TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Continued from Part 1. In testimony before Congress’s Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Admiral Porter boasted that “The Red River expedition was originally proposed by General Sherman and myself.”1 Porter’s statement is presumptuous — there was an earlier plan by Halleck2 — but Sherman did raise the idea to Grant’s Chief of […]

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Update March 30, 2015: post edited to show a change in how the series will unfold. In my opinion, several aspects of the Red River campaign of 1864 are misunderstood. An example of this is the role of General Ulysses S Grant. This post is the first in a six an eight part series that […]

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Frazier, Donald S. Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi. (State House Press: February 2015). 469 pages, dozens of illustrations, 35 maps, notes, bibliography, index.  ISBN: 978-1-933337-63-0. $39.99 (Cloth) Donald Frazier, author of the ongoing “Louisiana Quadrille” series published by State House Press, is on the verge of releasing volume 3, Blood […]

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In my reply to Spengler I noted the difficulties of making a land link with Mexico to supply the Confederacy. After doing a bit more research I found that there really was a land link, although subject to all the difficulties I mentioned. When the Union blockade went into effect Southern cotton became both scarce […]

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Back in the summer I wrote a couple of posts about the Red River campaign of 1864.  I intended to follow them with this concluding post, but my time has been occupied with other things, so I am only now getting around to putting it up. During the Red River campaign, the river was a […]

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After musing on the battle of Mansfield in my previous post, I come to the question of whether Banks was on the wrong road. The basics of the situation are this: by the first week of April 1864 U.S. forces had advanced as far as Grand Ecore and Natchitoches; it was about 75 miles further […]

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As described previously, even though overall the US had more men in the campaign, Taylor enjoyed a numerical advantage at the moment he attacked at Mansfield. As a result Taylor was able to overwhelm the US front line, turning it in on itself and driving it back. So for Taylor, not much went wrong that […]

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