretching out for "an immense distance". Stopping at Bagdad in March 1865, Union General Lew Wallace, who later wrote Ben Hur, saw at least 100 ships of various types lying off Bagdad. He commented, "Neither the port of New Orleans nor that of Baltimore can present to-day such a promise of commercial activity."

A French Catholic priest, P.F. Parisot, observed that so many languages could be heard in the town that "Bagdad was a veritable Babel, a Babylon, a whirlpool of business, pleasure and sin". He also pronounced it "the Gomorrah of the Rio Grande". A writer for the New York Herald thought even less of the "dirty filthy place" with its "streets covered with slime and mud puddles". He found the town populated by, in addition to various adventurers and desperadoes, "the vile of both sexes".

An Austrian lieutenant in the service of Maximilian, the puppet Emperor of Mexico, said that everything in town was built of wood, completely practical and without any sense of permanence. Of course, there was no consideration whatsoever given to health and cleanliness. Further, he wrote, when the wind blew from the north, it forced water into the low lying streets, which became canals and "nowhere are so many rats to be found".

In the way of boomtown entertainment, Bagdad offered saloons, billiard halls, gambling houses and brothels. As for basic, everyday requirements, it had hotels, which some called "first class", boarding houses, well- stocked stores and many restaurants. Not completely neglected were spiritual needs, addressed by the existence of one small church. All in all, Bagdad was a place, according to William Watson, master of the English ship Rob Roy, where "everyone competed to grab what he could... to make money out of the crisis".

In Texas, as well as elsewhere, railroad lines were sparse, so the cotton had to be hauled hundreds of miles by wagon from Arkansas, Louisiana and as far away as Missouri. They averaged eight to 10 miles a day, except for a particularly difficult stretch in south Texas, a vast sand belt known as "the Desert of the Dead", where they made only four or five.

There were two main routes that led to Bagdad, one from the north and one from the east. Both of the great cotton routes took the wagons to the legendary King Ranch in south Texas, owned by Richard King, "an official receiving, shipping and storage point". The eastern route originated near the railroad termination on the lower Colorado River, west of Houston. The other, from central Texas, went south to San Antonio and on to the ranch. A variant of the second route took the wagons from San Antonio southwest to the Mexican border towns of Piedras Negras and Nuevo Laredo, both on the banks of the Rio Grande.

It has been said that Richard King, founder of the King Ranch, did not go to war, but rather it came to him on the old Santa Gertrudis Spanish land grant ranch he had bought in 1856. Though renowned as a Texas rancher, King was actually born in New York City, and he had been a steamboat captain in Florida, Alabama and on the Rio Grande in Texas. During the Mexican War, he served as the captain of a US Navy vessel, transporting soldiers and supplies.

Throughout Los Algodones, King was a principal partner in M. Kennedy and Company, a firm that secured a significant cotton- trading monopoly from the Confederacy along the border. Apart from piloting steamboats on the river, King had also designed them for maximum performance in the sharp turns and swift currents of the Rio Grande.

After the cotton haulers camped overnight near ranch headquarters on the Santa Gertrudis and purchased supplies — including horses, mules and beef — from the ranch commissary, they made their way toward the river, still well over 100 miles distant. From the watchtower near his house, King observed them as the dust rose from their wagons on their relentless southward trek toward Bagdad. For years afterward, shreds of cotton fiber could be seen in the brush along the trail. With his enormous cotton profits from the war, King went on to expand his famous ranch. Already possessing about 70,000 acres before the war, by his death he had extended his holdings to over 600,000 acres.

Just as the export of cotton in the Civil War had brought prosperity to Bagdad, the end of the War took it away. William Neale noted that, with peace established between the states in 1865, cotton, "the only medium toward making a good business", soon began to ship directly to Europe from the United States. Watching the merchants who occupied the prosperous boomtown depart, he soon shut down his stage line. As suddenly as it had grown, Bagdad declined.

On 7 October 1867, a great hurricane hit the area that Neale said "swept Bagdad off the map". Father Parisot did not hesitate to declare that the town had been laid low by the wrath of God. Today, day-trippers from Matamoros and tourists from northeastern Mexico go to the place where Bagdad once stood, to fish and enjoy the beach. Long forgotten is the boomtown that once flourished there during the War Between the States and Los Algodones.

Ron Hunka. Bagdad, Mexico: Civil War Boomtown. History Magazine. February/March 2009.

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