Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West (review)

The 1864 Red River campaign is hardly one of the Civil War’s most familiar or most glorious. The Union forces that invaded western Louisiana that spring met with a series of embarrassing setbacks, culminating in a humiliating retreat. The disaster nearly became a catastrophe when low water in the Red River threatened to strand the gunboat fleet accompanying the United States Army during its hasty countermarch. Fortunately for the Union cause, a brilliant engineer officer, aided by several thousand hardworking soldiers, succeeded in quickly constructing an ingenious series of dams that narrowed the river’s channel and raised the water level, enabling the ships to escape. This impressive improvisation, however, could not erase the widespread perception that the Red River campaign had been terribly, if not criminally, mismanaged by the Union leadership.

Joiner’s fine new book provides the best and fullest account yet of this intriguing and little-remembered series of battles. In many respects, it is a model campaign study, with a fine, well-balanced narrative and exemplary use of both primary sources and recent scholarship. Joiner appropriately emphasizes the impact of the region’s extremely difficult, sometimes almost impassable terrain on the campaign. The author should be especially commended for including an abundant number of superb self-designed maps, which help make the different stages of this rather chaotic clash quite comprehensible. Although greater attention to the experiences of common soldiers and civilians during the campaign would have been welcome, the author does appropriately draw our attention to the incredible dissension within the Union army during the invasion. This squabbling stemmed both from the army’s fragmented character—it was composed of hastily assembled elements of the Army of the Gulf and the Army of the Tennessee, not to mention the difficulty of coordinating its operations with that of the naval forces involved—and from its commander Nathaniel Banks’s at best ineffectual leadership, which Joiner appropriately and inevitably lambastes. The author also faults David Dixon Porter, commander of the campaign’s Union naval forces, for most unwisely including a number of overly large and cumbersome ships in his armada. In a fine bit of historical detective work, Joiner proposes that faulty intelligence likely led Porter to deduce, incorrectly, that Confederate defenses at the Red River stronghold of Shreveport included both an ironclad and a submarine and hence that he needed to be able to bring overwhelming firepower to bear.

The opposing Confederate high command was also bitterly divided, however, with field commander Richard Taylor at odds with departmental commander Edmund Kirby Smith on seemingly every conceivable issue other than the burning of cotton by Confederate forces during their initial strategic retreat, in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Yankees, an easily predicable and indeed legally mandated Confederate policy. The implementation of this standard Confederate tactic tends to undermine the older interpretation of the campaign as motivated mostly by northern lust for cotton (advanced most persistently by historian Ludwell Johnson), which Joiner largely avoids. He recognizes, for instance, that the campaign’s essential strategic purpose was to establish a Union military presence in Texas and thus deter further French aggression in Mexico.

At times Joiner comes close to suggesting a greater strategic and historical significance for this interesting campaign than it likely possessed. For example, could Taylor’s forces, as the Confederate general hoped, ever really have seized Porter’s squadron intact and then retaken control of the Mississippi? But ultimately Joiner offers a sober assessment of the campaign and its impact, which was primarily to tie up Union forces that could have been more profitably employed elsewhere. Although other Civil War campaigns might be more dramatic or have had greater impact, few offer such a thorough portrait of military mismanagement in all its varied forms—and surely it is always worth remembering and...