Monett's Ferry: The Red River Retreat

By April of eighteen sixty-four, the Union's Red River Campaign had already gone badly wrong. General Nathaniel Banks had led an army of thirty thousand up the Red River into central Louisiana with the goal of capturing Shreveport and raising the United States flag over Texas. Instead, he had been beaten at Sabine Crossroads and forced to fall back after Pleasant Hill, and now he was retreating south through the Louisiana pinelands with Confederate cavalry pressing hard on his rear.

The Cane River crossings were the bottleneck. Where the Cane River curved southwest of what is now Natchitoches, there was a ford called Monett's Ferry, and Brigadier General Hamilton P. Bee had rushed ahead with Confederate cavalry to hold it. If Bee could block the crossing, Banks's entire retreating column would be trapped between the Cane River in front and Confederate infantry behind.

On the morning of April twenty-third, eighteen sixty-four, Brigadier General William Emory led the Union advance and found Bee dug in on the far bank. Emory knew a frontal assault across the water would cost him dearly. So he demonstrated noisily at the main crossing while sending a brigade upstream to hunt for an alternative ford. They found one. The flanking force crossed, hit Bee's cavalry from the side, and the Confederate position collapsed.

Bee's men rode off to the south. Banks's army laid pontoon bridges, and by the next day, the entire column had crossed and was pushing toward Alexandria.

The battle was small by Civil War standards, a few hundred casualties on both sides, but its consequences were decisive. Had Bee held Monett's Ferry, the Union retreat might have turned into a catastrophe. As it was, Banks made it to Alexandria, then to the Mississippi, then out of Louisiana entirely. The Red River Campaign ended as the Union's most embarrassing military failure of the war in the Western Theater, a costly adventure that accomplished almost nothing.

The Cane River country here has changed remarkably little. The same water, the same Spanish moss, the same low red banks where the soldiers of both sides splashed across on a warm Louisiana spring morning, wondering if the worst was already behind them.