The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (120 page)

His own critique of the battle, from the Confederate point of view, was given five years later to a man who was contemplating a school history. Referring the writer to the official accounts, Lee avoided personalities entirely. “Its loss was occasioned by a combination of circumstances,” he declared. “It was commenced in the absence of correct intelligence. It was continued in the effort to overcome the difficulties by which we were surrounded, and [a success] would have been gained could one determined and united blow have been delivered by our whole line. As it was, victory trembled in the balance for three days, and the battle resulted in the infliction of as great an amount of injury as was received and in frustrating the Federal campaign for the season.” Reticent by nature in such matters, he was content to let it go at that, except for once when he was out riding with a friend. Then he did speak of personalities, or anyhow one personality. “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me,” he said, looking out over the peaceful fields, “so far as man can see, I should have won the battle of Gettysburg.”

That was still in the future, however. For the present he reserved his praise for the men who had been there. “The army did all it could,” he told one of his numerous cousins in late July. “I fear I required of it impossibilities. But it responded to the call nobly and cheerfully, and though it did not win a victory it conquered a success. We must now prepare for harder blows and harder work.”

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Having failed in his effort to “conquer a peace” by defeating the principal Union army north of its capital, Lee had failed as well in his secondary purpose, which had been to frighten the Washington authorities into withdrawing Grant and Banks from their strangle-hold positions around Vicksburg and Port Hudson, thereby delivering from danger not only those two critical locations but also the great river that ran between them, the loss of which would cut the South in two. But Lee’s was not the only attempt to forestall that disaster. In addition to Joe Johnston, whose primary assignment it was, Kirby Smith too had plans for the relief of Pemberton and Gardner, on whose survival depended his hope of remaining an integral part of the Confederacy. Though these included nothing so ambitious as an intention to end the war with a single long-odds stab at the enemy’s vitals, they were at least still in the course of execution when Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s men came stumbling back from Cemetery Ridge, leaving the bodies of their comrades to indicate the high-water mark of Lee’s campaign, which now was on the
ebb. Nor were these Transmississippi plans without the element of boldness. Encouraged by Magruder’s success in clearing Texas of all trace of the invader, Smith hoped his other two major generals, Holmes in Arkansas and Taylor in West Louisiana, might accomplish as much in their departments. If so, he might attain the aforementioned secondary purpose of causing the Federal high command to detach troops from Grant and Banks, in an attempt to recover what had been lost across the river from their respective positions, and thus lighten the pressure on Vicksburg and Port Hudson. At any rate Smith thought it worth a try, and in mid-June, being frantically urged by Richmond to adopt some such course of action—Davis and Seddon by then had begun losing confidence that anything was going to come of their increasingly strident appeals to Johnston along those lines—he instructed Taylor and Holmes to make the effort.

Taylor, who had just returned disgruntled to Alexandria after his strike at Milliken’s Bend—a tactical success, at least until Porter’s gunboats hove onto the scene, but a strategic failure, since the objective turned out to be little more than a training camp for the Negro recruits Grant had enlisted off the plantations roundabout—was pleased to be ordered back onto what he considered the right track, which led down to New Orleans. His plan, as he had outlined it before the fruitless excursion opposite Vicksburg, was to descend the Teche and the Atchafalaya, recapture Berwick Bay and overrun the Bayou Lafourche region, which lay between Grand Lake and the Mississippi, deep in Banks’s rear, interrupting that general’s communications with New Orleans and threatening the city itself; whereupon Banks would be obliged to raise his siege of Port Hudson in order to save New Orleans, whose 200,000 citizens he knew to be hostile to his occupation, and Gardner then could march out to join Johnston for an attack on Grant’s rear and the quick delivery of beleaguered Vicksburg. Such at least were Taylor’s calculations—or more properly speaking, his hopes; for his resources were admittedly slim for so ambitious a project. He had at Alexandria three small cavalry regiments just arrived from Texas under Colonel J. P. Major, a twenty-seven-year-old Missouri-born West Pointer whose peacetime army career had included service in Albert Sidney Johnston’s 2d Cavalry, which already had provided the South with eight and the North with two of their leading generals. Awaiting instructions on the upper Teche, to which they had returned in the wake of Banks’s withdrawal in mid-May, were five more such mounted regiments under Thomas Green, the Valverde hero who had been promoted to brigadier for his share in the New Year’s triumph at Galveston, along with three regiments of Louisiana infantry under Brigadier General Alfred Mouton, thirty-four years old and a West Pointer, a Shiloh veteran and native of nearby Vermilionville, son of the former governor and brother-in-law to Frank Gardner, whose rescue was the object of the campaign.
The combined strength of the three commands was about 4000 effectives, barely one tenth of the force available to Banks, but Taylor intended to make up in boldness for what he lacked in numbers.

The advance was made in two widely divided columns. While Mouton and Green swung down the west bank of the Teche, marching unopposed through Opelousas and New Iberia, Taylor rode with Major across the Atchafalaya, then down Bayou Fordoche to within earshot of the guns of Port Hudson. At that point he left him, on June 18, with orders to move rapidly to the rear of Brashear City, the objective upon which the two forces were to converge for a simultaneous attack five days later. The distance was one hundred miles, entirely through occupied territory, but Major made it on schedule. Skirmishing briefly that afternoon with the bluecoats on guard at Plaquemine, a west-bank landing below Baton Rouge, he bypassed fortified Donaldsonville after nightfall and set off next morning down Bayou Lafourche, which left the Mississippi just above the town. Some thirty miles below on the 20th, he rode into Thibodaux, whose garrison had fled at the news of his approach, and next day he struck the railroad at Terrebonne, thirty miles east of Brashear, then turned due west to complete his share of the convergence Taylor had designed. Moving crosscountry with relays of quick-stepping mules hitched to his ambulance, that general had joined Mouton and Green on their unopposed march through Franklin to Fort Bisland. By nightfall of June 22 they were at Berwick and were poised for an amphibious attack, having brought with them a weird collection of “small boats, skiffs, flats, even sugar-coolers,” which they had gathered for this purpose during their descent of the Teche. Batteries were laid under cover of darkness for a surprise bombardment in support of the scheduled dawn assault on the Brashear fortifications, just eastward across the narrow bay. Taylor’s old commander in the Shenandoah Valley doubtless would have been proud to see how well his pupil, whose preparatory work had been done not at West Point but at Yale, had learned the value of well-laid plans when the object was the capture or destruction of an enemy force in occupation of a fixed position.

Old Jack’s pride would have swelled even more next morning, when the Louisianian gathered the fruits of his boldness and careful planning. While some 300 dismounted Texans manned the 53 boats of his improvised flotilla—it was fortunate that there was no wind, Taylor said later, for the slightest disturbance would have swamped them—Green’s cannoneers stood to their pieces. At first light they opened fire, and as they did so the sea-going troopers swarmed ashore, encouraged by the echoing boom of Major’s guns from the east. Flustered by the sudden bombardment, which seemed to erupt out of nowhere, and by the unexpected assault from both directions, front and rear, the blue defenders milled about briefly, then surrendered. The take was great, for here at the western terminus of the railroad Banks had cached the ordnance
and quartermaster supplies he intended to use in his planned return up the Teche and the Red. In addition to 1700 prisoners, a dozen heavy-caliber guns and 5000 new-style Burnside repeaters and Enfield rifles were captured, together with two locomotives and their cars, which were unable to get away eastward because Major had wrecked the bridge at Lafourche Crossing, and commissary and medical stores in such abundance that they brought to more than $2,000,000 the estimated profit from Taylor’s well-engineered strike. The general’s pleasure was as great as that of his men, who wasted no time before sitting down to gorge themselves on the spoils. Their main concern was food, but his was the acquisition of the implements with which to continue his resistance to the invasion of his homeland. “For the first time since I reached western Louisiana,” he exulted afterwards, “I had supplies.”

All in all, it was the largest haul any body of Confederates had made since Stonewall followed up his raid on Manassas Junction with the capture of Harpers Ferry, back in September. Like his mentor, however, Taylor did not allow his exultation to delay his plans for the further discomfiture of his adversary. Next morning, leaving one regiment to sort the booty and remove it to Alexandria for safekeeping, he pressed on north and east, once more in two columns. While Green and Major marched for Donaldsonville, near which they were to establish batteries for the purpose of disrupting traffic on the Mississippi and thus sever the main line of supply and communications available to the besiegers of Port Hudson, Mouton’s infantry went by rail to Thibodaux, from which point he sent pickets down the line to Bayou des Allemands, within twenty-five miles of New Orleans. It was during the early morning hours of June 28 that Taylor encountered his first setback, though not in person. Approaching Donaldsonville the night before, Green had meant to bypass it, as Major had done on his way south, but the existence of an earthwork at the junction of the Lafourche and the Mississippi proved irresistible, perhaps in part because the Yankees had given it a hated name: Fort Butler. He disposed 800 dismounted troopers for attack and sent them forward two hours before dawn. The result was a bloody repulse, administered by the 225 defenders and three gunboats that arrived in time to support them. Green, who had suffered 261 casualties and inflicted only 24, pulled back, chagrined, and went about his proper business of establishing his three batteries on the west bank of the river, some ten miles below the town. He opened fire on July 7 and for three days not only kept the Mississippi closed to transports and unarmored supply boats, but also sent out mounted patrols as far downstream as Kenner, barely a dozen miles from the heart of New Orleans, which was already in a turmoil of expectancy as a result of Mouton’s continued presence at Thibodaux and nearby Bayou des Allemands.

Secessionists were joyously predicting the imminent entry of the graybacks who were knocking at the gates, and William Emory, with
fewer than 1000 men to oppose a rebel host he reckoned at 13,000, was altogether in agreement that the place was the Confederacy’s for the taking. What was more, as we have seen already, he had said as much to Banks. “It is a choice between Port Hudson and New Orleans,” he informed him on July 4, adding: “You can only save this city by sending me reinforcements immediately and at any cost.” Dick Taylor thus had accomplished the preliminary objective of his campaign; that is, he had brought the pressure he intended upon Banks, who now would be obliged to withdraw from Port Hudson, permitting Gardner to join Johnston for the delivery of Pemberton by means of an attack on Grant’s intrenchments from the rear. So much Taylor had planned or anyhow hoped for. But Banks, as we have also seen, refused to cooperate in the completion of the grand design. If New Orleans fell, he told Halleck, he would retake it once the business at hand was completed and his army was free to be used for that purpose; but meantime he would hang on at Port Hudson till it surrendered, no matter what disasters threatened his rear. Observing this perverse reaction, Taylor was obliged to admit that once again, as at Milliken’s Bend a month ago, though his tactics had been successful his strategy had failed. He had gained much in his brief campaign—particularly at Brashear City, whose spoils would greatly strengthen his future ability to resist the blue invaders—but he had not accomplished the recapture of New Orleans, which he saw as a cul-de-sac to be avoided, or the raising of the siege at Port Hudson.