The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (18 page)

Looking out across the unbridgeable 600-yard expanse of the Atchafalaya, a swollen barrier to the safety his army could only attain by reaching the far side, Banks foresaw an outcome all too similar to the one his adversary was moving to effect. Still, his despair was not so deep as to keep him from doing all he could to ward it off. When he was informed, around midmorning, that Taylor had moved up to
Yellow Bayou, close in his rear, he instructed A. J. Smith to countermarch and drive him back. Smith returned to the Bayou, crossed three brigades, and pitched without delay into the rebel skirmish line, throwing it back on the main body, which then attacked and drove him back in turn. It went that way for a couple of hours, first one side gaining ground and then the other — each had about 5000 men engaged — until at last the underbrush caught fire and both withdrew in opposite directions, choked and scorched, from the crackling barricade of smoke and flame. That ended the action. Unresolved and indecisive as it was, Smith’s gorillas once more had proved their worth as fighters as well as burners, losing about 350 to inflict a total of 608 casualties on Taylor.

Nothing daunted, the Louisianian prepared to return to the offensive next day, May 19. But that was not to be. The back-and-forth engagement on the west side of Yellow Bayou turned out to be the last of the campaign — for the simple reason that presently no blue-clad troops remained within his reach. Banks by then had bridged the unbridgeable Atchafalaya.

Once more the
deus ex machina
was Joe Bailey. Handed the problem by Banks, the engineering colonel promptly solved it by mooring all the available riverboats and transports side by side across the near-half-mile width of the stream, like oversized pontoons, and bolting them together with timbers which then served as stringers for planks laid crosswise on them to form a roadbed. Soon after midday, though the varying heights of the boats on which it rested gave it something of the crazy, up-and-down aspect of a roller coaster, Banks had the bridge he needed to reach the sanctuary beyond the river. The wagon train began to cross at once, followed that night by the guns and ambulances; next morning, May 20, the troops themselves were marched across and the makeshift bridge dismantled in their rear. Two days later — a solid month past the time when they had been scheduled to rejoin Sherman in far-off Georgia — Smith’s three divisions filed back aboard their transports and set out for Vicksburg. Banks meantime was as full of praise for Bailey, here on the Atchafalaya, as Porter had been the week before, back up the Red. “This work was not of the same magnitude, but was as important to the army as the dam at Alexandria was to the navy,” he said of the improvised bridge in his final report, and repeated his recommendation that the former logger be promoted to brigadier as a reward for his resourcefulness under pressure.

Another upbeat flourish had been provided, but so had additions been made to the list of casualties — more than fifteen hundred of them, all told, since the return to Alexandria in late April. Army losses for the campaign now stood at 5245 killed, wounded, and missing, and to this were added some three hundred naval casualties, suffered in the course of the subtraction from the flotilla of an ironclad, two tinclads, three transports, a pair of pump boats, and 28 guns of various calibers,
captured or spiked and abandoned up the Red. This Federal total of about 5500 exceeded by well over a thousand the Confederate total of 4275. Losses in matériel were of course even more disproportionate, not only because the rebels had lost much less in battle, but also because they had had a great deal less to lose: aside, that is, from civilian property, the destruction of which, if included, would doubtless swing the balance the other way. But perhaps the greatest contrast lay in what a member of Banks’s official family called “the great and bitter crop of quarrels” raised in the northern ranks by what he referred to as “this unhappy campaign.” If on the Confederate side there were arguments in the scramble to divide the glory, on the Union side there were hotter ones involved in the distribution of the blame. Looking back over the events of the past seventy days, the staffer noted that feelings had been severely ruffled and several lofty reputations quite undone. “Franklin quitted the department in disgust,” he recalled; “Stone was replaced by Dwight as chief of staff, and Lee as chief of cavalry by Arnold; A. J. Smith departed more in anger than in sorrow; while between the admiral and the general commanding, recriminations were exchanged in language well up to the limits of ‘parliamentary’ privilege.”

Now still another illustrious name was added to the list: Banks’s own. Not that he was relieved outright or shunted into obscurity, as so many others had been in the doleful course of the past six weeks. This was an election year, and too much rode on the outcome for the authorities to risk alienating a man with as many votes as the one-time Speaker of the House controlled. Lincoln and Halleck put their heads together and came up with the answer. Major General Edward R. S. Canby, a forty-six-year-old Kentucky-born West Pointer, had come east after the New Mexico campaign of 1862, in which he had managed to save the Far West for the Union, and had since been involved in administrative matters, including the reëstablishment of law and order in New York after the draft riots of 1863. In all these positions his outstanding characteristic had been his prudence, a rare quality nowadays in the Transmississippi; Lincoln and Halleck, with Grant’s concurrence — Canby had been another of his classmates at the Point — decided to send him there to supply it, not as Banks’s replacement, but rather as his superior, by placing him in charge of the newly created “Military Division of West Mississippi,” which stretched from Missouri to the Gulf and from Florida to Texas. Banks’s unquestioned abilities as an administrator, honest amid corruption, were thus preserved for the government’s use, along with his political support, while his military ineptness was set aside by depriving him of any further independence — or, as it turned out, service — in the field.

Canby was waiting for him with the necessary papers at Simsport, and accompanied him on the final leg of the retreat, another hundred
miles downriver to Donaldsonville, where the campaign formally ended on May 26, seventy-five days after its start and more than a month beyond its scheduled finish. An Iowa soldier wrote in his diary that Banks looked “dejected and worn” at that stage, and small wonder. More had ended and more had been lost, for him, than the campaign. The former governor, whose reduction of Port Hudson had opened the Mississippi to northern trade throughout its length, was now the mere desk-bound head of a subdepartment in an organization commanded by a man almost two years his junior in age and three full years behind him in date of rank. That came hard, but that was by no means the worst of it for Banks, who was taunted not only by the thought of what he had lost but also by the thought of what he had failed to gain. Mobile might someday be attacked and taken, but not by him, and along with much else that had gone with the winds of war — including all those hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton, which were to have put the national effort on a pay-as-you-go basis, but which instead had tainted it with scandal — were his hopes for the highest political office. All that had ended up the Red. He not only had been defeated by his enemies up that river, he had been oversloughed by his superiors on his return: “a fit sequel,” the Saint Louis
Republican
asserted, “to a scheme conceived in politics and brought forth in iniquity.”

If contention was less widespread on the Confederate side, where there was more credit than blame to be divided, such contention as there was only flared the higher on that account. Taylor’s distress in reaction to his fear that the Federals were going to escape — the result, he claimed, of “sheer stupidity and pig-headed obstinacy” on the part of the high command at Shreveport — was mild compared to the frustration he felt when the bluecoats did in fact improvise an Atchafalaya crossing before the arrival of the Arkansas reinforcements enabled him to exact the retribution he felt they owed. Though his pride in his outnumbered army was as boundless as his contempt for the invaders (“Long will the accursed race remember the great river of Texas and Louisiana,” he said of the latter in a congratulatory order he issued to his troops on May 23. “The characteristic hue of its turbid waters has a darker tinge from the liberal admixture of Yankee blood. The cruel alligator and the ravenous garfish wax fat on rich food, and our native vulture holds high revelry over many a festering corpse”) his wrath had mounted with each passing day of the unimpeded blue retreat. Moving up to Yellow Bayou five days ago, he had taken time to communicate his chagrin at having been obliged to step aside, just when he had the vandals within his grasp, for lack of strength to stand his ground at Mansura. “I feel bitterly about this,” he protested in a dispatch to Kirby Smith’s adjutant, “because my army has been robbed of the just measure of its glory and the country of the most brilliant and complete success of the war.”

The further it receded into the past, the more “brilliant and complete” that missed victory became. Indeed, within a week or so, Taylor had come to believe that his superior’s military ineptness, which had obliged him to forgo a certain triumph, might well have cost the South its one best chance to win its independence. What was more, he said as much to Kirby Smith himself on June 5, in a letter combining indignation and despair. “In truth,” he wrote, quite as if he had a corner on that rare commodity, “the campaign as a whole has been a hideous failure. The fruits of Mansfield have turned to dust and ashes. Louisiana, from Natchitoches to the Gulf, is a howling wilderness and her people are starving. Arkansas is probably as great a sufferer. In both States abolition conventions are sitting to overthrow their system of labor. The remains of Banks’ army have already gone to join Grant or Sherman, and may turn the scale against our overmatched brethren in Virginia and Georgia.” What made the hot-tempered Louisianian angriest was the contrast between this and the situation that might have obtained if his chief had not rejected his advice on how to go about disposing of the invaders, which he was certain would have led to their destruction and the reversal of the tide of war. “The roads to Saint Louis and New Orleans should now be open to us. Your strategy has riveted the fetters on both.” The more he wrote — and he wrote at length, including a full critique of the campaign, with emphasis on the mismanagement of events beyond his reach, both here and in Arkansas — the angrier he grew: until finally, as he drew to a close, his wrath approached incandescence. “The same regard for duty which led me to throw myself between you and popular indignation, and quietly take the blame for your errors,” he wound up, “compels me to tell you the truth, however objectionable to you. The grave errors you have committed in the recent campaign may be repeated if the unhappy consequences are not kept before you. After the desire to serve my country, I have none more ardent than to be relieved from longer serving under your command.”

Thus Taylor, whose rage had made him as blind to the virtues of others as he was perceptive of their faults. To refer to the just-ended campaign as “a hideous failure,” simply because it had not yielded all that he had hoped for, was to overlook its fruits, which in fact were far from slight. Inflicting more than 8000 casualties on Steele and Banks, at a cost to Price and Taylor of 6500, Smith had captured or caused the destruction of 57 pieces of artillery, nearly half of them naval, along with about a thousand wagons, most of them loaded with valuable supplies, and more than 3500 mules and horses. This was a considerable tactical haul, by almost any standards, and yet the strategic gains were even greater. Despite the hot-tempered Louisianian’s claim to the contrary, the campaign had cost Sherman the use of 10,000 veterans in North Georgia; which meant that he moved with that many fewer against Joe Johnston, while Johnston’s own army was enlarged
by nearly twice that number because the upset of Banks’ schedule had ruled out an early movement against Mobile, leaving Polk free to shift from Demopolis toward Dalton with some 20,000 troops who otherwise would have been drawn in the opposite direction by the threat to coastal Alabama. The greatest effect of the campaign up Red River thus was felt in northern Georgia, where a net difference of 30,000 men was registered in favor of the defenders of Atlanta. If the South was going to lose the war, then this would no doubt prolong the conflict. On the other hand, this might just narrow the long odds enough for the South to win it.

That of course remained to be seen. In the meantime, there was nothing Kirby Smith could do, despite his disinclination in such matters, but act on Taylor’s insubordinate letter. Appointing Walker as his successor, he ordered him to Natchitoches, there to await instructions from their superiors, and forwarded the correspondence to Richmond with a covering letter to his friend the President. The good of the service required that he or Taylor be removed from command, the mild-mannered Floridian declared, adding that if Davis thought it best — as he well might do; Smith freely acknowledged the Louisianian’s “merits as a soldier” — “I will willingly, with no feeling of envy or abatement of interest in the service of my country, turn over my arduous duties and responsibilities to a successor.”

It made a sorry end, this falling-out by the victors, after all the glory that had been garnered up the Red and on the Saline; Dick Taylor was afterwards far from proud of his conduct in the quarrel, and set it down as the result of overwork and nervous strain. For the present, though, he was not unhappy to be reunited with his wife and children in Natchitoches, the lovely old French-Spanish town he recently had saved from Sherman’s burners, there to await the judgment of his presidential brother-in-law.

3