v1.1.1 / chapter 70 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* By the beginning of May 1864, Nathaniel Banks' campaign up the Red River in Louisiana had completely fizzled out. To compound Banks' troubles, the Union river fleet that had accompanied the expedition was threatened by the falling water level of the Red above Alexandria. If the vessels couldn't get downstream, they would have to be destroyed to keep them from falling into Confederate hands. However, an enterprising lieutenant colonel named Joseph Bailey managed to improvise a dam to get the fleet downstream. It was an impressive feat of field engineering and one of the few saving graces of an otherwise dismal campaign.
* As if Nathaniel Banks hadn't been humiliated enough by being sent packing back down the Red River by an inferior Confederate force, as the Federals withdrew downstream they were faced with an outright disaster. The falling waters of the river had stranded David Porter's river fleet behind the rapids above Alexandria, while the Confederates moved up to harass the Yankees. There was no way that Porter was going to abandon his gunboats to the Confederates, who would obviously use them to break the Mississippi river blockade. If the vessels couldn't be rescued, they would have to be blown up or burned.
Porter was particularly appalled when Banks showed him a letter from Grant that directly ordered Banks to get moving on Mobile, Alabama, on the first of May, no matter what was going on up the Red. Banks had been essentially told by Grant to abandon the Navy. Porter had no high opinion of or liking for Banks and expected the worst; but for whatever his other faults, Banks was conscientious, and he made it clear he had no intention of abandoning Porter even if it meant the wrath of Grant. It would be hard to believe Porter would have stuck his neck out so far for Banks, or for that matter anyone else, if the positions had been reversed.
Whatever good intentions Banks had still did not help get Porter and his sailors out of the fix they were in. However, on 19 April, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry, Franklin's chief engineer, approached Banks with an idea. Bailey had been a Wisconsin lumberman, in which capacity he had addressed the problem of getting logs over a low stretch of river by building a dam to raise the water level and then breaking the dam to shoot the logs downstream. Bailey had used the same trick a year earlier to salvage two transports the rebels had abandoned up a stream near Port Hudson and thought it would work for Porter's vessels. Banks took Bailey to Porter, who was unimpressed, but since there were no other options and Banks said that his soldiers would do the work, Porter finally agreed.
* Banks handed Bailey a regiment of Maine volunteers, many of whom had also been lumberjacks in their previous lives, plus three regiments of New Yorkers. This gave Bailey an energetic and capable work crew of about 3,000 men, and they started to work on 1 May.
The dam had to span 758 feet (231 meters). Bailey planned to build two partial "wing dams" from the shores, each wing dam being 300 feet (91 meters) long, and then sink high-sided barges loaded with brick to plug the gap. The north bank wing dam was built by the Maine regiment, who laid big trees in the direction of the current and lashed them together with timbers. The south bank had few trees, so the New Yorkers tore down local buildings for timber and stone to build "cribs" extending out from the bank. One of the buildings they tore down was the military academy where Sherman had been superintendent at the outbreak of the war. They worked around the clock, using bonfires for illumination at night.
At first the workers were ridiculed by idlers on the ships and on the banks, but as the dam took shape, everyone began to think the scheme might work after all. It couldn't work fast enough. Taylor couldn't attack the Federals in the entrenchments around Alexandria or interfere with the building of the dam, but he could do his best to cut their downstream communications. On 1 May, as work on the dam began, the Union transport EMMA was seized 30 miles (48 kilometers) downriver from Alexandria, with the crew taken prisoner and the vessel burned.
On 4 May the transport CITY BELLE was also taken and burned. The vessel had been carrying an Ohio regiment of 700 men. 276 of the were taken prisoner, with the rest jumping over the side and escaping. The next day, 5 May, the transport WARNER was under escort by the gunboats COVINGTON and SIGNAL when they steamed into a rebel trap at a bend in the river. The Confederates had carefully sited and concealed four guns: they disabled the WARNER, and when the two gunboats went to her aid, they were knocked out in turn. All three vessels ended up burning and loss of life was heavy. The Confederates were almost unscathed.
The Union supply line to Alexandria had now been effectively cut; Taylor also destroyed all forage and supplies in the neighborhood of Alexandria within reach of Banks' men. Taylor now waited for Kirby Smith to arrive with his reinforcements so the two generals could draw the noose around the Federals.
* Banks had calculated on 1 May that he had half-rations for three weeks. Everything depended on Bailey's dam. The dam grew rapidly and so did everyone's enthusiasm, one of the local blacks exclaiming at the sight: "Before God, what won't the Yankees do next!"
The dam was plugged after a week's work on 7 May and the water began to rise rapidly. Four of Porter's ships were able to move downstream and take up positions in front of the dam the next day. However, when Banks inspected the dam he worried that it might not be able to hold. He was correct, since at about 5:30 AM on the morning of 9 May it gave way.
Four gunboats managed to make it downstream through the breach in the dam, some of the vessels taking a wild and rough ride through the foaming rapids. Banks was very upset at the failure of the dam, since with his supplies dwindling he couldn't wait much longer in beginning his retreat down the Red.
Porter, with the optimism of the egotistical, was not unhappy at all. Four of his ships had been saved, and if he could get Banks to stand fast for a few days while Bailey's crew rebuilt the dam, he could get the other six downstream as well. Then everyone could retreat together, with a combined force that would scatter the rebels if they tried to block the way.
Banks wavered, sending a staff officer over to Porter on 11 May to complain that the Navy didn't seem to understand the urgency of their situation. Porter sent back a reply reassuring Banks that things were not as bad as they seemed, and in fact if they rescued the remaining ships, it would help restore some credit to the campaign. He ended by asking Banks to hang on a little longer "even if we have to stay here and eat mule meat."
Porter's reassurances were not just smoke. Bailey had decided to build a secondary dam instead of plug the first, and the work crew, by now experienced dam-builders, got it done in record time. The same day that Porter sent his reply to Banks, 11 May, three more vessels made it downstream, and the next day the other three followed. The water downstream was perfectly navigable all the rest of the way. While the Red was dry that season, the Mississippi was flooded, backing up the water all the way past Alexandria. The river fleet had been saved.
* The retreat from Alexandria began on 13 May. A.J. Smith's gorillas torched the place as they left, one Union soldier recollecting that "thousands of people, mostly women, children, and old men, were wringing their hands as they stood by the little piles of what was left of all their worldly possessions." The gorillas were indifferent. Smith called out to them as they did their work: "Hurrah, boys! This looks like war!"
Once they were done, Smith's men marched out of town, leaving smoke pouring up into the sky and providing rearguard protection for the column. The column was led by Franklin's divisions, though he was no longer at their head. The wound to his shin had proven troublesome and he wanted to distance himself from the whole campaign anyway, so he had gone downstream to New Orleans on 1 May, before the Confederates closed the river. His place was taken by Brigadier General William H. Emory, one of his division commanders.
The march went well and quickly. Taylor tried to block the retreat at Mansura at 16 May. He had no hope of seriously impeding the Yankees if they pressed the matter, since he was outnumbered 5 to 1, but hopefully he could slow them down until Kirby Smith arrived with his reinforcements from Arkansas, whenever that might be. Banks was inclined to press the matter, sending his troops across a prairie before the town in what was described as splendid "picture book" order. It was a great show but didn't lead to much of a fight, since all that came of it was a four-hour artillery duel and long-range skirmishing. The Federals applied enough pressure for Taylor to finally decide to pull back, leaving the Union retreat free to move on; Taylor was aggressive but not suicidal.
Taylor had no idea where Kirby Smith and his reinforcements were and no idea when they would arrive. His ignorance left him wildly frustrated, since with every hour that passed the Federals were moving farther out of reach.
On 17 May, the Federals reached Yellow Bayou, only a few miles from the burned ruins of Simsport and the Atchafalaya River. Once they were across the river, it would effectively block further Confederate pursuit. This was Taylor's last chance to trap Banks. Taylor's scouts told him the river was very swollen, about 600 yards (550 meters) across, too wide for the Federal pontoons to span, meaning the troops would have to be ferried across by Porter's ships.
That would be a slow and clumsy procedure; Taylor hoped to let a portion of Banks' men cross the river and then destroy the remainder. If Kirby Smith arrived with his reinforcements before most of the Federals crossed, the rebels would be able to pen the Yankees up against the river.
The Federals having moved into what was left of Simsport, Taylor marched his troops up to Yellow Bayou on the morning of 18 May to dig in and establish jumping-off points for an attack. Banks, very worried about his chances for escape, ordered A.J. Smith to drive the Confederates back to give some breathing room.
Smith took 5,000 men and hit the rebels, who hit back as hard as they could. The fighting went on in a seesaw fashion for a few hours, until the brush caught fire and both sides had to retreat. The little battle was a draw, but Smith's troops had inflicted about 608 casualties on the Confederates compared to about 350 of their own. This did not discourage Taylor in the least, and he moved up again on 19 May to see what trouble he could make for Banks and his men. However, he soon found out there was nothing more he could do.
Taylor hadn't considered the talents of the ingenious Colonel Joe Bailey, who took Porter's transports and gunboats, moored them in a line across the Atchafalaya, and then laid a bridge across them. It was not the sturdiest bridge ever made, but it worked. In the early afternoon of 19 May, Banks began to send his wagons, ambulances, and guns across the river. The infantry protected the crossing and then pulled out themselves on the morning of 20 May. The bridge was dismantled behind them.
A.J. Smith boarded his troops onto transports on 22 May to return to Vicksburg, more than a month after Grant had insisted on their return. Banks led the rest of his force to Donaldsonville, where they made camp on 26 May.
* The Red River campaign was over. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey emerged as the hero of the exercise. Porter personally awarded him a ceremonial sword and the Navy gave him a valuable ceremonial silver vase. Both Porter and Banks had nothing but glowing praise for Bailey, since he had done much to save both of their commands. The Congress granted him a vote of thanks, and the Army soon promoted him to brigadier general.
As far as everyone else who had been on the expedition was concerned, there were few causes for satisfaction and many causes for unhappiness. The Federals had lost about 5,500 men marching up and down the Red River, well more than the Confederate losses of about 4,725. The Union had also lost large quantities of supplies, horses, mules, and wagons, plus an ironclad gunboat, two tinclad gunboats, three transports, and two pump boats.
The unhappy end of the campaign unsurprisingly led to finger-pointing and recriminations. Franklin resigned from Banks' command, to end up, fortunately for the Union cause, sidelined for the rest of the war. Banks and Porter quarreled bitterly, and a Congressional committee performed an investigation to see what had gone wrong.
One of the big problems in hindsight had been the agenda for grabbing cotton. Banks denied, no doubt sincerely, that the campaign had not been conducted just to obtain cotton, but it had certainly entered into and influenced his calculations. It had definitely been a major factor in the calculations of some of the other participants in the operation. They had been given implicit encouragement for this all the way down from the top.
In January 1864, the Federal government had attempted to clarify the rules for dealing with Confederate cotton. The Federal government reasoned that if Southern cotton growers were able to slip cotton through the blockade, they would be able to fetch a high price for it, paid in weapons and ammunition that would be used to fight the Union. With cotton prices so high the Lincoln Administration felt that if the Union didn't buy the cotton, the rebels would be able to sell it for a much higher price on the export market. As Lincoln told a Union general who protested angrily over the trade: "Better give him [the rebels] guns for it than let him, as now, get guns and ammunition for it." In hindsight, it isn't so certain that Lincoln's arithmetic really worked out that way.
In any case, the new Federal policy stated that any Southerner who wanted to sell cotton to the US government could take an oath of loyalty, and would then be paid a quarter of the cotton's market value in cash, along with a receipt for the other three-quarters of payment that could be redeemed after the war. In theory, this took cotton out of the hands of the South and made Southern cotton growers born-again Unionists. This was a nice neat business transaction, but warfare is a strange sort of business, generally neither nice nor neat. One complication to the scheme was that the Navy had some rules of their own regarding cotton, in that it was seen as just another naval prize that could be seized by a captain and his crew and sold off for their personal profit, much like an enemy merchantman. In effect, they were given both license and encouragement to grab cotton.
As Banks and his forces had moved up the Red, local cotton growers had brought out their bales of cotton in hopes of receiving Yankee dollars, only to have the bales seized by Porter and his officers as contraband of war. In principle, the Navy men were only supposed to steal cotton belonging to the Confederate government, but in practice it was very simple to stencil "CSA" on a bale of cotton, cross it out, and then stencil "USN" underneath. An Army colonel suggested that this stood for "Cotton Stealing Association of the United States Navy". Even Porter thought the joke was funny. Banks later claimed, in response to Porter's self-serving allegations that the whole expedition was an exercise in cotton speculation, that the Navy had sent Marines inland on wagons to collect it.
The planters, betrayed, began to burn their cotton, instead of having it stolen by Porter's men. The cotton speculators who had followed the advance to Alexandria were furious, and after Banks told them to go back to New Orleans they had absolutely nothing good to say about him. The government had authorized and encouraged them, and now they had nothing to show for it. Most of the cotton that fell into Union hands ended up becoming part of Bailey's dam, much to the satisfaction of Army troops, who were entirely disgusted with the Navy's profiteering.
* As much as cotton had encouraged bitterness between the Army and the Navy and contributed to the failure, that issue was overshadowed by the overwhelming fact that the whole expedition had been a waste of effort in the first place. With Union forces moving against Shreveport instead of Mobile, General Polk was able to add the weight of his corps to the defense of Atlanta, prolonging Sherman's thrust into the heart of the Confederacy and stretching out the war.
This was clearly seen at the time. The assistant medical director on Banks' staff commented: "It seemed to me that any life lost in battle west of the Mississippi River after January, 1864, was an unnecessary sacrifice, and that the real theater of war was east of the river and the operations west of it only a sideshow."
Nathaniel Banks had been at least as much sinned against as a sinner in the whole fiasco. He had failed in the Shenandoah Valley partly because he refused to listen to his senior officers, and failed in the Red River partly because he did; and of course the indecisiveness of Grant and Halleck in neither supporting nor calling off the expedition factored heavily in the fiasco. Still, it was a failure, and it was the last straw for Banks' military career; patience for military ineptitude had grown much shorter.
However, Banks had to be treated kindly due to his political influence, and though he was nothing much as a general, he was both honest and a competent administrator. The solution was to form the "Military Division of West Mississippi", with responsibility for Union forces in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Major General Edward R.S. Canby was put in charge. Canby, who had chased the Confederates out of New Mexico territory, had come back East after that and served in administrative posts. He had been a classmate of Grant's at West Point, and Grant felt Canby was a good candidate for the job. Canby could take charge of military operations, leaving Banks to sit at a desk where he could do good and not harm.
When Banks arrived in Simsport on his retreat, Canby was already waiting for him there with papers establishing the new order. One of the soldiers on the march observed that Banks looked "worn and dejected", returning from a campaign that had been a failure to find, no doubt to little surprise, that he had been relieved from command. It was done in a very tactful and polite way of course, but he had still been effectively demoted. Banks had hoped to shower himself in military glory as a step towards the White House, and now he saw his presidential ambitions going up in a column of smoke, like those that had dotted the path of his campaign up the Red.
* Oddly, while the Federal participants in the Red River fiasco quarreled among themselves, a roughly similar set of quarrels was in progress among their Confederate opposites. This was odd because Kirby Smith had reason to be pleased with how things had gone. His soldiers had defeated two Union forces that combined greatly outnumbered him, inflicting a total of about 8,000 casualties on them to about 6,500 of his own, and seized dozens of artillery pieces, hundreds of wagons, and thousands of mules and horses. Most important of all, he had thwarted Federal designs on his department.
The difficulty was that Richard Taylor was off his head with anger over the management of the campaign. Certainly the massive devastation that marked the path of Bank's army gave him a very good reason to believe that calling the matter a "victory" for the Confederacy was mocking the destitution and misery of the citizens of the region. However, Taylor went much farther than that. He believed that the invaders should have been completely destroyed. Considering their conduct, it would have been only just, and more importantly it would have allowed rebel forces in the Trans-Mississippi to then reverse the course of the war in the region, driving the Federals out of Arkansas and pressing them in Missouri. The whole "hideous failure" was only due, as Taylor put it with absolutely no finesse, to the "sheer stupidity and pig-headed obstinacy" of his superiors.
That wasn't the end of it, either. On 6 June, Taylor wrote a letter to Kirby Smith that gave Smith a double-shotted load of wrath straight in the face. Smith was an easy-going man but this was going too far, and he was forced to take action. He send Taylor's letter and a covering letter to Jefferson Davis, suggesting that Davis had to relieve Smith or Taylor from command. Under the circumstances, there was no way they could work together. Smith also suspended Taylor from command, ordering him to quarters in Natchitoches until Davis could render his judgement. One of Taylor's lieutenants, Major General John G. Walker, took command in his place.
Taylor, an intelligent man, lived to be embarrassed by his conduct, claiming as a perfectly believable excuse that he had been under extreme pressure, but the thing had been done and there was no undoing it. In compensation, Richmond recognized that Taylor had done very well under difficult circumstances, and soon gave him a promotion to lieutenant general.
* As far as the rest of the Confederacy went, the frustration of Banks and Steele was an inspiring victory, particularly since it came in the wake of fears that the Federal thrust was too powerful to be stopped. It had been stopped and sent running back home. Coming in the wake of other Confederate successes over the last few months, this latest triumph could give encouragement to Southern patriots that they might yet win their independence if they continued to frustrate Union advances into their states. Surely, Northerners would have to decide at some point that their attempt to subjugate the South was not worth the price in money and blood.
Jefferson Davis pinned his hopes on continued Confederate resistance to Union aggression, but this effort was draining, and the drain on Davis had been massively increased by a personal tragedy on the last day of April. His five-year-old son Joe had fallen off a balcony onto brick pavement, broken both legs and fractured his skull, and died that day. Davis was almost in shock with grief, but he never lacked for self-control and rallied quickly. However, many visitors commented that he had seemed to have aged greatly overnight.
Davis would find his hopes now ever dimming. Although the Federals would be frustrated many more times, the Union war machine was now at full steam. No matter what setbacks the Yankees were dealt, they would simply come forward again and tighten their grip.
