The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864 by Henry O. Robertson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864 by Henry O. Robertson Steven D. Fratt The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864. By\ Henry O. Robertson. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2016. Pp. x, 209. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4766-6378-4.) Henry O. Robertson provides a brisk narrative of military events and quite a bit more in The Red River Campaign and Its Toll: 69 Bloody Days in Louisiana, March–May 1864. His goal is to explore "the meaning, the why of the campaign" (p. 5). Robertson has turned to source materials relating to soldiers, civilians, and politicians to create a new understanding of the Red River campaign's immediate consequences and even its impact on our lives in the twenty-first century. Robertson lays out the economic background of the Red River Valley before the Civil War and explains the Confederacy's cotton strategy in the region once the war began. When New Orleans was captured in April 1862, planters simply continued their normal routine of growing cotton and storing it in hopes of future sales to Europe at greater profits. The great stockpile of wealth that Confederates were amassing in the valley did not go unnoticed by Washington, D.C. After taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, Federal strategists began to see the stores of cotton in the Red River Valley as a significant target that, if captured, could pave the way to conquering Texas. While the Union army under Nathaniel P. Banks assembled in Alexandria, Louisiana, for the Red River campaign, other dynamics emerged that affected how events unfolded. As Union forces worked their way up the river, Louisiana loyalists took oaths of allegiance to the United States. General Banks embraced fleeing slaves, incorporating them as laborers in the camp. Stores of cotton played upon these events as well. Union officers, especially Admiral David Dixon Porter, saw the chance to benefit financially by confiscating cotton. Unfortunately, both sides employed a scorched earth policy and burned cotton during their respective retreats up and down the river. In the end, the utter defeat of the Union armies played havoc on the loyalists and freedpeople who had benefited from the Federal advance. Freedmen who were put to work as laborers in the Union army but could not keep up with the retreat found themselves reenslaved. Louisiana moderates and Unionists who had taken the Yankee oath were arrested and executed as traitors. The destruction of cotton during the retreat marked the beginning of the valley's economic decline, which extended into the twentieth century. Robertson's study of compensation records from after the war brings these events into greater relief. Finally, and most important, the "'unvanquished'" Confederates of the Red River Valley stiffened their resistance to the reintroduction of Federal authority (p. 177). While Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia had experienced the conquest of victorious Union armies marching across their lands, central Louisianans ended the war as military victors who suffered a political defeat. Robertson thus reminds us that we should resist the temptation of oversimplifying our understandings of the South as a region during the war and in its aftermath. [End Page 988] Steven D. Fratt Trinity International University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association