War battles. Wealthy Tejano ranchers, such as Santos Benavides, were the strongest Texas supporters of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, many working class Tejanos fought for the Union army, as they had no interest in living in a social system predicated on unfree labor. Some Tejanos, such as Antonio Ochoa, had fought against the Texas Confederates from the time of secession. In 1861, Ochoa and a group of 40 men marched to the Zapata County courthouse and sought to prevent the town officials from swearing their allegiance to the Confederacy. Ochoa and his men were immediately attacked by Confederate troops and forced to flee into Mexico. There they met and recruited Juan Cortina, who'd been forced out of Texas at the end of the First Cortina War. Ochoa and Cortina together launched multiple military and economic attacks in South Texas, targeting supply lines, and even assassinating a Confederate county judge. After each attack, they fled back to the safety of Mexico, waited for a short time, and then moved back into Texas for their next attack. This continued until Ochoa was executed by the brother of Santos Benavides. The final battle of the U.S. Civil War was fought in Texas. One month after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Union forces marched toward Brownsville. Tejano Confederates responded near the mouth of the Rio Grande and attacked the Union soldiers. While the Confederates won this final victory, they were the ultimate losers of the war. All told, an estimated 20,000 Latino soldiers fought during the American Civil War. Reconstruction era Despite the significant contributions of Mexican Americans in the American Civil War, the community faced a resurgence of discrimination in the Reconstruction era. In the 1870s, the New Mexico Territory saw a massive influx of Anglo-American settlers and land speculators. The Territory legislature, fearing a Gold Rush-style land grab, petitioned Congress for protections. In their 1872 memorial to Congress, the New Mexico legislators argued for a change in federal land laws, which stipulated that in the case of a dispute, the owners of the land must present evidence of their original land grant in both English and Spanish. The legislators argued this provided an undue burden to Nuevomexicanos, since in the territory, "very few ... understand the English language." As migration increased over the course of the decade, the legislature issued more memorials, stressing the need for a Board of