CORTINA PRAISES MATA DEFENDERS FOR JAN. 13, 1864 VICTORY

Today in history: Internecine battles were fought between Liberal and Conservative forces battling over the city of Matamoros. Simultaneously, the French Imperialist army under Imperialist Gen. Tomas Mejia was making its way north toward Tampico seeking the customs house at Puerto Bagdad. From the west, an army under the control of Nuevo Leon Gov. Jose Santiago Vidaurri sought to take over Matamoros.

By late 1863 and early 1864, Vidaurri switched sides and supported Emperor Maximilian as he sought Bernito Juarez, in internal exile in the parched northern states of Chuihuahua and Nuevo Leon.

Vidaurri as leader of Coahuila-Nuevo León was de facto head of a sovereign nation. He had an army, collected customs revenues, and was free of central government interference. If he controlled Matamoros, the Juarez-government-in-exile which counted  only on the customs house at Bagdad under the command of Col. Juan Nepomuceno "Cheno" Cortina to keep the government afloat, would perish.

Over the previous months, Cortina – then a colonel of the Juarista Liberals – had sent his brother Jose Maria to deliver thousands of dollars in custom-house revenues from that port to sustain Juarez penurious and dwindling forces. His forces met the Vidaurri forces outside the city and after a pitched battle, drove the invaders away.

In the message posted January 14, 1864 to his Tamaulipas soldiers congratulating them for their victory, he said that their fellow citizens in Matamoros had seen "our arms shine with splendor, obligating the enemy to flee precipitously."

It would be September 1864 that the French imperialist army under Tomas Mejia marched into the city and Cortina briefly took their side to save his weapons and men and later fought against them to oust them from Matamoros.

On the U.S. side, Brownsville was occupied first by the Confederate Army, then by the Union, and much later, finally under the Union's control after the final battle at Palmito Hill on May 1865, which the rebels won under John "Rip" Ford. A month earlier, on April, the Virginia rebel army under Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Army if the Potomac under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

 

Ironically, it would be much later – on June 19, 1867 – that Cortina would be present at the Cerro de las Campanas, Queretaro, when Mejia, Maximilian and Gen. Miguel Miramon were executed by firing squad.