The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Accordingly, he left Shreveport on April 16, taking Walker and Churchill with him. Taylor stayed on for two more days, arranging for the shipment of supplies, and then set out on the 19th to join what he called “my little force near Grand Ecore.” He was still hopeful that the Federals could be bagged, despite the disparity in numbers, and he counted on using deception to that end. Compelled, as he said, “to eke out the lion’s skin with the fox’s hide,” he had instructed his unit commanders to keep Banks on edge, and deceived as to their strength, “by sending drummers to beat calls, lighting campfires, blowing bugles, and rolling empty wagons over fence rails.”

  All this they had done, and more, with such effect that when Taylor dismounted near Grand Ecore on the evening of April 21, ending his ninety-mile ride, he found that the Federals had begun to pull out of the place that afternoon. The head of their column was already beyond Natchitoches, slogging south in an apparent attempt to take up a safer position at Alexandria, if not to get away entirely. Determined not to permit this, Taylor set about planning how to intercept the retiring bluecoats and, if possible, bring them to battle, although they outnumbered him five to one, exclusive of their heavily gunned flotilla. Their march was down the narrow “island” lying between Cane River and the Red, and it was his hope to force them into a strung-out halt that would give him a chance to go to work on them piecemeal. With this in mind, he sent Bee’s brigade of cavalry on a fast ride south to Monett’s Ferry, forty miles away at the far end of the island, with instructions to block the crossing of the Cane at that point, so that the rest of his troops could be thrown upon some vulnerable segment of the blue column stalled between there and Natchitoches. This was an ambitious undertaking for some 5000 men opposed by 25,000, but Taylor undertook it gladly, anticipating the Cannae he had been seeking all along.

  Banks anticipated much the same thing, and moved rapidly to avoid it if he could. He was by now, as a result of the strain of the past ten days, about as edgy as even Taylor could have wished, and this edginess had been provoked by more than the various nerve-jangling ruses those “22,000 to 25,000” graybacks had been practicing in the woods beyond his semicircular line. For one, there was a growing sense of failure. He still had spasms and flickers of hope, during which he planned to go back over to the offensive, but these grew fewer and weaker as the days wore on, until finally they stopped. For another, he had found waiting for him at Grand Ecore a message from Sherman, notifying him that his lease on A. J. Smith’s three divisions had expired and ordering their immediate return. This could be ignored or countermanded because of the exigencies of the situation, which plainly would permit no such detachment; but a few days later, on April 18, he received from Grant a follow-up letter of instructions that had for him, in his present hemmed-in state, a sound of hollow mockery not so easily dismissed. Written at the end of March, it set forth in some detail the procedure he was to follow, once Shreveport had been taken, in moving without delay against Mobile. “You cannot start too soon,” the letter ended. “All I would now add is that you commence the concentration of your force at once. Preserve a profound secrecy of what you intend doing, and start at the earliest possible moment.”

  That was perhaps the cruelest blow; Grant had written as if in fervid haste, lest time be wasted between the fall of Shreveport, apparently expected momentarily, and the arrival of his letter urging Banks to be quick in taking the road to glory, which led from Shreveport to the White House, by way of Mobile, Atlanta, and Richmond. Contrasting what was with what might have been — for the road’s only entrance, for him, was Shreveport, and he could not get there to take it — the former Bay State governor was correspondingly depressed. He relieved his spleen to some degree, however, with a pair of summary dismissals. One was of Stone, his chief of staff (Stone took no further part in the war, though afterwards he served the Khedive of Egypt in the same capacity for thirteen years, with the rank of lieutenant general, and then returned to act as chief engineer in the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty); Banks let him go because he found him “very weak,” and the same might have been said of young Albert Lee, whom he relieved of duty as cavalry commander and sent back to New Orleans, although not without regret. He testified later that Lee had been “active, willing, and brave,” if not skillful, and had “suffered, more or less unjustly, as all of us did, for being connected with that affair.”

  Such administrative corrections had little effect on a tactical situation which seemed to be growing increasingly grim as the rebels out in the brush continued to beat drums, build a myriad of campfires, blow bugles, and bring up what sounded like thousands of wagonloads of supplies and ammunition. For what purpose all this was being done Banks could only guess, but with every passing hour he was brought closer to the inevitable conclusion that if he could not go forward, as was obviously the case, then he would do well not to postpone going back. This applied most of all to Porter’s gunboats, for the river was still falling: was already down, in fact, to half the seven-foot depth required to float them over the double falls at Alexandria. The thing to do was get back there as soon as possible, before the river took another perverse drop, for a close-up look at what was reported to be an impossible situation. So the admiral advised, although the temptation was strong to remain where he was, under the friendly bluff at Grand Ecore, his recent trip to Loggy Bayou having given him all too graphic a preview of what to expect in the course of his return to the Mississippi, down those more than three hundred winding miles of the Red. “It is easy to die here, and there are many ways of doing it,” a sailor diarist had observed en route. In addition to the more or less normal dangers involved in descending a swift and crooked river at the speed required to maintain steerage — staved-in bows, unshipped rudders, broken wheels, and punctured hulls, all brought on by collisions with other boats, with underwater snags, with the iron-hard red clay bottom — there were the rebels to contend with, fast-firing marksmen who shot at passing or stalled vessels from hidden positions along both banks. At Blair’s Landing, for example, where Tom Green was killed by a blast of canister, the fleet was exposed to what one veteran skipper called “the heaviest and most concentrated fire of musketry I have ever witnessed.” As a result of this and other such nightmare encounters at places with names like Campti and Coushatta Chute, the thirty-boat flotilla got back from its ten-day upstream excursion sadly altered in appearance: especially the vessels loaded with Kilby Smith’s gorillas, to which the butternut riflemen and cannoneers had given their particular attention. “The sides of some of the transports are half shot away,” a soldier noted in his diary on April 15, after watching them come in, “and their smokestacks look like huge pepper boxes.”

  Porter recommended an immediate return to Alexandria, but Banks was not quite ready to make so frank an admission of defeat. That took him another four days, two of which he used to compose a letter to Grant, explaining that his retrograde movement from Mansfield had been due more to a shortage of water and the nonarrival of Steele than to resistance by the enemy — though he added, rather ingeniously, that the stubborn quality of the latter had proved the campaign to be “of greater importance than was generally anticipated at its commencement,” and asked therefore that he be allowed to continue it beyond schedule, but only a bit, since “immediate success, with a concentration of our forces, is within our reach.” Knowing Grant’s low tolerance for failure, however skillfully disguised, he did not have much hope that his request would be granted, and he had even less hope, in case it was, that he would be continued in command. At the end of the four days (April 19: the day Taylor set out on his ninety-mile ride from Shreveport) Banks issued orders for a withdrawal to Alexandria. It got underway two days later, after A. J. Smith moved out and occupied Natchitoches, from which point he would cover the retreat by protecting the flanks of the column as it passed, then follow to serve as rear guard on the long march down the “island” between the two rivers, Cane and Red.

 
Whatever shortcomings the invaders had shown in the past forty days, they demonstrated conclusively, in the course of the next two, that their ability to cover ground at a fairly dazzling rate of speed not only had not been impaired, but in fact had been considerably improved by the events of the past two weeks. The march began at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and by the time the tail of the column left Grand Ecore at 3 o’clock next morning, April 22, the men at the head were twenty miles away, taking their first rest while waiting for the others to close up. Before nightfall, the entire command had cleared Cloutierville, thirty-two miles from the starting point. Not even then was the blistering pace relaxed; Banks had learned that the rebels intended to contest his crossing of the Cane at Monett’s Ferry, another dozen miles southeast, and he pressed on, determined to get off this jungly island and past the last natural obstacle between him and Alexandria, where he would recover the protection of the fleet and his army could once more break out its shovels and throw up dirt between itself and the danger of assault.

  So far, its performance had been highly commendable from the logistics point of view; nor had it permitted haste to interfere unduly with the exercise of its various other talents. A. J. Smith’s irrepressible campaigners, while holding off pursuers with one hand, so to speak, still found time for more than their usual quota of vandalism and destruction with the other. Grand Ecore had gone up in flames at the outset, along with the surplus goods the army left behind; then Natchitoches, whose old-world French and Spanish charm had been admired by many of its blue-clad visitors, was put to the torch as a farewell gesture. Gray cavalry came up in time to turn fire-fighters and save the latter place, as well as Cloutierville the following day, far down the island. But Smith’s troops made up for this double disappointment with the amount of damage they inflicted on barns and houses along the road between the two, including even the cabins of the Negroes who turned out to welcome them. “At night the burning buildings mark our pathway,” a marcher recorded. “As far as the eye can reach, we see in front new fires breaking out, and in the rear the dying embers tell the tale of war.”

  Close in their rear with Polignac, while his cavalry harassed their flanks and rode hard to get into position in their front, Taylor was finding it “difficult to restrain one’s inclination to punish the ruffians engaged in this work.” He meant that the prisoners were a temptation in that regard — blue-clad stragglers picked up along the roadside, blown and blistered or drunk on looted whiskey, unable to hold the pace Banks was setting them in his eagerness to attain the safety Alexandria would afford — but there was also the temptation for the pursuers to strike before the tactical iron was hot. Too quick a blow, delivered before the Federals had been brought to a disjointed halt on unfavorable terrain, would merely hasten their march and inflict only superficial damage, not to mention that it would be likely to disclose the smallness of Taylor’s command; whereas if he waited till their path was blocked he might be able to bag the lot by tricking them (much as Bedford Forrest had tricked Abel Streight, about this time last year in Alabama) into surrendering to the “superior force” Banks believed was breathing down his neck. However, the Lousianian soon had cause to regret that he had stayed his hand, forgoing a leaner in hope of a fatter prize. Brigadier General Richard Arnold, Lee’s replacement as chief of the Union cavalry — a thirty-six-year-old West Pointer, son of a former governor of Rhode Island and descendant of a distinguished New England family that included the notorious Benedict — had come upon Bee’s dismounted brigade in a stout defensive position overlooking, from the opposite bank, the approaches to the Cane at Monett’s Ferry. Instead of attempting the suicidal attack Bee expected, head-on down the road, Arnold located an upstream crossing for the infantry to use while he kept up a show of force in front and probed industriously below, as if in search of another crossing a couple of miles downriver, to attract Bee’s attention in that direction.

  It was neatly done. Emory’s division, coming up at the head of the Federal main body on the morning of April 23, crossed the river two miles above the ferry and struck in force at the upstream rebel flank, while a second arriving division added its weight to the frontal demonstration and the downstream feint. This last was so well carried out, indeed, that Bee — a Charleston-born adoptive Texan whose younger brother had given T. J. Jackson his nom-de-guerre at First Manassas, but who himself had been a desk soldier until the present campaign — believed he was swamped on the right as well as the left, though in fact he had managed to inflict rather heavy casualties on the attackers from upstream. “The critical moment had come,” he later reported; “the position turned on both flanks and a large force close in front ready to spring on the center.” He counted himself fortunate to get away — “in good order at a walk,” he noted — with a loss of “about 50 men and 1 artillery wagon … while the enemy lost full 400 killed and wounded,” and he complained that, with fewer than 2000 men in all, he had been expected to block the path of “an army of 25,000 marching at their leisure on the main road to Alexandria.” Yet that was exactly what had been expected of him, and Taylor was no more inclined to be charitable in such cases than was the man Bee’s brother had caused to be nicknamed Stonewall. The fact remained that Banks had made his getaway, avoiding the destruction planned for him, and Bee had let the escape hatch be slammed ajar with a loss to himself of only “about 50 men and I artillery wagon.” Nor was the disparity of losses any mitigation of the offense. “He displayed great personal gallantry, but no generalship,” Taylor said of the South Carolinian, and ordered his removal from command.

  Into the clear at last, though greatly relieved to be out of a jungle whose gloom seemed made for ambuscades, Banks did not slacken the pace for his foot-sore troops. He was still not half way to his goal, and he covered the last fifty miles with something of the hard-breathing urgency of a long-distance runner entering the stretch and catching sight of the tape drawn taut across the finish line, ready to be breasted. All through what was left of that day and the next, molested by nothing worse than small clusters of Confederate horse taking pot shots at the column from off in the pines, he kept going hard and fast, his over-all casualties now increased to about 4000, more than half of them captured or missing in battle and on the march. On the third day, April 25 — the fifth since he left Grand Ecore — the lead division slogged into Alexandria, followed next day by the others. There they promptly got to work with their shovels, heaving dirt, despite the recovered protection of Porter’s fleet: what was left of it, at any rate, after an equally strenuous five days of fighting rebels and the river.

  The admiral had suffered woes beyond a landman’s comprehension, including the loss of his finest ironclad, the 700-ton Eastport. Sunk by a torpedo eight miles below Grand Ecore, she was patched and raised with the help of two pump boats hastily summoned upriver, and continued on her way — only to ground again in the shallow water forty miles below. Porter unshipped her four 9-inch guns, along with her other four 50- and 100-pounder Dahlgren and Parrott rifles, loading them onto a flat behind the light-draft gunboat Cricket, and thus got her afloat; at least for a time. She had only gone a few more miles, bumping bottom as she went, when she ran full tilt into a pile of snags, and there she stuck and settled. After three days’ work by her crew and skipper, Lieutenant Commander Ledyard Phelps, who could not bear to lose “the pride of the western waters,” Porter, having observed that such efforts to haul her off only made her stick the harder, gave orders for her destruction. A ton and a half of powder was distributed about her machinery and hold. When the electrical detonator failed to work, Phelps himself, in accordance with the tradition requiring the captain to be the last to abandon ship, applied a “slow match,” then went over the side and into a waiting launch. The match was almost not slow enough, however. When the Eastport blew, Phelps was only a short way off and barely avoided being crushed by one of the dory-sized fragments from the 280-foot iron hull that came hurtling down and raised huge red geysers all around the la
unch.

  Porter had a double reason for ordering the ironclad’s destruction. One was that further delay seemed likely to cost him not only the Eastport — which, in point of fact, had been Confederate at the outset, captured uncompleted up the Tennessee River near the Mississippi town that gave her her name, just after the fall of Fort Henry in early 1862 — but his other boats as well. While the attempted salvage work was in progress, enemy marksmen were gathering on both hostile banks of the river and adding to his discomfort by sniping at the flotilla. Small-arms fire, though deadly enough, was only part of the danger; for presently, emboldened by the absence of the infantry escort now on the march with Banks, they brought up batteries of horse artillery and opened fire from masked positions. So intense and accurate was this, Porter lost one of his unarmored pump boats that afternoon and the other the following morning, together with all but five of about 175 Negroes, mostly fieldhands taken aboard from surrounding plantations, who were scalded to death by steam from a punctured boiler. The gunboats Juliet and Fort Hindman lost 22 men between them in the course of the downstream run, along with their stacks and most of their upper works. Hardest hit of all, though, was the Cricket, now serving as the flagship. Rounding a bend, she came upon a rebel battery cleverly sited atop a bluff, and took 38 hits within the five minutes she was exposed to its plunging fire. Out of her crew of fifty, 31 were casualties, including a dozen killed. “Every shot [went] through and through us, clearing all our decks in a moment,” according to the admiral, who had to take the wheel himself when he ran up to the pilot house and found the helmsman badly wounded.