A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [328]
Grant had prepared a strategic plan for the next phase of the war: to subdue the western half of the Confederacy first before moving east to crush Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But he discovered on his arrival in Washington that Lincoln’s promise not to meddle in military actions contained qualifications. Lincoln, along with General Henry Halleck (who had been relegated to the newly created administrative post of chief of staff), wanted a major push up the Red River into Texas.
The fertile cotton plantations along the Red River were too enticing for the administration to ignore. Lincoln also liked the idea of keeping troops in Texas just in case the Confederates attempted to join forces with the French in Mexico. The fall of Mexico City in June 1863 had effectively ended the Franco-Mexican War, although the victorious French army was still fighting the defeated Juarist regime in parts of the country. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, had been cajoled by Louis-Napoleon into accepting the imperial crown of Mexico and was due to arrive in the country sometime in April.28.2 Even though Grant did not think either reason was sufficiently compelling to deprive him of the forces he needed for an attack against Mobile, Alabama—which he considered a vital stepping-off point for capturing the rest of the state—Lincoln and Halleck went ahead with their plan anyway.
On March 12, General Nathaniel Banks’s troops began slogging from Franklin, Louisiana, toward Shreveport, the Confederate capital of Louisiana since the capture of Alexandria in 1863. The campaign was a joint army-navy expedition, with Admiral David Dixon Porter leading a flotilla up the Red River to converge with Banks at Shreveport. Some of the infantry regiments were only two months old. The 17th Infantry Corps d’Afrique, for example, was made up of freed slaves from Nashville, Tennessee. Its officers were white volunteers from across the North, among them Dr. Charles Culverwell from New York.28.3 The generous signing bonus of $227 had persuaded him to apply for the post; part of it paid for his photograph in a new uniform purchased specially for the expedition. Many years later, he made light of his participation in the Red River campaign, joking that he had expected to show off his crisp new jacket to the inhabitants of captured Confederate towns, only to find that the opportunity never came.
Few excursions in the war encountered so many mishaps or ended so ignominiously as Banks’s Louisiana campaign. The start had been exceptionally smooth; he reached Alexandria on March 26 and immediately began to organize elections for the new pro-Union state legislature. But after that, nothing went right. This plan to revive economic ties between Southern plantation owners and the North was undone by Admiral Porter’s officers, who seized all the cotton for themselves before the official cotton brokers, who accompanied Banks, had a chance to transact any legitimate business. Even the Red River turned against him; instead of rising to its usual winter levels, it began to shrink at a rapid rate. Porter just managed to haul his vessels over the rapids above Alexandria before the fast-emerging rocks made the journey impossible. The U.S. fleet ground to a halt near Grand Ecore, a small trading town perched atop a ninety-foot bluff, more than seventy miles from Shreveport. Banks was able to push his army a little farther upriver, but the single-track route he had chosen turned the journey into a slow-moving haul through foul slurry.
The Confederate general Richard “Dick” Taylor ended Banks’s advance at the Battle of Mansfield on April 7, some forty miles south of Shreveport. Taylor had only 8,000 men