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Doctor Jack Shackelford and the Red Rovers
By James L. Noles, Jr. *
Copyright 2000
Jack Shackelford was born in Richmond on March 20, 1790, to Richard Shackelford and Richard’s third wife, Johanna Lawson. Johanna died soon thereafter, leaving Jack to be raised by the sister of one of Richard’s earlier wives, Catharine Allgood.
Once an adult, Shackelford moved to Winnsboro, South Carolina. There he courted and married Maria Yongue, "a lady of small person and much beauty." When the War of 1812 broke out, Shackelford volunteered for duty and, in a skirmish outside of Charleston, was cut in the face by a slash of a British officer’s sword. His service also included time on General Andrew Jackson’s staff.
Not long after the war’s end, Shackelford joined the exodus of thousands of former Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians lured westward by the "Alabama fever." A resident of North Carolina described this fever: "The Alabama fever rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens . . . . There is no question that this fever is contagious . . . . for as soon as one neighbor visits another who has just returned from Alabama he immediately discovers the same symptoms which are exhibited by the one who has seen alluring Alabama."
Shackelford arrived in the "alluring" Alabama Territory in 1818 and settled in Shelby County, southeast of present-day Birmingham. There he became a cotton planter. He also reportedly enjoyed a successful medical practice, although the extent of his formal education is unclear. At that time in America, and especially on the young nation’s southwestern frontier, a man’s capability to practice medicine was judged more on his abilities than on his credentials. Albert Burton Moore, in 1927’s History of Alabama and Her People, described the medical profession in Alabama a hundred years earlier. "Medical science was backward, and many of the doctors in Alabama had not even pursued the courses of study available at the time," Moore wrote. "Their remedies were usually drastic. Strong purgatives and emetics, laudanum, blisters and starvation were employed, and in stubborn cases the lancet was called in to bleed the patient. Such treatment not infrequently brought the disease or the patient, or both, to a speedy end."
Shackelford, however, was apparently a member of the growing majority of doctors who favored the so-called "tonic" system of treatment over the vicious "depletion" system described by Moore. "Gentle remedies and topical applications" were reportedly Shackelford’s remedies of choice, and curing nervous disorders his forte.
Not content with merely planting cotton and practicing medicine, Shackelford was also active in the Democratic party and a vocal supporter of Andrew Jackson. Within two years Shackelford was elected to the state legislature’s House of Representatives, followed by a term in the State Senate. The results of one of these elections – in which every voter save one in Shelby County cast a ballot for Shackelford – attested to Shackelford’s popularity.
These early years in Alabama were apparently happy ones for Shackelford. With his adoring wife by his side, a profitable medical practice, and a productive cotton plantation, Shackelford frequently provided his fellow legislators with a sanctuary from the often flooded and yellow fever-plagued state capital of Cahaba. There he lived "like a baron of the middle ages," debating the issues of the day with his guests and enjoying venison from his woods and fresh fish pulled from the Coosa River.
This pleasant state of affairs would have likely continued for some time if it were not for Shackelford’s decision to personally guarantee a loan received by one of his cousins. When the cousin’s mercantile schemes failed miserably, Shackelford was left to pay off his debts. Shackelford did so, but at the cost of his land and the majority of his slave holdings.
Despite his losses, Shackelford retained his good name and his political connections. These intangible assets enabled him to be elected to the office of receiver of the land office in Courtland. He moved north to Courtland in 1829, with his family and his remaining slaves, mainly old men, women and children. In Courtland, Shackelford fulfilled his duties as land receiver, supervising the sale of land in association with the construction of the Muscle Shoals Canal. With those responsibilities complete, he turned his attention to his medical practice, apparently rebuilding it to the same successful degree that it had existed in Shelby County. His fortune restored, Shackelford also helped finance the construction of the Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur Railroad, completed in 1834 as the first railway in Alabama (and indeed one of the first in the nation). Shackelford served as its treasurer.
Shackelford and his investors envisioned the railroad as providing the cotton planters of the Tennessee Valley with a means of circumventing the Muscle Shoals down river. This would allow easier and quicker access to the cotton markets in New Orleans. The railroad, however, was reportedly a failure. "Equipment was inadequate, the train kept no regular schedule, and the iron rails were too light and began to sag. Often the steam engine would not run and mules pulled the cars."
Faced with such business reversals, one wonders at Shackelford’s state of mind when he read the following plea from General Sam Houston, commanding the Republic of Texas army and seeking support for Texas’ revolt against its Mexican colonial overlords, published in the Huntsville Democrat in 1835.
Of course, it is possible that Shackelford’s motives were less pecuniary. Many of the Anglos who had settled in Texas were originally from Alabama, and many Alabama families had relatives in the then-Mexican colony of Texas. In fact, according to the details garnered from the 1860 census, only Tennessee had provided more settlers to Texas than Alabama. Young America’s own history with autocratic rule left Alabamians overtly sympathetic to the Texas colonists, chaffing under the autocratic rule of General Santa Anna. Shackelford may have been like many of his countrymen who viewed his participation in the Texas Revolution as akin to that of Lafayette in America’s own revolution.
Whatever their motives, Courtland’s citizens soon acted upon Houston’s appeals for help. Shackelford began efforts to raise a company of men from Courtland and the surrounding Tennessee Valley for service in support of Texas’ revolt against Mexico. A meeting of the local residents soon followed, in which one gentlemen arose, slapped a hundred dollar bill on the room’s table, and challenged his colleagues to match his donation in order to finance Shackelford’s company. Eleven other soon followed with hundred dollar bills of their own, which in turn were supplemented by smaller donations from other citizens.
Buttressed by such support, Shackelford soon raised a company of approximately fifty-five volunteers. Courtland’s women worked day and night to outfit Shackelford’s men. They sewed uniforms that consisted of "linsey-woolsey" fringe-trimmed hunting shirts with bright red, green, and brown checks and jean trousers tied bright red to match their shirts. The final product inspired the women to dub Shackelford’s company the "Red Rovers." A simple blood-red flag provided the Red Rovers with their company guidon – suspected by some to be the first flag in Alabama’s history to evidence a separate and distinct Alabama identity.
Topped with coonskin caps, sporting large hunting knifes strapped to their hips, and carrying muskets supplied by Alabama’s state arsenal (for a cost of $600), the Red Rovers boarded the cars of the Tuscumbia, Decatur, and Courtland Railroad on December 12, 1835. The shouts and well-wishes of the entire town of Courtland rang in their ears as the Red Rovers – consisting of half the male adult population of Coutland, to include practically all of its young men – left town aboard the railroad’s mule-drawn cars. Shackelford’s eldest son, Fortunatus, accompanied him as his orderly sergeant. The Red Rovers also counted among their number two of Shackelford’s nephews and J.C. Ferguson, a young medical student studying under Shackelford.
After a short trip along the railway, the Red Rovers reached Tuscumbia, on the southern shore of the Muscle Shoals. There they transferred to a waiting steamer, the William Penn, for the trip to Paducah, Kentucky. From Paducah they traveled down the Mississippi River aboard the Kentuckian, arriving in New Orleans nearly a month later. In New Orleans the Red Rovers boarded the schooner Brutus to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The Brutus deposited its weary and seasick human cargo at Dimmit’s Landing on Matagorda Bay on January 19, 1836.
The Red Rovers were not the only Alabama volunteer units found in the Republic of Texas’ order of battle. Huntsville contributed as many as seventy men in a company known as the Huntsville Volunteers, Montgomery sent the Alabama Greys under the command of Isaac Tichnor, and Mobile provided the Mobile Greys, commanded by David Burke. Despite their eagerness to join the fray, the Red Rovers were delayed for two weeks at the coast while Shackelford attempted to ascertain the whereabouts of the Texan army.
In February, Shackelford’s Red Rovers marched inland to Texana and then on to Goliad. At Goliad, a Texas regiment under the command of Colonel James Fannin had occupied La Bahia, the settlement’s impressive stone fort overlooking the San Antonio River, and renamed it Fort Defiance. The occupation of Goliad was part of the Texas Republic’s legislative council’s questionable conventional strategy of occupying forts and settlements in the path of the advancing Mexicans in order to block any offensive thrusts into Texas from the south. Given the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Mexican army, this was a debatable strategy at best. Nevertheless, Colonel Fannin and the approximately four hundred men under his command, which now included the Red Rovers, the Mobile Greys, the Alabama Greys, and members of the Huntsville Volunteers, set about improving the fortifications of Fort Defiance in anticipation of the arrival of the advancing Mexicans.
For six weeks, Fannin’s regiment labored at improving the fort’s defenses, mindful of the similar plight of their fellow volunteers occupying the Alamo upriver in San Antonio. Shackelford wrote of it in a letter to his wife on March 9, 1836:
Shackelford’s predictions, although delinquent, were prophetic. The Alamo had fallen three days earlier with a complete loss of life. Perhaps it was better for Fannin’s command that its ranks were unaware of their colleagues’ fate – morale was not universally high among his command. J. C. Ferguson, Shackelford’s student physician, shared the regiment’s opinion of their colonel in a letter to his twin brother A.J. back in Alabama. "I am sorry to say," he wrote "that the majority of the soldiers don’t like him, for what cause I don’t know, without [sic] it is because they think he has not the interest of the country at heart, or that he wishes to become without taking the proper steps to attain greatness." Ferguson went on to observe that Texas, with its "want of society and government," was "no place for" him and that he intended to return to Alabama as soon as his enlistment expired on April 18th. For Ferguson and the vast majority of the Red Rovers, it was a wish that would never be fulfilled.
At the expense of time that could have been spent on drill and similar tactical training, Fannin kept his volunteers working on Fort Defiance’s fortifications. He slowed his work on March 12 to send a small detachment of his troops, lead by Amon King, to aid in the evacuation of civilians from the path of the advancing Mexican army. When the Mexicans cornered this force, he dispatched William Ward’s battalion to its relief two days later, thereby ignoring one of the principles of war that Fannin should have learned during his unfinished tenure at West Point – seldom, if ever, divide one’s command. The folly of Fannin’s decision was revealed on March 15th, when orders arrived from Sam Houston directing Fannin to abandon Goliad and fall back to Victoria. Fannin was forced to delay the departure in order to allow his subordinate units to rejoin him. King’s company, however, was massacred by the Mexicans, and Ward’s battalion, cut off from Goliad, escaped (albeit briefly) to Victoria.
With Ward cut off, Fannin stepped up his preparations to withdraw. The arrival of Mexican soldiers in the vicinity of Goliad, however, indicated that Fannin might already be too late to effect his unit’s escape. In a sharp skirmish on the 18th, Fannin’s cavalry troop, led by Albert C. Horton (like Shackelford, a former member of the Alabama state legislature) charged the reconnoitering Mexican cavalry scouts. Horton’s thirty-odd men put the Mexicans to flight but soon encountered a force of infantry approximately ten times their own number and were forced to retreat. As Horton’s company fell back in good order toward the fort, Shackelford led the Red Rovers out of the fort’s gates in hopes of outflanking the advancing Mexicans. The Red Rovers waded out into the San Antonio River up to their armpits and emerged on the Mexican’s flanks. At that point, cannon fire from the fort drove off the Mexican infantry, denying the Red Rovers their first opportunity to close with the enemy.
Despite the success of this first brush with Mexican forces, the short battle outside the fort’s walls exhausted the cavalry’s horses, distracted the Texans from their preparations, and thereby delayed Fannin’s withdrawal even further. His regiment, now numbering approximately three hundred men, finally departed Fort Defiance early on the morning of March 19, 1836, sheltered by a heavy shroud of fog. Behind them they left the smoldering ruins of the fort and the supplies they could not carry – burned to deny the Mexican army their use.
Relying on the customary good order and discipline of Shackelford’s Red Rovers, Fannin placed them in the vanguard of his retreating force. Shackelford led from the front both literally and figuratively. When the regiment struggled to move its artillery pieces across the San Antonio River during a difficult river crossing, Shackelford waded into the river and lent his shoulder to the effort.
With the river behind them, Fannin’s regiment pushed sluggishly onward across open grasslands. Heavy baggage-laden wagons and stubborn oxen slowed its progress. By midday, the unit had only covered six miles and was still short of the sheltering timber of Coleto Creek. Neverthless, Colonel Fannin called a halt to rest his command. Shackelford, concerned about being caught in the open by Mexican forces, pressed for the march to continue. His arguments encountered only condescending amusement from his fellow officers.
Later that day, after the regiment had resumed its march, Shackelford’s fears were confirmed. A Mexican cavalry unit appeared, cutting off Fannin’s regiment from the protective timberline of Coleto Creek, approximately a mile distant. Mexican infantry and artillery soon joined their mounted comrades and Fannin, realizing that he could not reach Coleto Creek, hastily formed his regiment into a hollow rectangle in a shallow depression on the bare prairie to await the Mexican onslaught.
What was to become known as the Battle of Coleto Creek was not long in coming. The Mexicans, outnumbering Fannin’s command by approximately two thousand to two hundred seventy, closed for battle. Volleys of musket fire blunted an initial bayonet charge by the elite Tampico Regiment. No sooner had they been repulsed when a regiment of Mexican lancers charged the Texans’ rear. Fannin’s men waited until the charging cavalry closed within sixty yards. At that point, they devastated the Mexican lancers with a blast of musket fire and double canister grapeshot from the Texans’ cannons. A latter-day chronicler and friend of Shackelford’s vividly described the aftermath of that charge:
As the battle waged on, the Texans’ cannon barrels grew so hot that they were rendered useless. The artillerists, trapped on the prairie and lacking water to cool their cannon, abandoned their overheated field pieces and fought on as riflemen. The Mexicans, laboring under no such difficulties, wrapped their superior force around the Texans and poured cannon and musket shot into their ranks.
As evening fell, close to a quarter of Fannin’s troops were dead, dying, or badly wounded. Shackelford reported that half of his men were dead or wounded, and that he was slightly wounded himself. Faced with the prospect of another day’s battle, the Texans spent the gloomy evening entrenching and caring for their wounded. Whatever thoughts the Texans might have had with regard to escaping under the cover of darkness were apparently dissuaded by an unwillingness to abandon their wounded comrades.
The next day dawned with the Mexican forces drawn up for battle and artillery massed for a final barrage. After several shots, however, General Urrea, commanding the Mexican forces, signaled his intent to parley with a white flag. A council of war followed and Fannin made ready to meet with General Urrea. As he prepared to depart his regiment’s lines, Shackelford detained him briefly. With the plight of his wounded men and the hopelessness of their position in mind, Shackelford reminded Fannin to secure "an honorable capitulation." Otherwise, he said, "come back – our graves are already dug – let us all be buried together."
Fannin, however, did return, bearing terms of surrender that included treatment as prisoners of war and the parole of the vanquished Texans back to the United States as soon as transport could be obtained. The triumphant Mexicans marched Fannin and his regiment back to Goliad, where they were penned in the burned remains of the settlement’s church. The Mexicans pressed Shackelford into tending to their wounded, while Fannin and other officers traveled to the coast to ready transport for the volunteers’ return to the United States.
The prisoners remained at Goliad for a week, joined by other captured Texan units such as the remnants of Ward’s battalion. On March 27th, they received orders to gather their belongings and assemble in the fort’s courtyard. Shackelford and Joseph Barnard, another physician, were taken to a Mexican officer’s tent to tend to wounded Mexican soldiers as their fellow volunteers marched out of the fort and to, they assumed, the port of Copano for passage home.
A short while later, however, the crash of musketry alerted Shackelford and Barnard that something was amiss. Although a Mexican officer explained the firing was simply the guards drilling, the screams of the prisoners unmasked the true nature of the musket fire. The Mexicans, intent on treating the rebelling Texans and the supporters as pirates rather than prisoners, were massacring their captives. Some prisoners tried to flee, while others simply stood their ground, waved their hats defiantly, and boldly shouted "Hurrah for Texas!" Neither reaction was any match for the blazing muskets, plunging bayonets, and slashing sabers of their ruthless captors. In the end, only approximately twenty-seven escaped. Shackelford’s son, his two nephews, and young Ferguson were not among the fortunate ones.
The Mexicans returned Shackelford and Barnard to the fort later that morning. There they faced a chilling sight. Their captors had dragged the wounded out of the church and executed them as well. Their mangled and naked bodies were thrown, along with those of their comrades who had been marched out earlier in the day, into various piles of corpses near the fort. The Mexicans then set them alight, eventually leaving their charred remains to feed the vultures and coyotes. In the end, over three hundred seventy men were massacred at Goliad that bloody Palm Sunday.
Shackelford and Barnard remained at Goliad for another month, tending to the Mexican wounded at Coleto Creek. The Mexicans then dispatched the two men to San Antonio, where they treated those Mexican wounded still recovering from the battle of the Alamo. It is possible that they were the first Americans to enter the mission following the Alamo’s fall. They were still in San Antonio when word of Santa Anna’s defeat and capture at the battle of San Jacinto on April 21st reached them. Even then, however, the Mexican army refused to release the two doctors, although the majority of its forces withdrew south.
At this point, Shackelford and Bernard took matters into their own hands. Stealing horses, weapons, and ammunition – "procured in a manner that would not have been deemed proper under any other circumstances," according to Shackelford – they set off for Goliad. For two days they avoided roads, slipping around the slumbering Mexican army at night and bluffing their way past Mexican cavalry patrols during the day. They eventually encountered a small detachment of Texan troops on the fourth day of their journey and, safe at last, proceeded to Goliad and on to Velasco.
In Velasco, on June 9th, 1836, the Republic of Texas issued Shackelford an honorable discharge. It read:
Discharge in hand, Shackelford proceeded to New Orleans, where he wrote to inform Maria he was on his way home to Courtland. He arrived there, on the same railroad upon which he had departed, on July 9, 1836, to find a town that had already counted him and all of his men as dead. As he surveyed the gathered townspeople from the railway station platform, knowing that so many of them were hoping for miraculous news of a departed father, son, or brother, he burst into tears. All those around him wept as they realized no such news would be forthcoming.
The ever-resilient Shackelford eventually rebuilt his medical practice and returned to Texas a number of times to secure the wages (eight dollars a month) and land grants (5,245 acres for a married man, 2116 acres for bachelors) promised by the Texas government to the families of his fallen comrades. His wife Maria died in 1842 and Shackelford eventually married Mrs. Martha Chardavoyne, a local widow. On January 27, 1857, Shackelford died, survived by Martha and Shackelford’s three children borne by Maria: Samuel, Harriett, and Edward. In 1858, Shackelford County, Texas was established and named in his honor.
VIII. The Men of the Red Rovers
On March 5, 1857, Texas’ Commissioner for Deeds published a list of the men who had served with Shackelford’s Red Rovers in a Huntsville newspaper, encouraging them or their heirs to collect the pay and land owed to them. The following men, not all of whom were with the original Rovers, were listed:
The following individuals were reported as surviving the massacre, either by escaping or by having the good luck to be detached to scouting units which were not captured with the rest of the men at Coleto Creek:
* Author Note: The author, James L. Noles, Jr., is an attorney with the Birmingham law firm of Balch & Bingham LLP. His areas of practice include environmental and historical/cultural resource law. He would greatly welcome and appreciate any information readers of this article might have regarding Jack Shackelford and the men of the Red Rovers or their families. Mr. Noles can be reached at jnoles@balch.com.
Leah Rawls Atkins, Wayne Flynt, William Warren Rogers, and Robert David Ward, Alabama – The History of a Deep South State, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa and London 1994.
Harbert Davenport, Notes from an Unfinished Study of Fannin and His Men, 1936. Includes 651 biographical sketches. (Published on the Internet at http://www.mindspring.com/~dmaxey/hd/home.htm, H. David Maxey, Editor – Webpage of January 1, 2000).
Henry Stuart Foote, Texas and the Texans, or, the Advance of the Anglo-Americans to the Southwest, Volume II, Thomas, Cowperthwait & Company, Philadelphia 1841, pages 226-248.
Claude Elliot, "Alabama and the Texas Revolution," 50 Southwestern Historical Quarterly No. 3 (January 1947).
James E. Harris, "Remember Goliad!", Alabama Heritage No. 5 (Summer 1987)
Albert Burton Moore, History of Alabama and Her People, Volume I, The American Historical Society, Chicago and New York 1927, page 194.
James Saunders, Early Settlers of Alabama, L. Graham and Sons, Ltd., New Orleans 1899.
Sons of DeWitt Colony Texas, http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt.htm, August 16, 2000.
Texas State Historical Association, The Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/hanbook/online, August 17, 2000.
Various conversations with John Hardin, Alabama Department of Archives and History, July 2000.
