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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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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Even though I was able to count a sizable Confederates force that Taylor had at the Battle of Mansfield, wasn’t he outnumbered in the battle? Coming up with the total Present for Duty (PFD) on the US side is relatively easy since there is a table in the Office Records that shows the following Present […]

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This is the first in a series of posts planned for the next several weeks that address aspects of the Red River campaign of 1864.  Rather than a chronological narrative about the campaign, I shall be examining different topics and decision points. — How many Confederates were at the battle of Mansfield (also known as […]

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The other day Dimitri Rotov had a blog post comparing a quote from James M. McPherson’s new book with similar quotes from other books.  What bothers Dimitri is that McPherson isn’t original; what also ticks me off is that McPherson mimics bad history. The quotes in question link the Red River Campaign of 1864 to […]

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