Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi by Donald S. Frazier (review)

The struggle for the Mississippi River, which culminated in the siege of Vicksburg, was one of the most important events in the Civil War. Needless to say, this high-profile episode has tended to distract historians from the concurrent happenings that occurred on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi is the latest installment of what author Donald S. Frazier calls “the Louisiana Quadrille” series (p. vii). It focuses on the lesser-known events that surrounded Union efforts to take Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the principal Confederate bastions guarding the Mississippi, from May to July 1863.

Frazier begins with a brief introduction outlining the early phases of the Civil War and discusses Abraham Lincoln’s move to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Here, Frazier explains, a divide existed between the theory of emancipation in Washington, D.C., and its implementation in the field: “Although the Lincoln administration urged freedom for all slaves, it clearly had not established mechanisms and policies with which to actually deal with the processes—and consequences—of instant emancipation” (p. 20).

From here, the author homes in on his subject, shifting the focus from Washington to Louisiana and the Mississippi River Valley, where the majority of the book takes place. After Federal troops besieged Vicksburg and Port Hudson in May 1863, local Confederate forces mounted various raids and small campaigns bent on drawing Union armies away from their respective siege works. Frazier’s book describes these lesser-known and underappreciated military movements at great length. Some events, such as the Milliken’s Bend campaign, will be familiar to Civil War historians. Other engagements, such as the Confederate victory in the battle of Kock’s Plantation on July 13, 1863, might be new for some trans-Mississippi enthusiasts. In all accounts, Frazier narrates each fight with authority, and his enthusiasm for educating others in the details of these events shines through.

In addition to outlining military movements, Frazier’s book is very much in keeping with the scholarship of the “new military history,” which seeks to bridge the divide between social history and campaign narratives. Throughout the book, Frazier takes pains to illustrate what the fighting meant for the southerners, free and enslaved, who inhabited the region during the war, citing a breadth of sources including interviews with former slaves recorded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. Frazier’s use of WPA narratives is most evident at the end of the book, when he discusses the “mass exodus” of displaced Confederates and slaves who left Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of the fighting and established residence in Texas for the remainder of the war (p. 381). He writes, “The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson and the threat of Federal invasion provided these displaced people with an uncertain future” (p. 388). Overall, the book is a solid piece of scholarship that is both informative and entertaining. Those who enjoyed the previous installments of the Louisiana Quadrille will not be disappointed.