The Brush Battalion: A Confederate Unit's Struggle in Texas

The Brush Battalion was a Confederate unit composed of men who surrendered to authorities in the fall of 1863 with an agreement to defend the northwest frontier of Texas in exchange for amnesty. Many of the men had been hiding in thickets across North Texas. While accounts vary, the number who turned themselves over in November 1863 was somewhere between 638 and 1,121. Only a very small part of the battalion saw military action and that was in pursuit of Comanches northwest of Gainesville in Cooke County in December. Continued desertion from the Brush Battalion and a lack of confidence in its ability to defend the frontier led Confederate authorities in early 1864 to change its primary objective to apprehending deserters and others still hiding in thickets. Essentially perceived as a failure, the unit disbanded in March 1864 after just a few months of service.

According to author David Paul Smith in Frontier Defense in the Civil War: Texas’ Rangers and Rebels (1992), the organization was never officially designated the Brush Battalion, but the members were colloquially referred to as “brush men” or sometimes “bush men.” The most noted thicket was Jernigan’s Thicket, located primarily in northeast Hunt County and northwest Hopkins County, or what is today Delta County. Other well-known thickets across the Northern Sub-District were Mustang Thicket, located primarily in northwest Hunt County and southwest Fannin County; Wild Cat Thicket, located in southwest Fannin and southeast Grayson; and Black Cat Thicket, located in north central Hunt County. One group of men that established the core of the Brush Battalion hid in the bottoms and thickets of southeast Collin County near Oxford Lake, about three miles northwest of Farmersville. The lake was at the confluence of Pilot Grove Creek and Indian Creek. 

The Brush Battalion was organized primarily for two reasons. The first was to persuade deserters, conscripts, and militia that were avoiding the conscription laws across the Northern Sub-District to serve in the Confederate military. These laws were very unpopular with citizens throughout the subdistrict and Texas. The initial Confederate conscription law was passed in April 1862 and required all able-bodied White men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to serve three years in the military. A subsequent conscription law, passed in September 1862, extended the eligible age to forty-five. The second reason the Brush Battalion was formed was to better protect the northwestern frontier of Texas from American Indian attacks. Comanches and Kiowas were the biggest threat from the southwestern section of the Indian Nation. A series of attacks occurred throughout February 1863 in Montague, Wise, Cooke, and Denton counties. A later series of attacks occurred throughout August in Wise and Parker counties. The effects of both desertion and frontier protection increased the urgency to defend this region, and Confederate authorities reluctantly agreed to allow the muster of the Brush Battalion. 

Brig. Gen. Henry E. McCulloch took command of the Northern Sub-District of Texas in September 1863, and he sent trusted volunteer aides to implore deserters and others in violation of the conscription laws to enlist. Per author David Paul Smith, McCulloch believed that “soft words [are] better than hard ones to bring the young ones back to their duty.”  The aides that he  sent included attorney Samual A. Roberts, Elijah S. C. Roberston, and John Henry Brown. Three additional aides were particularly interesting because they opposed secession before the war but supported the Confederacy during the war. These included Benjamin H. Epperson, a wealthy attorney from Red River County; Col. Robert H. Taylor of Fannin County of the Twenty-Second Texas Cavalry; and James W. Throckmorton of Collin County, elected governor of Texas during Reconstruction.

Taylor and Throckmorton contacted approximately 500 “brush men” located in the thickets  at Oxford Lake. In October they met with the leader of the group—Henry Boren, a deserter from Leonidas M. Martin’s Fifth Texas Partisan Rangers. Newspapers throughout Kansas and Missouri reported that McCulloch threatened to send William C. Quantrill, and implicitly his raiders, into the thicket. In response, Boren told the Confederate authorities that McCulloch could “go to hell” and that he [Boren] “wished no better fun than to kill that great scoundrel.” In response, McCulloch sent a letter to Boren. According to this communication, which was dated October 24, 1863, McCulloch agreed to allow the men to serve on the frontier with the following stipulations: 1) they could not elect officers; 2) Union troops must be engaged if met on the frontier; and 3) belligerent American Indians and jayhawkers would be engaged as well. The objective of the battalion, which had five companies, was initially to defend the part of the northwest frontier of Texas under the jurisdiction of Col. James G. Bourland. Ultimately, Bourland planned to have one company posted in Archer County, north of Fort Belknap; two companies farther north on the Wichita River; and two companies in the Indian Territory.

Boren and his men were escorted to the headquarters of the Northern Sub-District in Bonham by early November 1863. Members of the Brush Battalion soon moved west to the post at McKinney, and by mid-December they were stationed in Denton and awaiting supplies. Maj. John R. Diamond took charge of the battalion soon after its organization and led it until its disbandment. The total number of names on the list from Oxford Lake was 483. Almost 70 percent were deserters from Confederate units, including the Sixteenth, Twenty-second, and  Thirty-fourth Texas Cavalry regiments. The balance were conscripts and militia, mainly from the counties of Hunt, Collin, Van Zandt, Wood, Grayson, and Fannin.

The battalion struggled with obstacles from the beginning. McCulloch learned in late November 1863 that Boren, if armed, had planned to overthrow the headquarters in Bonham upon arrival. Fortunately, that was not the case as his men were disarmed by the Confederate authorities before they were delivered to the garrison earlier in the month. When McCulloch got this information, however, he decided that Boren and his company would not be stationed along the frontier with the others. While documentation remains scarce, the majority of the men were believed to be in Denton on December 21 and 22 when approximately 300 Comanches crossed the Red River east of Red River Station in Montague County and attacked settlers to the west and northwest of Gainesville in Cooke County. By early 1864, and with a few exceptions, the men of the Brush Battalion were excluded from McCulloch’s plans for frontier defense.

In January and February 1864 McColloch changed the focus of the battalion from frontier defense to apprehending deserters. Unfortunately, that did not work well either as reports soon surfaced that the some of the battalion were aiding deserters around Elm Creek near Denton. Furthermore, the battalion was down to only 209 men due to desertions. The last straw for McCulloch came after he learned from Diamond that Boren planned to send 300 men out of Texas to support the Union. On March 21, 1864, McCulloch, who described the battalion as “perfectly worthless and cowardly,” arranged for its disbandment. A few days later he was told to send men who wished to return to their old units to Marshall and to deliver the others to Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder in Houston. As the outfit traveled through Lamar County, the March 26, 1864, edition of the Clarksville Standard reported, “Boren’s bushmen . . . have been taken under guard toward Shreveport, by a detachment of Martin’s regiment. They were believed to be preparing to take to the bush again. It is a pity that they were not in the first instance driven out of the bush by force, or exterminated in the attempt. The traitorous, scoundrels were not worth the time, and care wasted upon them.” On the other hand, the battalion was viewed as a major source of inspiration for the North as a sub-headline of the April 8, 1864, edition of the Daily Missouri Democrat in St. Louis hailed Boren for his gallantry. Such diametrically opposed accounts were typical for the contemporaneous reporting of Civil War dissent in Texas.