The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote

bales. This last represented nearly half the value of the spoils — and would represent even more today, with the price in Boston soaring rapidly toward two dollars a pound in greenbacks. Yet those 5000 bales collected along the Teche were scarcely more than a dab compared to the number awaiting seizure in plantation sheds along the Red and in the Texas hinterland; Banks predicted that the campaign would produce between 200,000 and 300,000 bales. Even the lower of these two figures, at a conservative estimate of $500 a bale, would bulge the Treasury with no less than a hundred million dollars, which by itself would be enough to run the whole war for two months. Nor was that all. In addition to this direct financial gain, he would also put back into operation the spindles lying idle in the mills of his native state, where he had got his start as a bobbin boy and where the voters would someday turn out in hordes to express their thanks for all he had done for them and the nation in their time of trial. It was no wonder his enthusiasm rose with every closer look at the political, strategic, and financial possibilities of a campaign he formerly had thought not worth his time.
    Perhaps the most persuasive factor of all, so far at least as Banks was concerned, was that he secured Halleck’s approval of a plan, worked out between them, that assured the coöperation not only of Steele, who would move south from Little Rock to the vicinity of Shreveport with 15,000 troops, but also of Sherman, who was to send 10,000 of his veterans to Alexandria for a combination with the 20,000 Banks himself would bring to that point by repeating last year’s profitable march up the Teche. Including a marine brigade and the crews of twenty-odd warships under Rear Admiral David D. Porter, which were to serve as escort for the transports bringing Sherman’s men from Vicksburg and thenceforth as an integral part of the command in its ascent of the Red, this would give Banks a total strength of just under 50,000; which he believed was sufficient, in itself, to guarantee success in the campaign. His opponent, General Edmund Kirby Smith, commanding that vast, five-state Transmississippi region already beginning to be known as “Kirby-Smithdom,” had not much more than half that many soldiers in all of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and the Indian Territory combined. Such opposition as Smith might be able to offer the veteran 45,000-man blue army and its hard-hitting 210-gun fleet, Banks was not unjustifiedin believing, would only serve to swell the glory involved in the inevitable outcome.
    Sherman himself was inclined to agree with this assessment, though he was aware (as Banks perhaps was not, having had little time for theoretic study) of Napoleon’s dictum that the most difficult of all maneuvers was the combination of widely divided columns, regardless of their over-all numerical superiority, on a field of battle already occupied by an enemy who thus would be free, throughout the interim preceding their convergence, to strike at one or another of the approaching columns. His only regret, the red-haired general said when he came down to New Orleans in early March to confer with Banks about his share in the campaign, was that Grant had forbidden him to go along. He stayed two days, working out the arrangements for his troops to be at Alexandria in time for a meeting with Banks’s column on the 17th — the same day, as it turned out, that he would meet with Grant in Nashville, though he did not know that yet — then steamed back upriver to Vicksburg, declining his host’s invitation to stay over for the inauguration on March 5 of the recently elected Union-loyal governor of Louisiana, one Michael Hahn, a Bavaria-born lawyer and sugar planter who had opposed secession from the start. Despite the delay it would entail, Banks apparently felt obliged to remain for the ceremony — which was quite elaborate, one item on the program being a rendition of