In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Texas remained almost completely free of Union occupation throughout the Civil War. This was not the result of a lack of interest in Texas on the part of the Federal leadership, nor of a lack of effort on the part of the Union military to occupy part of the state, but rather of a combination of factors that were unique to the state. First, Texas was remote from the heavily contested regions of the Confederacy. Because of its remote location the state possessed limited military value as a target for invasion, and in the event of an invasion it presented the special difficulties inherent in any long-range military action. To be successful, a Union invasion of Texas would require careful planning along with exceptional effort in the areas of logistics and communication. Second, although the quality of the individual soldiers in the opposing armies in both Texas and Louisiana was every bit as good as that of the armies of the east, such was not the case for the senior officer corps of these armies. Competent and effective army commanders were available to the Confederate forces present in these states, but the Union Army of the Gulf suffered from poor military leadership. Thus, in addition to having the advantage of being on the defensive, in general the Southern troops could depend on their commanding officers using them effectively and to good purpose. The Northern troops could not. For a period of seventeen months, from mid-December 1862 through mid-May 1864—a period during which many crucial and determining events of the war occurred, including the Battles of Stones River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, plus the capture of Vicksburg—the Army of the Gulf was commanded by Major General of Volunteers Nathaniel P. Banks. During this period, among his other military and political activities, General Banks attempted to invade Texas five times. Two of these attempts were thwarted by Southern forces in Louisiana and failed to reach Texas soil, whereas two reached the coast of Texas only to be soundly repulsed by local Confederate and Texas state troops. The fifth attempt, which was actually the fourth chronologically, was Banks’s only successful invasion, though the question of whether it was in fact a success is perhaps moot. Under whichever interpretation one chooses, however, the invasion resulted in the capture and Preface xii preface occupation of a small area near the mouth of the Rio Grande and, for a short while, some areas along the coast of south Texas. All of Banks’s invasions of Texas, including his partially successful coastal invasion, have been the subject of scrutiny and assessment by historians, and full-length treatments exist that cover four of the invasions. Each of these assessments treats the invasion it covers as an essentially isolated campaign: the Battle of Galveston, the Texas overland expedition, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River expedition. None of the extant works that addresses Banks’s Texas campaigns has examined them as part of a coordinated whole. In fact, there was a level of consistency in the motivation and intent of the Union government, as well as that of the Gulf Department commander, that lay behind these events. The present work attempts to address this consistency by examining the decisions made in Washington concerning Texas, along with the actions and reactions of General Banks to these decisions and to events in his department. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations contained in the text reproduce the syntax and spelling used in the document quoted. Thus, there are numerous misspelled words, run-on sentences, and other nonliterary gems in the quotations. Rather than mark these blunders “[sic]” to indicate that the errors are in the original, I have chosen to leave them for the reader to discover. Attrition caused frequent changes in leadership at nearly all levels of both armies during the war, and both the military grades and assignments of some officers changed rapidly. I have attempted to designate the grade of the officers mentioned in the narrative at the time of the action being described. Thus, in some cases the reader will find the same individual referred to by different grades at different points in the narrative because of interim promotions. Frequently no explicit reference is made to such promotions. Official time zones and their associated standard times—products of the transcontinental railroad—did not exist during the period of...

Share