War Along the Bayous: The 1864 Red River Campaign in Louisiana
William R. Brooksher. Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 1998. 287 pp. Photos. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $27.50 ($24.75).
Reviewed by Craig L. Symonds
In spring 1864, while General U. S. Grant’s forces in Virginia and Major General W. T. Sherman’s in Georgia completed preparations for the campaigns that would decide the outcome of the Civil War, Union Major General Nathaniel P. Banks and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter began a joint campaign up the Red River into Louisiana with the objective of capturing Shreveport.
The campaign was driven as much by political and economic factors as by military strategy. President Abraham Lincoln encouraged it because he hoped to re-admit Louisiana back into the Union in time for it to participate in the 1864 election. The Union Chief of Staff, Major General Henry W. Halleck, encouraged it in the expectation that it would yield a rich harvest of confiscated cotton, the price of which had shot up on the world market. Grant, recently named Union General-in- Chief, was skeptical, believing that it diverted forces from the military center of gravity—but he allowed it to go forward nonetheless. It was a mistake. The Red River Campaign was a Union disaster, and as Brooksher shows in this tightly written book, it is also testimony to the perils of combined operations in wartime, especially when there is no overall commander.
This is a story that has been told before: Ludwell Johnson wrote a comprehensive history of the campaign only six years ago (Red River Campaign: Politics & Cotton in the Civil War [Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993]). Brooksher’s particular contribution is a challenging but compelling reevaluation of the leadership of both Banks and Porter. The traditional assessment of this ill-fated campaign is that Banks, a political general with no significant combat experience, got in over his head and was out-foxed by his Confederate opponent, Major General Richard Taylor. Porter, in this scenario, was a hapless victim, compelled to undertake an unwise operation against his better judgment—and then was all but abandoned by a panicky Banks when things turned bad. Brooksher challenges this view by apportioning responsibility more equally between Banks and Porter.
Banks made errors in judgment, to be sure, particularly when he took a road that separated him from the support of Porter’s gunboats. But Porter too shares in the blame. During the campaign’s early stages, he concentrated on appropriating abandoned cotton from the enemy before the Army could get to it (prize laws still applied, and Porter was entitled to 5% of the total value of all cotton seized). Once the campaign was under way, he worried far more about how he would be portrayed in the papers than how he could contribute to the outcome. Afterward, Porter blamed Banks for virtually all his troubles, but in doing so, says Brooksher, he “conveniently overlooked the fact that he was an independent commander and, thus, ought to have been held fully responsible for the naval situation”. In the end, it was an Army engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey, who saved Porter’s fleet by building a dam across the falling Red River to raise the water level, a scheme that Porter dismissed originally as impractical.
Brooksher notes, too, that Banks and Porter escaped complete disaster in this campaign largely because the Confederate commanders also squabbled among themselves. The mercurial Taylor wanted to concentrate on Banks. Unfortunately, the more cautious Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith, Taylor’s theater commander, declined to provide him the forces he needed, a decision that Brooksher calls “a blunder”.
This is a well-researched and engagingly written account of a much overlooked campaign, with important lessons about the inherent dangers of divided command in the conduct of combined operations.
The Continental Risque
James L. Nelson. New York: Pocket Books, 1998. 372 pp. Charts. Glossary. $14.00 ($12.60).
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Joseph F. Callo, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired)
With The Continental Risque, author James Nelson delivers a rollickingly good sea story that moves fast and has credibility as well—the kind of credibility a writer of “high-seas adventure” gets from knowing the sting of storm-driven salt spray. In this case, the author has worked square riggers and lives on the Maine coast. His colorful language not only creates evocative images of shipboard life in the days of sail, it also creates interesting illustrations of historic places and events, such as the streets and political meetings in revolutionary Philadelphia. At a deeper level, the book contains flashes of insight that jump off the page for those who have gone to sea—such as a captain’s recognition of “the moment when the brig became an extension of himself.”
Certainly one of the most noteworthy features of The Continental Risque is its focus on the birth of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. For those who have enjoyed following C. S. Forester’s Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey, it is a welcome extension. The book’s central character, Captain Isaac Biddlecomb, typifies the sailors who made the transition from earning their livelihoods from the sea as civilians to serving their emerging country in its struggling new navy.
The political infighting, regionalism, and underfunding of the Continental Congress are all there in the plot, along with the constant threat of U.S. ships being overmatched by elements of the Royal Navy. Nelson also works in the kind of personal conflicts that surely troubled a navy that had yet to establish the culture and traditions that provide institutional durability. Out of the yams emerges the beginnings of the risk-taking and active sense of duty that are now part of the Navy’s character.
The book illuminates some of the immutable challenges that go with military leadership at sea. For example, there is Biddlecomb’s difficulty in dealing with a competent but unpleasant officer, a situation that “only someone who had spent a lifetime at sea, who understood the workings of a floating society” could appreciate. At another point, there is the challenge of coordinating Navy and Marine Corps forces—with no amphibious doctrine to begin with—into a coherent over-the- beach operation. To the author’s credit, and further establishing his credibility, Biddlecomb deals with his problems with varying degrees of success, as usually happens in a “floating society.”
All in all, The Continental Risque is what a sea-based historical novel should be: a combination of an engaging story and a lesson about an important period of history. As a bonus, the book’s basic diagram of a brig and glossary are a big help to those who never have picked up an intimate knowledge of square-rigger technology. When the reader turns the last page, there will be no hesitation in putting this book on the same shelves alongside O’Brian’s and Forester’s works.
Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate
Harry Kelsey. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1998. 566 pp. Photos. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.00 ($31.50).
Reviewed by A. N. Ryan
Students of history 40 or 50 years ago who encountered the Elizabethan Navy also encountered Sir Julian Corbett’s magisterial Drake and the Tudor Navy: With a History of the Rise of England as a Maritime Power, a literary monument to the age of navalism published in two volumes in 1898. A key to understanding Sir Julian’s perception of Francis Drake is to be found in the subtitle. While not seeking to minimize the significance of Drake’s career as a “corsair,” Sir Julian stressed the significance of his career as “an admiral and administrator,” the creator and inspiration of a force that was new to the world. “As the perfector,” Sir Julian continued, “of a rational system of sailing tactics, as the father of a sound system of strategy, as the first unsurpassed master of that amphibious warfare which has built up the British Empire, as an officer always ready to accept the responsibility of ignoring unintelligent orders, he has no rival in our history but Nelson.”
Corbett’s principal (and laudable) object was to rescue Drake from what he called the romantic fascination of Drake’s career as a corsair and to restore him to the position he held in his own time— “as one of the great military figures of the Reformation.” The problem is that for many of us, including Harry Kelsey, Sir Julian’s 16th-century Drake seems to be more like a professional Georgian sea officer than an independently minded Elizabethan maritime adventurer intermittently—sometimes unofficially—employed by the state to promote its interests.
The subtitle of Kelsey’s study of Drake contrasts sharply with that of Sir Julian Corbett. Here the emphasis is not upon the rise of England as a maritime power, but upon the 16th-century war of maritime pillage as practiced by governments and citizens to advance an amalgam of public and private ambitions. Motivated by the same laudable intentions as Sir Julian, Kelsey has turned back the clock to place Drake firmly in the 16th century: a much more chaotic and anarchic 16th century than could have been envisaged by a middle-class professional product of Victorian England.
On the other hand, those of us who have been shaped by the events of the 20th century can make sense of the chaos and anarchy (at least we think we can), and can accept Kelsey’s definition of Drake as “the Queen’s pirate”—a definition that would have struck Sir Julian as a meaningless contradiction in terms. Even so, there may be those who would argue that in an age when Anglo-Spanish relations were murky and states waged war without admitting that they were at war, the term “pirate” may be an inexact definition.
Our changed perception of Drake and his times by no means owes everything to our experiences of the present century. A wealth of contemporary historical evidence edited for the Hakluyt Society by Kenneth Andrews, Elizabeth Donno, Mary Frear Keeler, and David Quinn, and for the Navy Records Society by R. B. Wernham has compelled historians to think again about inherited certainties. The same is true of a number of key monographs, notably Kenneth Andrew’s Drake’s Voyages (New York: Scribner’s, 1967). From these publications Drake emerges as a fascinating personality possessed of the kind of daring that is easy to admire, but certainly not as the perfecter of naval tactics or the father of a sound system of strategy. Kelsey skillfully has exploited his own archival explorations, the documentary publications, and a great mass of Drake-centered writings over the ages to create a portrait of a watchful opportunist with a sharp eye for the main financial chance: an enigma who was both genius and charlatan, as seems to have been recognized by the queen who admired and distrusted him.
Drake the “admiral and administrator” has been laid to rest by Kelsey, but Drake the vainglorious, belligerent entrepreneur lives on to bewilder and torment us as he did his contemporaries—both English and Spanish. Writing as friend and critic, Kelsey does justice to Drake by making his triumphs and disasters comprehensible, and by inviting us to understand his enemies at home and abroad. This is a book that cannot be ignored. The text is supported by a range of illustrations in black and white and 61 maps and plans, for which we must be grateful.