A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-Mississippi

Abstract

A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-Mississippi. By Jeffery S. Prushankin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xx, 308. Acknowledgments, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) Although operations in the Trans-Mississippi have hardly been ignored by historians of the Civil War, there is a longstanding and probably correct belief that this theater has not received sufficient attention or appreciation from students of the war. In recent years, a number of historians have endeavored to correct this by producing informative and insightful works on the campaigns and personalities that shaped the course of the war west of the great river. The latest addition to this corps of scholars is Jeffery S. Prushankin, whose new book, A Crisis in Confederate Command, deserves attention from anyone interested in the war in the West. As indicated in the title, the focus of this book is the troubled command relationship between Edmund Kirby Smith and Richard Taylor, which shaped and was shaped decisively by the course and outcome of the infamous Red River Campaign of 1864. In early 1864, Smith, commander of Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi, faced Federal threats from two directions to his base at Shreveport. Advancing from the north through Arkansas was a column commanded by Frederick Steele, while to the south a joint army-navy force under the command of Nathaniel Banks and David Dixon Porter pushed up the Red River. Smith planned to take advantage of his interior lines to defeat these two forces in detail. Yet, in defiance of Smith's relatively clear intention to maintain the defensive in Louisiana and make the decisive initial offensive against Steele, Taylor attacked and defeated Banks at the battle of Mansfield and induced the Federals to retreat back down the Red River. In the meantime, Smith was able to thwart Steele's advance, but could not deliver a decisive strike against the Federals in Arkansas. As was typical in the Civil War, a fierce debate emerged after the campaign over whether more could have been accomplished. Had Smith reversed his assessment of operational priorities at the outset of the campaign, Taylor groused, the result would have been the destruction of Banks's and Porter's forces, rather than the simple thwarting of the two Union offensives. The dispute between Smith and Taylor over the conduct of the Red River Campaign and other matters, as these things so often did during the Civil War, quickly became public and did not end with the collapse of the Confederacy. …