Actions near Alexandria — Red River Campaign

The city of Alexandria, Louisiana sits on the Red River, and in the spring of eighteen sixty-four it was the epicenter of one of the Union Army's most humiliating failures of the entire Civil War. The story involves a general who chose cotton over combat, a river that nearly swallowed a fleet, and an engineer whose improvisation saved hundreds of lives.

The Red River Campaign launched in March of eighteen sixty-four with a deceptively simple strategic goal: push up the Red River into the cotton-rich interior of Louisiana, link up with a separate force in Arkansas, and open the road into Texas. Union General Nathaniel Banks led an army of roughly thirty-five thousand men, counting the column under General Andrew Smith. Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter commanded a supporting gunboat fleet on the river. They moved quickly, taking Alexandria and Fort DeRussy in mid-March.

Then came the Battle of Mansfield on April eighth. Confederate General Richard Taylor caught Banks' vanguard strung out on a country road, launched a determined assault, and routed the lead divisions. The Union army never recovered its momentum. Banks ordered a retreat back down the Red River toward Alexandria.

The retreat nearly became a catastrophe of a different kind. The Red River was falling with the drought of late spring. Porter's gunboats, drawing too much water for the dropping river, were trapped above the rapids at Alexandria. With Confederate forces closing in, the fleet faced destruction or capture.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey, an Army engineer who had been a Wisconsin lumberman before the war, proposed a solution: build a series of wing dams using materials salvaged from the riverbanks. Working around the clock for ten days, soldiers and sailors assembled the dam, raised the water level, and Porter's gunboats ran the falls to safety, the last of them on May thirteenth. It was one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the war.

As the Union forces left, much of Alexandria burned, and the origin of the fire is still disputed.