Low Water on the Red River

On the morning of March 12, 1864, Confederate General Richard Taylor stood in a borrowed farmhouse near the Atchafalaya, a map of western Louisiana spread across a pine table scarred by knife cuts and coffee rings. Rain leaked through the shake roof. His joints burned with the old rheumatism that never left him, and he kept one hand pressed to the small of his back while he studied the river lines his father had once marked in a different war.

Zachary Taylor’s Mexican maps were creased and brown. The old general had written in a cramped hand that ground decided battles more surely than speeches. Richard Taylor believed it. He believed it more now, with empty wagons rattling into camp and Federal steam echoing from the confluence of the Red.

A courier from Alexandria had already brought the worse news. The supply depots there were empty. Flour, salt meat, percussion caps: gone. Quartermasters blamed impressment, floods, worthless paper money. Taylor blamed the war itself. He looked at the casualty lists his field officers laid beside the maps. Names ran in cramped columns. He read them without comment, then asked how many men still had shoes.

“Fewer than half, General,” said a major whose coat was faded to the color of river mud. “The Texas brigade is worst.”

Taylor nodded. He did not waste breath on comfort. Outnumbered more than two to one, he would have to give ground and keep his army intact. A fighting retreat up the Red River valley was the only order that made sense. He gave it in a few clipped sentences and sent the officers out into the rain.

Far downriver, Admiral David Dixon Porter steered his flagship into the mouth of the Red. Twenty ironclads and gunboats followed in a line that filled the channel from bank to bank. Stacks threw black smoke. Paddle wheels chewed the brown water. Porter stood on the bridge with his hands clasped behind him, watching the timbered shores slide past Simmesport. The armada was larger than Confederate scouts had reported, and he knew it. Two hundred heavy naval guns rode beneath those armored casemates—enough weight of shot to pulverize any earthwork Taylor dared throw across the river bend.

Couriers rode the levee between the squadron and General Nathaniel Banks’s infantry columns. Banks wanted cotton for the northern mills and a flag over Shreveport to burnish his name. He wrote in polished phrases about joint movement and the restoration of loyal commerce. Porter answered with shorter notes: keep the army close to the river; do not wander into the pines. Banks promised he would.

Inland, Private Jabez Craddock of a Texas regiment marched through freezing river mud. His brogans had split along both soles and were tied with twine that cut his ankles. The pockets of his butternut jacket were empty. He chewed raw dried corn until his jaws ached, then spat the hulls into the ditch. Hunger sat in his gut like a stone.

At a halt he traded his pocketknife for half a piece of salt pork. The man who took the knife was from another company and did not ask why a man would give up the last tool he owned. Jabez ate the pork in three bites, standing in the mud, and felt no better for it. The column moved again. He limped with the rest.

In a cane brake a mile from the road, Eliza Gillum held her milk cow by a rope of twisted bark. Distant Federal steam whistles rolled across the bayous. She had heard such sounds before and knew what followed: forage parties, emptied cribs, children crying at night. Her three children waited in the cabin with the shutters barred. She whispered to the cow and led it deeper into the cane, where the leaves hid the animal from the river and from any rider who might come looking.

Taylor rode out that afternoon to see the threadbare divisions himself. Men stood in ranks with blankets rolled and cartridge boxes light. He spoke little. When a colonel asked if they would stand at Fort DeRussy, Taylor said they would delay, then fall back. He would not throw the army away on a fort the navy could smash in an hour. A low mutter ran through the staff, quickly choked off, leaving only the stiff touch of hats and tight, wooden nods.

Night came early. Fires smoked wet wood. Taylor sat again with the maps. He thought of his father, of Buena Vista, of a man who had never dressed for show and never yielded ground without a reason. The Union force coming up the Red was vast in men and iron. He would use the river, the pines, the poor roads, and time.

Porter’s ships anchored below the first bend. Deck lanterns made yellow pools on the water. The admiral walked the length of the flagship and counted hulls as if they were his own children. He sent another courier to Banks. The infantry was still coming up. Banks, in a tent far from the bank, composed a dispatch that spoke of inevitable progress and the justice of the Union cause. He signed it with a flourish.

Jabez slept sitting up, his back against a cypress knee, rain in his collar. The salt pork was gone. He dreamed of nothing he remembered. Eliza stayed in the cane until the whistles faded, then led the cow home in the dark and shut it in a stall no larger than a closet. She did not light a lamp.

At dawn Taylor issued the retreat order in writing. Wagons that had arrived empty would roll north anyway, carrying wounded and what little powder remained. “The Federal fleet is larger than the scouts said, and there is not a barrel of flour left in Alexandria,” he said without raising his voice. “We fall back.” The staff wrote the words down and rode.

The Red River ran high yet, but the season was turning. Taylor knew the water would fall. He knew Banks would leave the gunboats if the roads looked easier. He folded his father’s maps and put them in a leather case. Terrain would decide it. He mounted and turned his horse upriver, toward Mansfield, toward whatever ground he could still choose.

Behind him the steam whistles grew louder. Iron moved on the current. Mud sucked at every boot and hoof.