Red River Campaign

The area around Shreveport witnessed one of the most spectacularly botched Union operations of the entire Civil War, a campaign that General William Tecumseh Sherman later summarized as, quote, one damn blunder from beginning to end.

In the spring of eighteen sixty-four, with the war entering its fourth year, the Union hatched a plan to seize the Red River valley, the cotton-rich corridor running northwest through Louisiana toward Shreveport, which was then serving as the temporary capital of Confederate Louisiana and a major supply depot for Texas. Control the Red River, the thinking went, and you control Texas.

General in Chief Henry Halleck planned the operation, though Grant wanted the troops borrowed from Sherman back by mid-April. Major General Nathaniel Banks led roughly thirty thousand Union soldiers up through Louisiana while Admiral David Dixon Porter commanded a fleet of more than thirty warships ascending the Red River.

The campaign unraveled at Mansfield, also called Sabine Crossroads, on April eighth, eighteen sixty-four. Banks had left the river and the protection of Porter's guns to march overland, his column strung out for miles along a narrow road. Confederate General Richard Taylor saw the opportunity and attacked. Within hours the Union line collapsed. Seven hundred Union soldiers were killed or wounded, fifteen hundred captured, twenty artillery pieces taken. Banks fled.

Worse was to come for Porter's fleet. The Red River was falling faster than expected, and the gunboats found themselves trapped in the rapids above Alexandria, unable to pass downstream. Only a desperate improvised dam, built by Wisconsin engineers who had worked in the logging industry, raised the water level enough to float the vessels over the falls and save the fleet from surrender.

Shreveport was never taken. The operation cost thousands of lives and accomplished nothing. It stands today as a cautionary tale about fighting the wrong campaign in the wrong season against the wrong general.