Booknotes: Decisions of the Red River Campaign

New Arrival:

• Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation by Michael S. Lang (U Tenn Press, 2025).

This is only the second Trans-Mississippi theater entry in UT Press's highly prolific Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which is fast approaching two-dozen volumes. The first, Ed Cotham's Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns (2024), was one of the best in the series.

On the face of it, the 1864 Red River Campaign is a fascinating topic for critical decision analysis. Personality clashes within the Confederate high command in the theater hover heavily over the campaign, but its strategic and operational aspects ooze contingency in ways that still divide opinion. One chronicler of the Red River Campaign and its associated Camden Expedition, Michael Forsyth, even goes so far as to say that the Confederates bungled a golden opportunity to alter the course of the war. Michael Lang's Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation tackles a campaign that resulted in a clear Confederate victory that nevertheless left both sides dissatisfied with the result.

From the description: "By the time of the Red River Campaign, which occurred between March 10 and May 22, 1864, Federal victory in the American Civil War was nearly assured. This final Union offensive in the trans-Mississippi theater was launched to capture Shreveport, a strategic river port and Confederate military complex. The fall of Shreveport would split Confederate forces, allowing the Federals to encircle and destroy the Confederate Army in western Louisiana and southern Arkansas as well as open a gateway to an invasion of Texas. But the dense piney woods and swamps of Louisiana made for difficult maneuvering, and both sides made severe tactical mistakes, leading General William Tecumseh Sherman to declare the Red River Campaign “one damn blunder from beginning to end.”"

In support of the decision analysis are sixteen maps, an 11-stop driving tour, orders of battle, and strength tables. I've already started reading this so the review should appear sometime in the coming weeks.