Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, 1863–1865 123
years by thousands of slaves whose owners had sent them out of the way of
advancing federal armies. They were expected to furnish many recruits for the
Corps d’Afrique. Banks told Halleck that he would be ready to move when the
river rose that spring. 6
The core of Banks’ command consisted of some ten thousand men of the
XIX Corps, about five thousand in brigades of the XIII Corps that had not
been sent to Texas and another ten thousand on loan for thirty days from Maj.
Gen. William T. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee. Sherman thought that the
Red River Expedition stood a good chance of success if it moved as quickly
as his raid on Meridian, Mississippi, had in January. That sortie, he boasted,
had accomplished “the most complete destruction of railroads ever beheld.”
He wanted the borrowed troops returned in time for his spring campaign in
Georgia. Completing Banks’ force were 721 officers and men of the 3d and 5th
Corps d’Afrique Engineers and a brigade consisting of the 1st, 3d, 12th, and
22d Corps d’Afrique Infantry, 1,535 strong. Naval gunboats ascended the Red
River to augment the land force. Banks expected another seven thousand Union
troops from Arkansas to meet him near Shreveport. He had spent the winter
preoccupied with the election of a Unionist state government and delayed
leaving New Orleans until 22 March, long enough to attend the new governor’s
inauguration. 7
By that time, the troops on loan from Sherman’s army had steamed up
the Red River and captured a Confederate fort downstream from Alexandria.
Acting in concert with naval gunboats, they occupied the town on 16 March.
Heavy rains delayed the bulk of Banks’ force in its overland march from the
southern part of the state, but by 25 March, most of the troops, and the general
himself, had reached Alexandria. They set out for Shreveport the next day, with
the Corps d’Afrique infantry brigade guarding a train of nine hundred wagons.
Stretched out along a single road through the woods, the entire column was
about twenty miles long. The Corps d’Afrique engineers moved here and there
as needed, making “corduroy roads” by laying logs side by side in otherwise
impassable mud and operating a nine-boat pontoon bridge which they laid
across deep streams in the army’s path and then took up and loaded in wagons
when the troops had crossed. After a week of such marching, the expedition
6 OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt. 2, pp. 56, 133, 497, and pt. 3, p. 191. U.S. Census Bureau, Agriculture of
the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office, 1864), p. 69. Before the
war, the Red River parishes were home to more than seventeen thousand black males between the
ages of fifteen and fifty. U.S. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. 188–93.
7 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 1, p. 173 (“the most”); vol. 34, pt. 1, pp. 167–68, 181, and pt. 2, pp. 494,
497, 542. James G. Hollandsworth Jr., Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), pp. 162–71; Gary D. Joiner, Through the
Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 2006), p. 50. While these regiments of the Corps d’Afrique were
in the field, they were renumbered the 73d, 75th, 84th, and 92d United States Colored Infantries
(USCIs). The 3d and 5th Engineers became the 97th and 99th USCIs. OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt. 3, pp.
220–21. For troop strengths, see pt. 1, pp. 167–68. Regiments recalled from Texas augmented the
XIII Corps during the campaign. Calculations of troop strength are complicated by the fact that the
winter and early spring of 1864 was the season of “veteran furloughs,” when men who were near
completion of three years’ service and had reenlisted for another three went home for a month.