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Red River Campaign:
POLITICS AND COTTON IN THE CIVIL WAR
Red River
Campaign POLITICS AND COTTON IN THE CIVIL WAR
BY LUDWELL H. JOHNSON
Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO AND LONDON, ENGLAND
© 1993 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-40019
ISBN 978-0-87338-486-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
Previously published by The Johns Hopkins Press, © 1958
16   15   14           5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Ludwell H.
Red River Campaign: politics and cotton in the Civil War / Ludwell H. Johnson
      p.     cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-87338-486-5 (pbk). ∞
1. Red River Expedition, 1864. 2. Louisiana—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 3. Arkansas—Civil War, 1861–1865. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 1. Title.
E476.33.J6 1993
973.7’36—dc20 92-40019
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
Maps
FIG. 1.   Theater of Operations FIG. 2.   Red River Between the Mississippi and Alexandria FIG. 3.   Vicinity of Alexandria FIG. 4.   Natchitoches to Shreveport FIG. 5.   Battle of Mansfield, or Sabine Crossroads FIG. 6.   Battle of Pleasant Hill (Positions at the opening of the battle) FIG. 7.   Battle of Pleasant Hill (Penetration of the Union position) FIG. 8.   Battle of Pleasant Hill (The Union counterattack) FIG. 9.   The Campaign in Arkansas (Camden Expedition) FIG. 10.   Taylor’s Attempted Encirclement of the Union Army at Monett’s Ferry FIG. 11.   Engagement at Monett’s Ferry
Contents
    Maps     Preface to the Second Edition     Preface     Acknowledgments I.   Genesis of the Campaign II.   Concerning Cotton III.   The Campaign Begins IV.   Banks Finds the Enemy V.   Taylor Is Disappointed at Pleasant Hill VI.   The Federals Go Hungry in Arkansas VII.   Banks Retreats Again VIII.   A Pause and Another Retreat IX.   The End of the Campaign X.   Aftermath     Bibliography     Index
Preface to the Second Edition

THIS MONOGRAPH was originally a doctoral dissertation that was first published by The Johns Hopkins Press in 1958. It was kindly received by reviewers then and has been noticed occasionally since as an acceptable specimen of campaign history. For me, it was something more than that. As a beginning graduate student whose knowledge of the War of Secession was mainly of the drums and trumpets school, I found that the campaign offered an opportunity to explore a narrow topic in depth and so to understand better how things happened.
In particular, it became a case study of the way in which military events evolved from considerations having little to do with the ostensible objective of the Lincoln administration: winning the war in the shortest time with the fewest losses. I was, of course, acquainted with such studies as T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and the Radicals and knew that military operations did not spring pure and undefiled from the application of Napoleon’s Maxims . But to untwist the tangled web of cause and effect for oneself and to discover firsthand that it was bigger and more tangled than I had ever suspected was a valuable educational experience.
Having made this modest beginning, I began to envision an ambitious multivolume study of the origins and application of Northern military policies. I entitled it (when in search of grants) “The Influence of Party Politics and Pressure Groups on the Conduct of the Civil War.” Then the real world of making a living in an undergraduate college closed in, and, not being one of those annoying prodigies who are able to overcome all obstacles, I managed to work on little more than one part of this ambitious project. It was an investigation of trade between the Union and the Confederacy, the effects this unlovely traffic had on the conflict, and what it revealed about the political-entrepreneurial cast of Northern society. This part is about 80 percent finished and may well remain that way; the other parts were never really begun. One reason, or excuse, for this lack of progress is that I fell into the trap set for practitioners of history-in-depth: the lineal and collateral ramifications are endless and sometimes more interesting than the main enquiry. The temptation is to stop and look at this or that affair in even greater depth. So I wrote what might be called a series of case studies in the form of journal articles whose guiding principle was to answer the question, cui bono? A good many of those who benefited one way or another were identified and the reasons for their behavior exposed. 1 But then byways began to open up. The trade got into the Federal courts via a solidly established rule of international law which said that commerce between nations must cease when war begins, unless permitted by the sovereign power that made war. It seemed advisable to seek out the antecedents of that rule. The result was a foray into Anglo-American legal history. Another article ensued, 2 plus a never published essay on the trade itself during the Colonial and antebellum years.
In something not unlike what chessplayers call a “tree search,” more lines of inquiry branched off from that first legal article. The Federal government always denied that there was a war as defined by international law: it was merely a rebellion of individuals, and should the United States accord the rebels belligerent rights (e.g., not hanging prisoners as traitors) it was an act of free grace. Yet according to that same law, by proclaiming a blockade President Lincoln had in fact declared that a war existed, not merely a rebellion, and neutrals such as Britain responded by according the Confederacy belligerent rights. But the Constitution gives the war-making power to Congress alone, and Lincoln’s actions were therefore challenged in the courts. They were eventually upheld in Prize Cases (1863) by a Supreme Court packed with Lincoln appointees. Here, in this landmark decision, sanctified by its association with the Great Emancipator, the nation began its slide down the slippery slope that in the late twentieth century would see the executive branch not only claim but exercise the power to inaugurate war. 3
A third branch of legal inquiry arose from the fact that for years after the war cases came before the courts which forced them to grapple with the question of what kind of conflict it had been and therefore what legal status, if any, the Confederate States has possessed. So another article was thrust upon Civil War History’s unoffending readership. 4
The illicit trade of which the Red River campaign provided a good illustration undoubtedly prolonged the war. As always, the figure of Lincoln loomed up conspicuously: why was he so deeply implicated in promoting the trade? Faced with complaints from generals like Grant and Sherman, why did he continue to allow trading permits to go to old friends and political associates? Do his policies in this area contribute to our understanding of his political objectives and of the man himself? Ideas suggested by these questions have been useful, at least obliquely, on a number of occasions in articles, 5 commentaries, and lectures.
Trading with the South was one aspect of how the North fought the war, as were the methods by which it recruited and supplied its armies, picked its generals, decided on what routes of invasion to follow, and so forth. Did all this tell anything about the short- and long-term goals that the North in general and the Republican party in particular wished to accomplish? And the answer to that question clearly connects with the causes of the war, especially why Republicans fought rather than bid farewell to a section they had so often denounced as a sink of iniquity and a drag on the whole country. Kenneth Stampp, then happily in his Beardian phase, blazed this trail with And the War Came , but confined himself to the Sumter crisis. Pursuit of the answer carries one forward into the late nineteenth century and back through antebellum sectional battles to the Constitution, the Hamiltonian dispensation, and beyond that to seventeenth-century England.
I have not published the results of this venture in any detail, 6 but they have supplied a valuable organizing theme in teaching my two-semester course centering on the years 1815–65. Whatever success the course may have had over the past thirty-seven years owes much to what I learned about how history works when I researched the Red River campaign; it was just a matter of applying that understanding to other problems and to other periods. One can scarcely expect a dissertation to do more for one than that. Philosophical and methodological complications aside, trying to identify cause and effect is, to me, the very soul of history. When Vergil said, “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,” he knew what he was talking about.
To get back to this book, causes are ultimately of practical importance because of their effects, and the most important military effect of the Red River campaign was to tie up large Union forces west of the Mississippi. This altered the odds significantly in the Atlanta campaign, delayed the Mobile campaign, and thus quite probably allowed the Confederates to hold out longer in the western theater than they otherwise would. In my undergraduate course, I have tried to identify similar connections throughout the war, that is, to measure as precisely as possible the probable consequences of military decisions that were shaped by nonmilitary considerations, hoping that perhaps some of my students would learn to regard the events of their own time with a skeptical and analytical eye.
Skepticism is one thing, cynicism another, and I would not want to think that I have been inculcating the latter all these years. The North’s war on the South was not just a story of selfish ambition, greed, dishonesty, and even treachery. The men in the