Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi (review)

BOOK REVIEWS275 biographies of Jackson, which Piston contrasts with the obscurity and abuse that fell on Longstreet, didnot sell well. John EstenCooke, whose novels Piston calls "immensely popular" (p. 116), complained that he was morewidelyreadin the Norththan in the South. Bythetime that the North Carolinian William Sydney Porter was writing under the pen name O. Henry, he could amuse his readers by making fun of the oldfashioned Southern magazines devoted to "goobers, governors, and Gettysburg." Piston does not develop asustained analysis of theimplications of postwarpraise of Confederate generals. When Southerners sentimentalized the Confederacy, romanticized the war, and melodramatized the generals, should one who respected Longstreet have lamented his exclusion from their favor? The book's discussion of the Longstreet literature usually stays within the terms of the nineteenth-century controversy that it summarizes. Michael Shaara imagined a profound— almost tragic—Longstreet. Eckenrode and Conrad sketched a stubborn, often narrow-minded one. With the help of Piston's extensive catalogue of old arguments and enduringbiases, perhaps abiographer can give us a modern study of this enigmatic man without making him more modern than he was. Charles Royster Louisiana State University Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi. By Lawrence Lee Hewitt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Pp. xvi, 221. $19.95.) It did not receive all that much attention during the Civil War, and later historians have continued this neglect. It is never mentioned in the same breath with battles such as Gettysburg, Shiloh, or Chancellorsville. Port Hudson is usually remembered only as an afterthought to Vicksburg, falling five days after the Mississippi Gibraltar's capitulation made its own continued Confederate defense impossible and unnecessary. This neglect is unfortunate, argues Lawrence Lee Hewitt, a history professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "Port Hudson was important—a major Civil War event—and should be understood as such" (p. xiv). He reiterates the same point in the book's last sentence. The battle "brought about the participation by Negroes in the war and prevented [Nathaniel P.] Banks from superseding Grant—thus hastening the downfall of the Confederacy and making Port Hudson a turning point of the Civil War" (p. 179). Unfortunately Hewitt's book is not organized around this argument. He states his thesis in his Preface and repeats it in his concluding chapter, but the pages in between do not deal with it. The bulk of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the establishment of Port Hudson, of the fiery 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY passage of Admiral Farragut's fleet past it, and of Banks' bloody, uncoordinated , unsuccessful assaults against it. The final chapter argues the Banks-Grant point in a "what if section which is interesting but unprovable. Had Banks been successful in his early assaults at Port Hudson, Hewitt contends, hewould havebeen able to link up with Grant and, by virtue of rank, would have superceded him, become thehero of Vicksburg, and eventually become commanding general ofthe entire Union army. Hewitt also argues herethat black performance at Port Hudson was instrumental in causing the North to accept the idea of black troops. Unfortunately he does not prove this point either. Hewitt tacks his brief discussion of these contentions onto his main effort: describing what happened when Union and Confederate forces clashed over Port Hudson on land and river. Hewitt does a good job in describing the fighting. He does not sugarcoat the horror of war; in one place, for example, he notes that "Blood, brains, and other parts of human bodies covered the Richmond" (p. 92) . He graphically depicts what happened to Union sailors and soldiers on both sides who were caught in the slaughter: they suffered horrible wounds and died awful deaths. They also ran; they pillaged; they scavenged ; they deserted. Officers gave stupid orders and stubbornly refused to change them in the face of the most obvious human and geographical obstacles. Human beings died, futilely charging into areas where no human could expect to survive. Hewitt clearly shows that fighting at Port Hudson was not romance and glamour; it was chaos and gore and death. Anyone desiring a detailed account of the skirmishes that took place around Port Hudson will find this book satisfying reading...