In 1864 Major General Henry Halleck planned a Union drive up Louisiana’s Red River with four goals: capture Shreveport, headquarters of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department; destroy General Richard Taylor’s army; organize pro-Union governments under Lincoln’s 10 percent plan; and seize upwards of 100,000 bales of cotton. It was also meant to warn Napoleon III, whose 25,000 troops backed Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. Nathaniel P. Banks was to lead 20,000 men from New Orleans and meet 15,000 under A.J. Smith, on loan until the end of April, with Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter’s gunboats, while Frederick Steele came down from Arkansas with 7,000. Banks let cotton speculators travel with the army, Porter’s barges gathered cotton as prizes of war, and Banks reached Alexandria on March 26, nearly a week after Smith.
The river failed to rise, so Banks marched inland on a single road through pine forest, stretching his column over 20 miles. On April 8 at Mansfield, Taylor massed about 9,000 men against roughly 5,000 at the front and routed the Union force, though hungry Confederates stopped to loot the wagons. Smith’s reserves won at Pleasant Hill on April 9, yet Banks retreated anyway. At Alexandria the fleet was trapped above falls only a few feet deep until Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey dammed the river and let the boats ride the surge. Banks was then replaced by Edward Canby, and the delay postponed Grant’s planned attack on Mobile.
- General Alfred Mouton was killed leading a charge across an 800-yard open field at Mansfield.
- More than 2,000 Union soldiers were captured, many sent to Camp Ford in Texas.
- E. Kirby Smith stripped Taylor of three infantry divisions for Arkansas, starting a feud that ended with Taylor’s transfer.
- Confederate cavalry general Thomas Green was decapitated by a naval shell at Blair’s Landing.
- Bailey’s crews, many of them loggers from Maine regiments, sank brick-filled barges and dismantled Alexandria buildings to build the dams.
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