nition, medicine, and other precious sup-
plies regularly made landfall in Mexico and
offloaded contraband that was hauled
overland across the Rio Grande to Texas
and eventually into the waiting hands of
needy Confederates. In return, Texas cot-
ton was shipped to Europe in trade.
Cotton still wielded considerable influ-
ence on the Northern economy as well. The
raw material needed to fuel the economi-
cally vital textile mills of New England was
scarce. The mill owners, their looms virtu-
ally idle, were heavily invested in the polit-
ical scene, and they called long and loudly
for the seizure of the cotton fields of East
Texas. In that regard, Lincoln and Banks
shared common ground. Lincoln courted
the support of the wealthy business owners
as he stood for reelection. They were also
a critical component of Banks’s con-
stituency, and the ambitious general was
intent on running for the presidency him-
self sometime in the future.
Lincoln and his military advisers also
worried about the presence of a foreign
army near the Texas frontier—not the
Mexican Army but a French expeditionary
force sent there by Emperor Napoleon III.
It was possible, though unlikely, that theFrench would intervene in the war on the
side of the Confederacy, attempt to annex
parts of the American Southwest, or regain
control of at least a portion of the territory
that constituted the old Louisiana Pur-
chase. To dissuade the French from inter-
fering in the war and to capture the much-
needed cotton for northern mill owners, it
would be necessary for the Union Army to
invade East Texas.
With Port Hudson already occupied,
Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, titular com-
mander of all Union armies in the field,
determined that the most logical route for
such an invasion was a westward thrust
from neighboring Louisiana. A prerequi-
site to such an offensive was the capture
of the city of Shreveport, capital of Con-
federate Louisiana and the hub of a vital
military and manufacturing cluster that
included arms production and port facil-
ities on the Red River, a shallow and
sometimes treacherous stream that mean-
dered more than 1,300 miles from head-
waters in the Texas Panhandle through
scrub land, bayou, and swamp to a con-
fluence with the Atchafalaya and Missis-
sippi Rivers. Even during peacetime, the
land was inhospitable. Conducting a
sophisticated military campaign there
would be a daunting task indeed. One
Confederate soldier who knew the region
well said with disdain, “I would not givetwo bits for the whole country.”
Banks had long believed that a successful
military expedition would enhance his
prospects for the presidency, while a fail-
ure would doom his aspirations for the
White House. Because of that, Banks con-
sidered a campaign through Red River
country too risky, but unrelenting pressure
from Lincoln and Halleck had already
forced him to act. In the autumn of 1863,
he had made three separate alternative
attempts to establish a substantial Union
presence in Texas. Offensive actions at
Sabine Pass, along Bayou Teche, and at
Brazos Santiago near the mouth of the Rio
Grande had ended either in failure or only
limited success.
Nevertheless, Lincoln remained fixated
on East Texas, and Banks’s final attempt to
evade a campaign on the Red River in favor
of a move eastward against the port city of
Mobile, Alabama, was rebuffed by the
president despite the support of Maj. Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant, who commanded the Mil-
itary Division of Mississippi and would
soon succeed Halleck as overall Union mil-
itary commander.
Early in 1864, planning began for the
largest combined Army-Navy offensive of
the war. The ensuing Red River campaign
was destined to become a costly, protracted
exercise in frustration and futility that bat-
tle-hardened, pragmatic Maj. Gen. WilliamAdmiral David Dixon Porter’s Union fleet arrives in
Alexandria at the start of the joint Army-Navy
campaign to capture Shreveport and move into
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