A Confederate charge at the Battle of Pleasant Hill. From Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1864 Courtesy of Edwin Adams Davis.
The next day Banks was able to pull his army together. They stood against Taylor’s attack at Pleasant Hill, forcing the Confederates to withdraw. But despite this success, Banks was left with a disheartened army that was quickly losing confidence in his leadership. After the retreat to Grand Ecore, one “officer in high position” even suggested putting Banks on a steamer to New Orleans (Hoffman 1877:96-97).
RETREAT TO ALEXANDRIA
In spite of his army’s loss of courage, Banks wanted to continue the attack. But realizing that the troops were discouraged, and that General Steele was not coming down from Arkansas to support the Union attack on Shreveport, Banks’s officers convinced him to fall back to Alexandria. With this turn of events, the campaign’s goal of capturing Shreveport was all but forgotten. Now the main concern of Banks and Porter was to get their troops and boats out of the Red River area while keeping their forces intact.
After Porter’s gunboats returned to Grand Ecore from their own advance upstream, the dispirited soldiers began their retreat. Confederate General Taylor was now in a position to do real damage to the Union expedition. Confederate cavalry constantly tormented the retreating Union forces along the road to Alexandria. Meanwhile, others ambushed the gunboats along the twisting riverbanks. The river itself resisted the Federals as the boats continually ran aground in the shallow stream. One gunboat, the Eastport, was sunk by a rebel mine, refloated, towed, run aground several times, and finally blown up by the navy, to prevent her from being captured by Taylor’s rebels. Frank Church, a Marine officer aboard the tinclad Cricket, described what must have been a typical skirmish during the retreat:
We had not been fired upon for some time and were all sitting down not thinking of guerrillas when we were opened on by about a hundred men. My men sprang to their feet and fired back. I put two shots through the front door of the house where there were several men. After I fired three shots our boat swung around and got aground leaving us without a breastwork. My men behaved splendidly standing up and firing away while they were sending a perfect shower of ball and shot over us. As we could not get any opportunity to use our rifles to advantage I ordered my men to lay down until we swung around. I sought protection behind the bell but some fellow saw me and fired at me—two bullets struck the bell and I concluded I had better get somewhere else (Jones and Keuchel 1975:48-50).
The tinclad gunboat Cricket. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Eventually, the army and its naval support made their way back to Alexandria, where the rest of the Union forces waited. As the weary Yankees dragged into the town, an officer recorded in his diary: