James L. Padgett
CHAPTER IX.
The Red River Expedition—Death of Colonel Mudd—How Colonel Marsh Held the Line—Fighting Guerrillas—"Alton Hell-Hounds"—Their Remedy for Picket Shooting—Incidents at Clinton, Louisiana—Colored Wards and the River Jordan—Dash Upon Liberty, Mississippi—Capture of One Hundred and Four Confederate Officers—Chivalry of the Prisoners and Captors How a Confederate Captain "Made Good."
"The greatest gift a hero leaves his race is to have been a hero. Say we fail!
We feed the high traditions of the world
And leave our spirit in our children's breast."
—George Eliot.
One of the important and humiliating campaign features of 1864 was the Red River Expedition, which was foredoomed to ignominious failure. It was one of Halleck's favorite projects and was started before Grant received his general command; otherwise, it probably would not have been ordered. Grant, in his "Memoirs," says of it: "I had opposed the movement strenuously but acquiesced because it was the order of my superior (Halleck) at the time."
Another sentence of Grant's indicates the disadvantage at which it placed our army, aside from the great and needless loss of life and property entailed by it. He says: "The services of forty thousand veteran troops, over and above the number required to hold all that was necessary in the Department of the Gulf, were thus paralyzed."