Acclaimed historian Anthony Arthur tells one of the most
remarkable but surprisingly unknown stories of the post–Civil War
era in full for the first time. Here is the unforgettable account
of how a famous Confederate general forged a defiant new life out
of crushing defeat, and how he finally achieved forgiveness and
respect in his own reunited land.
General Jo Shelby had been a daring and ruthless cavalry
commander, renowned and notorious for his slashing forays behind
Union lines. After Appomattox, Shelby, declaring that he would
never surrender, headed for Mexico. With three hundred men, some
from his fighting “Iron Brigade” regiment, others adventurers,
fortune hunters, and deserters, the man Arthur refers to as “the
last holdout of the Confederacy” made the treacherous
twelve-hundred-mile trip.
In thrilling and vivid detail, General Jo Shelby’s March
describes the dusty and dangerous trek through a lawless Texas
swarming with desperadoes, into a Mexico teeming with Juárez’s
rebels and marauding Apaches. After near fratricide among his
fraying band of brothers, Shelby arrived to present a quixotic
proposal to Emperor Maximilian: He and his fellow Americans would
take over the Mexican army and, after being reinforced by forty
thousand more Confederate soldiers, the government itself. Though a
dramatic, doomed, and brave endeavor, Shelby’s actions changed both
himself and American history forever.
Anthony Arthur then reveals the astonishing end of Shelby’s
career: his return to America and his renouncing of slavery, his
nomination by President Grover Cleveland to become U.S. marshal for
western Missouri, his eventual fame as a model of
nineteenth-century progressivism.
General Jo Shelby’s March is a riveting book about a uniquely
American man, both brave and brutal, a hero and a hothead, whose
life’s startling last chapter is a microcosm of the aftermath of
our most divisive war.