Never Call Retreat (51 page)

Johnston had several times asked that Forrest (who was not under his command) be sent against Sherman's communications. So had Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, a tireless mouthpiece for the Georgia dissenters. When Mr. Davis told Brown that Forrest had in fact spent weeks operating deep in Sherman's rear areas, although not on his railroad, and that he was kept very busy on important assignments far to the west of Georgia, Brown replied: "If your mistake should result in loss of Atlanta and the occupation of other strong points in this state by the enemy, the blow may be fatal to our cause and remote posterity may have reason to mourn over the error."
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This was somewhat unjust, because Forrest had been busy and effective. In March and April he had raided in western Tennessee and Kentucky, getting all the way to the Ohio River, occupying Paducah briefly, collecting recruits and horses and food and weapons and returning to his base in Mississippi stronger than when he started out.

On this raid he stormed Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi in Tennessee some forty miles above Memphis, held by approximately six hundred Federals, half of them Negro soldiers, the other half Tennessee whites whom the Confederates contemptuously called "homemade Yankees." The defense was poorly directed, no one seemed sure whether the fort was actually surrendered or was simply overrun, and a number of white and colored soldiers were killed after effective defense had ended. Radical Republicans in Washington charged that there had been an outright massacre, after Forrest went back to Mississippi the Committee on the Conduct of the War collected a hair-raising set of atrocity stories, and there were demands for stern retaliation. The retaliation never took place, but a new note of bitterness entered Northern war propaganda and the affair testified to the grimness of the fighting in the disputed border country.

Early in June, Forrest started north to do more damage, but learned that Sherman had ordered Major General S. D. Sturgis with 8000 men to come down from Memphis and destroy him. He turned to meet Sturgis, caught him on June 10 at Brice's Crossroads, Mississippi, where the Federals were all strung out on a muddy road with a mired wagon train blocking the path for the infantry, and inflicted on this luckless command one of the most startling defeats of the war. In this battle Forrest caused more than 2200 Union casualties and lost fewer than 500 of his own men, seizing sixteen guns and two hundred wagons and leaving the routed Federals, as Sturgis confessed, "in no condition to offer determined resistance." Sturgis was glad enough to get his bedraggled men back to Memphis, where he reported that he had been attacked by a force numbering somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 men. In reality, Forrest had taken no more than 3500 into action.
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Forrest in short had been accomplishing a great deal; yet as far as the outcome of the war was concerned his efforts had been wasted. This man, who better than anyone else in the Confederacy could create chaos in the rear of an invading army, had not been used for that purpose when an invasion was threatening the Confederacy's very life. He had compelled the Federal government to waste money and manpower on what it had supposed was a thoroughly conquered area, and he had driven Sherman to cry angrily that there would never be peace in western Tennessee until Forrest was dead: but he had not made Sherman turn about and go north instead of south, and that was all that really mattered. He was a priceless resource and he had been used on a sideshow.

This was tragic, because Mr. Davis had no margin for error. His military resources were so limited that he dared not misuse any of them. Here Mr. Lincoln held an increasing advantage. In a military sense he had almost unlimited funds; he might lose the war by making political mistakes, but his military mistakes could be made good. This was an enormous point in his favor. Mr. Davis made the Federal invasion of Georgia easier by what he did with Johnston and Forrest, and Mr. Lincoln made it harder by what he did with General Banks; the difference was that the Northern President had something to spare and the Southern President did not.

When Mr. Lincoln authorized the Red River expedition he tried to do several things at once. He wound up by doing none of them, yet the big trouble was not that the expedition failed but that it was made at all. Like Forrest, Banks was put to work in the wrong place and he represented wasted effort. He carried out his assignment miserably, but the basic idea was bad to begin with.

The idea dated away back to the early days of the war, beginning to take active shape when General Banks got to Louisiana and sent back that glowing report about the enormous amount of cotton that could be had if the Federals controlled the Red River Valley. As the war grew older the Federal appetite for cotton increased, along with the price of cotton, and the profits that could be made by traders who laid their hands on it; and other events made that distant river valley look even more important.

The Red River came down from the country where Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana touched corners, and the city of Shreveport, three hundred tangled miles from the place where the Red River reached the Mississippi, was several things at once. It was the temporary capital of Confederate Louisiana, and it was also headquarters of General Edmund Kirby Smith and so, in a way, the capital of the trans-Mississippi Confederacy. It was a big supply depot, and a first-rate gateway to Texas. If the Federals held Shreveport and the river they could frustrate all of Smith's plans, protect their own control of the Mississippi and states like Missouri, and invade Texas whenever they pleased; also, the insecure ten percent governments set up in Louisiana and Arkansas would be strengthened. Shreveport looked like a place worth taking, and early in January Halleck told Banks that he was to go ahead and take it.

The stated objectives were simple: occupy Shreveport and drive the Rebels away from the Red River. Banks would have help. From Arkansas Major General Frederick Steele was to march down to join him with 15,000 men; Sherman was ordered to send 10,000 more under Major General A. J. Smith, and Admiral Porter would take a powerful flotilla up the Red River, convoying transports and supply steamers. All in all Banks would command between 40,000 and 50,000 men. He had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the venture, but he considered its objectives good and he assured Halleck that "the occupation of Shreveport will be to the country west of the Mississippi what that of Chattanooga is to the east."
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This might well be so, although the precise value of a triumph gained west of the river at a time when the war was to be won or lost east of the river was never thoroughly examined. Military and political considerations were so mixed that it was hard to say what the basic idea back of the expedition really was, and when Congressional investigators later asked Admiral Porter what the operation was intended to do the admiral replied: "I never understood."
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At the time he testified, Porter was on the most hostile terms imaginable with Banks, and this may have colored his answer; but it must be admitted that the thing was a jumble.

Whatever was meant, the expedition never came close to success. Banks himself was late, being held in New Orleans by ceremonies connected with the installation of the new loyalist government of Louisiana, but his troops took off on March 13 under General Franklin and ten days later they got to Alexandria, sixty miles up the Red River, where they met Smith's contingent and Porter's fleet. Banks overtook them there on March 24, and found waiting for him a dispatch from General Grant.

Grant had taken the top command intending Banks to join a combined movement of all the armies east of the Mississippi, and one of his first discoveries was that it was too late to cancel this Red River foray. He wrote his dispatch to Banks on March 15, immediately after his exploratory visit to Meade's army, saying frankly that he saw little point to this expedition and that the destruction of Confederate armies was "of vastly more importance than the mere acquisition of territory." If Shreveport fell, Banks and most of his men must return to New Orleans at once to mount an offensive toward Mobile; further—and this Banks found really troublesome—whatever happened, Smith and his 10,000 must go back to Sherman by April 25 at the latest, even if this wrecked the entire operation.
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Handicaps piled up so fast that this one made no difference. Coming down from Arkansas on bad roads swarming with hostile cavalry under General Sterling Price, Steele found it impossible either to drive Price away or to carry adequate supplies, and presently he had to beat a laborious retreat, giving Banks no help whatever. Water in the Red River was abnormally low, and it was April 3 before Porter could get his fleet past the rapids just above Alexandria. The army plodded on, two-thirds of the way from Alexandria to Shreveport, and on April 8 it encountered 8000 Confederates under Major General Richard Taylor, son of old Zachary and a good fighter in his own right. Taylor caught Franklin's column much as Forrest had caught Sturgis—strung out on a narrow road, with a wagon train stalled just where it would do the most harm—and at a place called Sabine Crossroads, south of Mansfield, he struck this column, mangled it and drove it back in confused retreat. Banks got things in hand, next day, and in a fight at Pleasant Hill A. J. Smith's men routed Taylor in a battle made odd by the fact that as soon as it ended both armies retreated as fast as they could go.

Kirby Smith took part of Taylor's force north to aid Price in driving back Steele, while Taylor, greatly depleted, managed an able harassing campaign against the gunboats and Banks. The Federal general wanted to confer with the navy and take stock, and he put his army in camp around the steamboat landing of Grand Ecore, where low water had brought the fleet's advance to a halt. What he learned here gave him scant comfort. The navy's luck had been worse than the army's, the river was falling so fast that if the fleet did not get out soon it could not get out at all, and under Grant's orders it was time to send Smith east. It had already been necessary to send away 3000 men who properly belonged to McPherson, 4000 more had been battle casualties, Steele and his 15,000 had never arrived at all, and without Smith's troops Banks felt that he would be forced to go back to New Orleans. He wired Grant that "this campaign cannot be abandoned without abandoning the navy and permitting the invasion of Missouri," and Porter sent an anxious message to Sherman saying that the safety of both the fleet and the army depended on keeping Smith: "He is the only part of the army that was not demoralized, and if he was to leave there would be a most disastrous result."
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In the end both the army and the navy escaped, but the thing was such a crashing failure that the mere fact that Porter's gunboats were saved came to look almost like a victory and was about the only point of the campaign the people in the North ever cared to remember. Low water made it impossible to get the gunboats down past the Alexandria rapids; the Confederates were bringing up sharpshooters and field artillery to harass them, Porter had already lost one light gunboat and two auxiliaries, and if the army retreated he must destroy all the rest. To blow up ten good gunboats was unthinkable, but to let the enemy have them would be far worse: give the Confederates a solid fleet of ironclads on the Mississippi and the war in the west might as well be started all over again.

The boats probably would have been lost if it had not been for Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry, chief engineer for Franklin's XIX Corps. Bailey had worked on western rivers and he saved the navy with a western river trick: when the water was too low the westerners simply built dams to make it higher. Banks gave Bailey two or three Maine regiments composed mostly of lumberjacks, handy with axes and used to riverside work, and Bailey put them to work building dams to create a suitable head of water. The river rose and hid the rocks, Porter's gunboats came bumping and grating over the shallows, and then the flood waters were released and the ungainly ironclads went careening downstream, all smoke and steam and spray, everybody whooping, army bands on the banks playing to cheer them along. On this gratifying but negative achievement the campaign came to an end, and by May 21 army and navy were back on the Mississippi.
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The campaign had been a blunder, not because it failed but because it was made at all. It prevented the Mobile offensive, kept 10,000 good men away from Sherman when he needed them most and enabled Mr. Davis to send Bishop Polk's corps to help Joe Johnston, and it would have had all of these effects even if Banks had been successful. It was an offensive that pointed in the wrong direction.

Also it was tainted. Nobody ever forgot about that Red River cotton, and although the campaign's basic objectives were clean enough the cotton business stained it. Washington wanted cotton and it also wanted to make good Unionists out of Southern planters: natural desires, both of them, but not compatible with purely military aims. In January the Treasury had issued new rules for the cotton trade: any Southerner who brought cotton inside the Union lines and took an oath of loyalty would be paid 25 percent of the cotton's market value in cash and could get a receipt for the balance, and at the end of the war, if he could show that his loyalty had remained firm after he made this deal, he could cash the receipt. In theory, this gave him a financial motive for wishing to see the Union restored; in practice it raised a whole mare's nest of problems, and later in the summer the Federal Major General E. R. S. Canby dilated upon these in a letter to President Lincoln.

When a Federal army entered a cotton-growing area, said General Canby, Confederate officers were supposed to burn cotton and Union officers were supposed to confiscate it. The cotton traders wanted neither thing to happen, and so they tried to make such invasions fail, tipping off the Confederate authorities whenever a move was being planned. Much worse, they swarmed all over everybody, trying to buy cotton before it could be either burned or seized, and they did this because the government's rules gave them a direct incentive. The government was actively promoting trade with the enemy at the very moment when it was trying its best to destroy him.