The Red River Expedition, measured by its results, was a conspicuous failure. The judgment of history, while according to most of the active participants therein most honorable mention, must impartially record the fact that the campaign of March, April and May, 1864, along the line of the Red river in Louisiana, and the collateral movements in southern Arkansas, wholly failed to accomplish the purpose for which they were undertaken.

The evident military purpose of the expedition was to eliminate rebel occupancy, so far as its organized and armed forces were concerned, from the trans-Mississippi territory. The capture of Vicksburg and the surrender of Port Hudson in 1863 had wrested from the Confederates their last stronghold in the Mississippi valley, and had effectually cut the Confederacy in two. The Mississippi river was wholly in possession of the Union forces, though its navigation was somewhat interrupted by small raiding bodies of the enemy that would occasionally seek to establish the pretense of a temporary blockade. There was no considerable force of the enemy in an organized form west of the Mississippi, except that under command of General E. Kirby Smith, whose headquarters were at Shreveport, on the upper Red river, near the border of Texas and Arkansas. This army was somewhat scattered, occupying detached positions in various parts of Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. The destruction of this army, whose strength in the aggregate was variously estimated at from 30,000 to 40,000 men, was the objective purpose of the campaign.

General N. P. Banks, commanding the Department of the Gulf, though ambitious to identify himself with the general movement organized early in 1864 for an advance of the principal armies of the Union against the forces of the Confederacy, did not personally favor the idea of a campaign along the Red river. Secretary Stanton, however, believing that an elaborate campaign in the trans

*Read by Gen. L. F. Hubbard at the Monthly Meeting of the Executive Council, November 11, 1907.

Mississippi states of the Confederacy would give promise of a considerable contribution to the aggregate of results hoped for from the general movement all along the line, ordered Banks to mobilize his forces for offensive operations.

Banks had at New Orleans and along the Gulf coast an army of considerable proportions, including a large force of cavalry. General Frederick Steele, at Little Rock, Arkansas, had in that vicinity a force of several thousand men available for the field. The plan of the campaign contemplated the co-operation of these two armies, the former to move up the valley of the Red river, and the latter southwesterly, their common objective being Shreveport, Louisiana.

General Grant's active army, that had taken Vicksburg and achieved other successes in the Mississippi valley, had largely been transferred to other fields, a large part thereof under General Sherman reinforcing the army at Chattanooga, Tenn. There was yet a considerable body of troops belonging to General Sherman's command remaining at Vicksburg, but they were mostly under orders to join the army concentrating at Chattanooga. Before the last of this force had moved, Banks asked Sherman for the loan of 10,000 men for thirty days to aid in the proposed expedition. Sherman, of course, was loath to part even temporarily with any of the troops that had served with him so long, but upon Banks' promise to relieve and return them at the end of thirty days, he detached two divisions of the Sixteenth and a detachment of the Seventeenth Corps for this duty. Could he have known that he would see these troops no more during the war, he would hardly have consented to the arrangement.

On the 10th of March, 1864, this force of about 10,000 men, under command of General A. J. Smith, embarked aboard transports at Vicksburg and moved down the Mississippi river, escorted by Admiral Porter's fleet of ironclads to the mouth of the Red river; thence up that stream and into the Atchafalaya river, to Simmesport, La., where the troops were disembarked on the 12th of March.

With this command was the Fifth Minnesota Infantry, commanded by Major John C. Becht, Colonel L. F. Hubbard being in command of the brigade to which it was attached. The Fifth Regiment was the only Minnesota organization participating in