Read Online The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote - Free Book Online Page A

of all the navy had accomplished in these past two years of war on the western waters. That was unthinkable, but he had boasted so often that he could take his fleet “wherever the sand was damp,” the admiral now found it impossible to renege on his promise to stay with the army to the end of its upstream trek. After three days of tugging and bumping — during which time the river, to his alarm, began to dwindle, then rose slightly — he got his largest ironclad,
Eastport
, over the falls; after which he followed with a dozen lighter-draft gunboats and twenty transports laden with troops. “The water is quite a muddy red and looks anything but inviting,” a sailor wrote in his diary as the column began its winding crawl to Grand Ecore. “The transports from the head belch out three bellowing whistles which is caught up by the next, and sometimes two or three vie in a euphonious concert much resembling the bellowing of cattle at the smell of blood.”
    So far, except for the considerable slaughter of pigs and chickens encountered on the march, the smell of blood had been little more than a figurative expression. Moreover, if Banks could judge by indications, the Confederates were either content to have it remain so, or else they were incapable of having it otherwise, knowing only too well that most of the blood that would be spilled would be their own. In any case, the one thing they had not done was fight, and as he boarded his headquarters boat at Alexandria for an upstream ride on the evening of April 2 — a nattily dressed man in his vigorous prime, two years short of fifty, wearing highly polished boots and chinking spurs, a light-blue overcoat, buckskin gauntlets elbow-high, a bell-crowned hat, and a neatly groomed mustache and brief imperial — he got off a dispatch toHalleck expressing his confidence in “an immediate and successful issue” of the campaign, the end of which he believed was in plain view.
    “Our troops now occupy Natchitoches,” he informed Old Brains, “and we hope to be in Shreveport by the 10th of April. I do not fear concentration of the enemy at that point. My fear is that they may not be willing to meet us.”
    In the course of the past three years Lincoln had read other such dispatches, and all too often they had turned out to be prologues to disaster. Reading this one, when in time it reached Washington, he frowned and shook his head in disapproval.
    “I am sorry to see this tone of confidence,” he said. “The next news we shall hear from there will be of a defeat.”
    A defeat was what the Confederates had very much in mind for the invaders: especially Major General Richard Taylor, Kirby Smith’s West Louisiana commander, who had crossed swords with Banks before, first in the Shenandoah Valley, two years ago, and then along the Teche the previous year. Tactically, the second of these confrontations had not been as brilliant as the first, in which Taylor, serving as one of Stonewall Jackson’s ablest lieutenants, had helped to strip the former Bay State politician of so many well-stocked wagons that he had been nicknamed “Commissary” Banks; but the aptness of this nom-de-guerre had been redemonstrated last summer, west of New Orleans, when Taylor’s surprise descent on Banks’s forward supply base at Brashear City, yielding an estimated $2,000,000 in ordnance and other stores, helped immeasurably to equip the army he had been raising for the defense of his home state ever since his transfer from Virginia. A son of Zachary Taylor and brother of Jefferson Davis’s first wife, now just past his thirty-eighth birthday, he was described by one of his soldiers as “a quiet, unassuming little fellow, but noisy on retreats, with a tendency to cuss mules and wagons which stall on the road.”
    This tendency had been given a free rein for the past three weeks, in the course of which he had been obliged to fall back nearly two hundred miles before an adversary he was convinced