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against 12,000 Federals, but he was one of the ablest generals in the South and had already demonstrated his aggressive fighting skills while serving under Stonewall Jackson in 1862. In this campaign, Taylor also benefited from having several excellent subordinates, including the French aristocrat Prince Camille de Polignac (affectionately dubbed “Prince Polecat” by his Texan troops), who had volunteered for the South in 1861. The Confederates cost the Federals 2,000 men at Mansfield; the loss shattered Banks’s confidence in the mission, and he ordered a general retreat, much to the chagrin of his own troops. His men never forgave him for making them look like cowards, and whenever he passed by marching columns he was greeted with rude songs and catcalls. Prevented from fighting the real enemy, Federal soldiers instead punished the surrounding communities, leaving a swath of burning homesteads all the way back to Alexandria. Porter’s fleet was now stranded above the rapids, forcing Banks to stay put with his glowering army until the Red River rose or someone found a way to carry the ships over the rocks.

Toward the end of April, with Porter’s ships still floating in three feet of water rather than the usual nine, Colonel Joseph Bailey, the acting military engineer of the xix Corps, devised a complex plan for damming the river to create a surge over the falls. “This proposition looked like madness, and the best engineers ridiculed it,” wrote Admiral Porter in his report. But Bailey convinced his superiors that the plan would work. On April 30, three thousand Federal troops began hacking and sawing. “Trees were falling … quarries were opened; flat-boats were built to bring stone down from above, and every man seemed to be working with a vigor I have seldom seen equalled,” wrote Porter. He singled out a few officers and regiments for praise, in particular the 133rd New York and its English colonel, L.D.H. Currie, adding that “the noble men who succeeded so admirably in this arduous task, should not lose one atom of credit so justly due them.”4 With his wounds healed, Currie had decided against transferring to another command and was back once more with his men, guiding them through the perils of Banks’s final campaign.

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On March 1, Confederate troops near Richmond stopped a bold attempt by a small Union cavalry outfit to liberate the Federal prisoners in Belle Isle camp on the James River. One of the leaders of the expedition, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, was killed during the retreat. Southerners were appalled that Dahlgren, who had strong family ties to the Confederacy, would turn against his own. Even more shocking was the discovery of papers on his body that outlined a plan to massacre the entire Confederate cabinet.5

The days of “Rosewater chivalry” were at an end, declared the Richmond Enquirer on March 5; henceforth the Confederacy must fight “barbarity with barbarity.”6 A week after Dahlgren’s raid, Davis summoned Captain Thomas Hines, who had masterminded the prison escape of the Kentucky raider General John Hunt Morgan, to a secret meeting in Richmond. He ordered Hines to travel to Canada via Chicago and other cities in the Northwest to recruit propagandists and fighters for the South. Once in Canada, his mission was to collect the scattered survivors of Morgan’s command, plus any displaced Southerners or former prisoners of war, and encourage them to rejoin the Confederate army. Hines could, in the carefully chosen words of the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, by “any fair and appropriate enterprises of war” engage in “any hostile operation” against the North.7

Hines presented Colonel Grenfell with a dilemma after he invited his former comrade to join his operations in Canada. At first, Grenfell felt honor-bound to keep his promise to serve Morgan as his adjutant general.8 But the offer of adventure proved too enticing, and two weeks after Captain Hines received his departure orders, Grenfell resigned his commission and announced he was leaving the Confederacy. The resignation was obviously a contrivance,