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

There was no shortage of squabbling generals during the Civil War. Union or Confederate, it made no difference. Whether John Pope and Fitz John Porter in the North or Braxton Bragg and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the South, a parade of generals in both armies argued among itself for reasons large and small. More to the point, it was the rare field army or department that did not hold at least one subordinate general who thought his commanding officer an incompetent fool. While these sorts of conflicts were nothing new to military history, the willingness of Civil War generals to air their personal conflicts and slights is notable. Perhaps the most heated and sustained of these feuds occurred in the Confederate Trans-Mississippi in 1863 and 1864 when Edmund Kirby Smith and Richard Taylor seemed to spend more time fighting each other than the Yankees.

Jeffery S. Prushankin does a fine job of providing a strategic history of the period and detailing the dispute between the two men. Using an impressive array of primary sources, he finds the origins of the feud in the differing backgrounds and strategic visions of the generals. For the bland and West Point–trained Smith, the war in the Trans-Mississippi was to be waged methodically and with a strategic view of concentrating scarce manpower in the vicinity of his headquarters at Shreveport, Louisiana. In true Fabian fashion, Smith would trade land for time and selected opportunities to strike at the invading northerners. For Taylor, a fiery citizen-soldier and native Louisianan, no military strategy could have been more poorly conceived. Taylor's most formative military experience had occurred while he was fighting under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley Campaign of 1862. There, Taylor absorbed Jackson's offensive oriented and hard-marching approach to warfare. Always desirous of seizing the offensive, Taylor was the wrong general to sit by and allow Smith to forfeit Confederate land to the enemy, especially when that land was Louisiana.

Political forces within the Trans-Mississippi aggravated Smith and Taylor's relationship. As Prushankin points out, prominent Arkansans—and Missourians—exerted a great deal of pressure on Smith to forsake the lower Mississippi River Valley for their own lands. Given these circumstances, it did not take long for Smith and Taylor to suspect each other's motives. The culmination of their feud occurred during the spring of 1864, when two Union pincers closed upon Shreveport. While Taylor saw the northern pincer under Frederick Steele as no real threat, Smith thought otherwise and withheld reinforcements from Taylor as the Louisianan impetuously attacked—and defeated—Nathaniel Banks further south at Mansfield. In the days that followed this victory, Taylor grew exasperated. He sought a final battle of annihilation over Banks but could only harass the retreating Yankees down the Red River. Smith had taken the field in Arkansas and deprived Taylor of badly needed men. A public war of words soon erupted that polarized officers and politicians alike in the western Confederacy. Inevitably, Taylor would be reassigned, and when he left Kirby Smith would lose his most capable commander.

Although Prushankin rightly criticizes Taylor for his insubordinate behavior and some operational gaffes, the author reserves his greatest censure for Smith. In one early episode, Prushankin characterizes Smith's actions as "at best foolish and at worst mendacious" (57). Perhaps even more important, he faults Smith for not acceding to Taylor's requests for reinforcements in late April 1864. He is no doubt correct in concluding that had Smith allowed Taylor to concentrate his forces, the Confederacy would have had at least "a chance to secure a decisive victory on the Red River" (179). Still, Prushankin is a bit too enthusiastic in his disparagement of Smith. This is especially so when he concludes Smith suffered from a "preoccupation with glory"(78). His evidence, instead, describes...