HISPANICS IN GRAY

At least 2,500 Mexican Texans joined the Confederate Army. The most famous was Santos Benavides, who rose to command the Thirty-third Texas Cavalry as a colonel, and thus became the highest ranking Tejano to serve the Confederacy. Though it was ill equipped, frequently without food, and forced to march across vast expanses of South Texas and northern Mexico, the Thirty-third was never defeated in battle. Colonel Benavides, along with his two brothers, Refugio and Cristóbal, who both became captains in the regiment, compiled a brilliant record of border defense and were widely heralded as heroes throughout the Lone Star State. The Benavides brothers defeated a band of anti-Confederate revolutionaries commanded by Juan N. Cortina at Carrizo (Zapata) in May 1861 and on three separate occasions invaded northern Mexico in retaliation for Unionist-inspired guerilla raids into Texas. The Benavides brothers were also successful in driving off a small Union force that attacked Laredo in March 1864.

Many Tejanos who enlisted in the Confederate Army saw combat far from home. A few who joined Hood's Texas Brigade marched off to Virginia and fought in the battles of Gaines' Mill, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Appomattox Court House. Thirty Tejanos who enlisted from San Antonio, Eagle Pass, and the Fort Clark area joined Trevanion T. Teel artillery company, and thirty-one more joined Charles L. Pyron company, both in John R. Baylor Second Texas Mounted Rifles, which marched across the deserts of West Texas to secure the Mesilla valley. These units were later incorporated into Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley  Confederate Army of New Mexico and fought bravely at the battle of Valverde.

Other Mexican Texans from San Antonio served in the Sixth Texas Infantry and fought in several of the eastern campaigns, including the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Atlanta, and at Franklin and Nashville in John Bell Hood calamitous invasion of Tennessee. Two of the better known Tejanos in the regiment were Antonio Bustillos and Eugenio Navarro. Others who served the Confederacy included the younger Manuel Yturri, a Kentucky teacher and scholar, who rose to the rank of captain in the Third Texas Infantry; and Lt. Joseph de la Garza, also from San Antonio, who died at Mansfield, Louisiana, in 1864 during the Red River Campaign. More than 300 Texas Mexicans from Refugio and Bexar counties joined the Eighth Texas Infantry. Two companies commanded by Joseph M. Peñaloza and José Ángel Navarro were almost entirely Tejano.

Confederate Hispanics

The Cuban patriot Narciso López approached Mexican War heroes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee in 1848 with the request to head a liberation army to free Cuba from Spain -- Lee seriously considered the offer, but turned it down. 

• José Agustín Quintero, a Cuban poet and revolutionary, ably served Confederate President Jefferson Davis as the C.S. Commissioner to Northern Mexico, ensuring critical supplies from Europe flowed through Mexican ports to the CSA. 

• Santiago Vidaurri, governor of the border states of Coahuila and Nuevo León, offered to secede northern Mexico and join the Confederacy; Jefferson Davis declined, afraid the valuable "neutral" Mexican ports would be then blockaded. 

• The Spanish inventor Narciso Monturiol offered the Confederacy his advanced submarine Ictineo to smash the Federal blockade. Never purchased, Jules Verne apparently based the Nautilus on this, the world's most advanced vessel of the day. 

• Ambrosio José González, a famous Cuban revolutionary, served Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard as his artillery officer in Charleston; earlier, in New York, he helped design the modern Cuban and (inversed) Puerto Rican flags. 

• The Mexican Santos Benavides, a former Texas ranger, commanded the Confederate 33rd Texas Cavalry, a Mexican- American unit which defeated the Union in the 1864 Battle of Laredo, Texas. He became the only Mexican C.S. colonel. 

• Thomas Jordan, a Confederate general responsible for early codes used in spying on Washington, after the war led the Cuban revolutionary army as Commander-in-Chief, training its generals and in 1870 routing the Spaniards at two-to-one odds. 

• Lola Sanchez, of a Cuban family living near St. Augustine, had her sisters serve dinner to visiting Federals, while she raced out at night and warned the nearest Confederate camp. The Yankees thus lost a general, his unit and a gunboat the next day. 

• Loretta Janeta Velazquez, a Cuban woman, claimed to have fought in the war disguised as a Confederate soldier, Lt. Harry Buford. She chronicled her amazing and harrowing adventures in an account called The Woman in Battle. 

• James Hamilton Tomb, a Confederate engineer on the innovative semi-submarine ship David, accepted a post-war offer from the Brazilian emperor as technical expert on torpedoes (submarine mines) in the Paraguayan War of 1865-1870. 

• Hunter Davidson, a Confederate torpedo (submarine mine) scientist, assumed the head of the Argentine Torpedo and Hydrographic Bureau for some years, training its leadership, and retired to Asunción, Paraguay, where he is buried. 

• John Randolph Tucker, head of the Charleston Confederate Naval Squadron, accepted a post-war position as Vice-Admiral heading the combined Peruvian-Chilean fleets in a Pacific conflict against Spanish coastal incursions. 

• John Newland Maffitt, who before the war captured illegal slave-trading ships, served the Confederacy as the CSS Florida's commander. Afterwards, he served in the Paraguayan war and commanded the Cuban gun-runner Hornet. 

• Thomas Jefferson Page, a Confederate naval commander who learned of the war's end in Cuba after sailing the ironclad CSS Stonewall from Spain, settled in Argentina, his son becoming an Argentine naval commander, his grandson an admiral. 

• Mexican service influenced Confederate general Stonewall Jackson; he often spoke Spanish endearments to his wife, Anna. • After the war, many prominent governors and other Confederates established a colony, Carlotta, in Mexico.