The Final Fury: Palmito Ranch, the Last Battle of the Civil War

"The Final Fury" tells the story of the American Civil War's final battlefield, a forgotten one near Brownsville, Texas, though author Phillip Thomas Tucker doesn't do much to lift it out of its obscurity. In fact, you might put down "The Final Fury" feeling like you knew less than when you picked it up.

Wars usually end messily, and the American Civil War was no exception. There was no formal, final surrender; Lee's color-striking at Appomattox Court House only ended the war for one Confederate fighting force. While the government moved out of Richmond, other Rebel forces remained, dormant but unbowed, including Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi force which was the last but one to give up. Before that happened, there was minor fighting with Union troops, culminating at Palmito Ranch on the Rio Grande in Texas.

A Union colonel trying to gain some 11th-hour glory led a combined force of Indiana and free black infantry as well as "Yankee Texas" cavalry to Brownsville, tangling at Palmito Ranch with a similarly irregular Confederate force led by John Ford, not the director, but a similarly rough-hewn fellow upon whom Tucker showers much approbation.

The battle was more of an engagement, and a one-sided rout at that. Unfortunately, Tucker feels the need to pad this thing out well past the breaking point. With little in the way of first-hand accounts to draw from, Tucker offers much supposition and endless repetition of facts that weren't that key the first dozen times he mentioned them. He varies the casualty count on both sides with amnesiac imprecision, describing the mortal wounding of a Confederate soldier on one page, then suggesting a few pages later that no Rebels were killed at all. He trots out tortured "ironies," such as the battle ended with a shot being fired eastward just as happened at Fort Sumter, the first battle, and that both were Confederate victories.

But unlike Sumter, Palmito Ranch didn't change much of anything, and the central problem for Tucker may be the insignificance of his story. Even Bruce Catton would have had his hands full trying to make a silk purse of this. But Tucker, though his intentions seem good, has little to say and a frightfully bad way of saying it.

Toward the end of the book, Tucker, whose Rebel sympathies are obvious though balanced, suggests the possibility that some Union troops, in particular the Texas riders, were shot after surrendering to their brother Texans. That might have made a more interesting basis for a book than the engagement itself, but instead the idea is merely raised with the vague comment people still find human remains around the battle site. It's the one time one wishes Palmito Ranch had the services of a better historian.

Reviewing the very last battle of the Civil War has merit, if only for historical documentation. This author has covered what was essentially an extended skirmish that occurred at an obscure location on the Rio Grande between Brownsville, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. The battle occurred six weeks after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Ironies abound and the author touches on them in the narrative. There are innumerable footnotes, indicating the author attempted original research and accuracy. The maps were helpful in orienting the reader. Some photographs of soldiers appear in the middle but strangely only a few were mentioned in the narrative, leaving the reader to wonder why the others were included. Unfortunately, my advice is avoid this book.

Where was the editor? Every other paragraph is repetitive, as if the author was trying to stretch a few pages to eke out his 160 page book. It is extremely trying and irritating to read. The book has numerous typographical errors, misspells and the like. Annoyingly, a concise well constructed sentence or paragraph will be immediately followed by a jarring construction that makes you wonder if the author was assisted by a grade school ghost writer.

Probably the story doesn't have enough bulk to be told in any forum larger than an essay. This last event of the Civil War is documented for posterity but not very attractively.

Don't waste your money. This poorly written account of an insignificant affair is replete with inaccuracies (it's Citronelle, not Citronville) and difficult to read due to the author's repetitive writing style. The author's main assertion, that this battle was somehow significant, holds as little water as the Laguna Madre. This unfortunate affair, which did nothing more than add a few more figures to the butcher's bill for the war, precipitated no great events and resolved nothing, coming six weeks after the surrender at Appomattox. The author's rampant pro-Confederatism buries any pretensions of an unbiased account and makes the work even more distasteful. Perhaps the only significance of this affair was to give partial rise to the "myth of the lost cause," evidenced by the creation and publication of such a biased account two centuries later.