Battle of Mansfield, Last Confederate Victory

On April eighth, eighteen sixty-four, near the crossroads of Sabine Crossroads just south of Mansfield, Louisiana, Confederate forces handed the Union army one of its most comprehensive defeats of the entire war. The Battle of Mansfield would prove to be the last major Confederate victory of the Civil War.

The engagement was the pivot point of the Red River Campaign, a Union operation intended to push deep into Confederate Texas. Major General Nathaniel Banks commanded roughly twenty thousand Federal troops, moving up the Red River toward Shreveport with a secondary purpose of confiscating cotton and propping up Union-friendly Louisiana politics. Confederate Major General Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, decided to strike.

Taylor chose his ground carefully, near Mansfield where the road narrowed and the Union column would be unable to deploy its superior numbers. Banks made the fatal mistake of stringing his army along several miles of road rather than concentrating it. When Taylor attacked in the afternoon, fewer than half of Banks's soldiers were actually on the field.

The Confederate assault drove the Union forces back in a rout. Banks lost about one hundred fifty supply wagons, twenty artillery pieces, and twenty-two hundred men killed, wounded, or captured. Taylor's casualties were roughly one thousand. The defeat forced Banks to retreat southward toward Alexandria, abandoning the campaign.

The consequences reached far beyond Louisiana. The failure of the Red River Campaign freed Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi from the threat of a western invasion, pinned Union resources that might otherwise have gone to support Grant in Virginia or Sherman in Georgia, and gave the Confederacy a morale boost in the spring of eighteen sixty-four, when the war's outcome was still genuinely uncertain.

The Mansfield State Historic Site preserves the battlefield today, one of the best-preserved Civil War sites in the South.