Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West
By Stephen A. Dupree

Illustrated, maps, appendix (order of battle), endnotes, bibliography, index, 314 pages, 2008.Texas A&M University Press, John H. Lindsey Building, Lewis Street, 4354 TAMU, College Station, Texas 77843-4354, $40 plus shipping.

Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington
C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.

Review:
Stephen Dupree’s Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West is a good book about a bad general. Readers of this newspaper who can put aside their knee-jerk aversion to Dupree’s subject, Union political general Nathaniel Banks, an abysmal failure as an army commander in two theaters of the war, will enjoy this well- written, thoroughly researched study of Banks’ bungling attempts to establish a Union presence in Confederate Texas.

 The prewar career of Nathaniel Banks mimicked a Horatio Alger novel. Born into obscurity in Massachusetts in 1816, Banks began work at age 11 as a “bobbin boy” in a Waltham textile factory. In his 20s, Banks became a lawyer, despite his lack of much formal education, and set his sights upon a career in politics.

Banks rose to political prominence in the 1850s, winning election first to the Massachusetts legislature and later to Congress, where he served as Speaker of the House, before returning to his home state as governor late in the decade. A Republican presidential candidate in the 1860 election, Banks failed to receive the nomination and briefly left politics.

Commissioned by Lincoln as a major general in June 1861 despite a total lack of military education or experience, Banks thus began his military career as one of the half dozen highest ranking generals in federal service.

After a brief review of Banks’ failures as an army commander in Virginia early in the war, during which time Banks’ ineptitude in opposing Stonewall Jackson earned Banks the sobriquet “Jackson’s Commissary,” Dupree picks up his story with Banks’ appointment in November 1862 as commander of the Union Department of the Gulf, with headquarters in occupied New Orleans.

Lincoln’s general-in-chief, Henry W. Halleck, gave Banks several assignments in his new position, including the occupation of some unspecified part of Texas.

The balance of the book is a chronological account of Banks’ five separate attempts to establish a Union presence in Texas. Though all but the Red River campaign of 1864 were relatively minor in scope, Banks’ first two forays into Texas resulted in humiliating federal defeats, beginning with the expulsion of federal land and naval forces from the seaport of Galveston in January 1863.

Later in 1863, at Sabine Pass near the Louisiana-Texas border, a Confederate force of 40-odd Texas Irish artillerymen commanded by a mere lieutenant sent a federal armada conveying 5,000 troops reeling back to New Orleans, and captured two of the Yankee gunboats in the process.

After the debacle at Sabine Pass, Banks’ chief subordinate, Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin, who had experienced his own command problems in Virginia earlier in the war, attempted to invade Texas overland through southwestern Louisiana. Logistical problems, combined with unexpected Confederate resistance and Franklin’s own indecisiveness, stopped this campaign short of the Texas border.

Banks initiated his fourth invasion of Texas in October 1863, an amphibious assault launched from New Orleans against the South Texas coast. Alone among Banks’ five invasion attempts, this campaign succeeded, though the only lasting result was the establishment of a small Union presence on an island near the southernmost tip of Texas.

In the spring of 1864, under pressure from Washington to establish a line of defense in northern Louisiana, Banks reluctantly led a large-scale land and naval excursion up the Red River towards Shreveport, the headquarters of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi army.

A Confederate army under Gen. Richard Taylor surprised and defeated Banks’ army at Sabine Crossroads, near Mansfield, in early April, and Banks hurriedly retreated down the river, despite a strong numerical advantage and the urgings of his better generals to resume the campaign.

 The aborted Red River campaign, Dupree points out, illustrates two of Banks’ worst shortcomings as a general: Banks could not adjust when the enemy did not do exactly what he expected; and he did not know good military advice from bad. Additionally, Banks suffered from what Dupree terms “incurable self-importance,” a trait that shines through in Banks’ typically self-congratulatory correspondence with Washington.

Dupree’s account of Banks’ service in the West trails the general from one failure to the next fiasco; however, the author recognizes Banks’ personal bravery and his steadfast refusal to use his office for financial gain.

In assessing Banks’ failures in command in his New Orleans posting, Dupree argues convincingly that those failures point up broader failures in the Union command system. Specifically, Lincoln was negligent in not removing Banks from command until May 1864, apparently because the president feared the political repercussions.

In order to avoid blame for Banks’ likely failures, Halleck repeatedly refused to issue definite orders to Banks, instead limiting himself to making periodic “suggestions” to the general, evidently in the hope that if Banks somehow took the suggestions and succeeded, then he, Halleck, might claim credit. If ever a Civil War general needed specific orders from Washington, Banks was that general.

Virtually all of Banks’ campaigns against Texas are the subject of separate books, and in some cases multiple published studies. But Dupree’s new book is the first to bring together in a single work all five invasion attempts, giving readers a better overall perspective on Banks’ efforts to plant the Stars and Stripes in Texas.

Dupree’s text is illustrated with pictures of the book’s major characters. The maps are well drawn and avoid excessive detail. The research underlying the text is impressive, and the author’s writing style is commendable. The notes, however, are located at the end of the text, a decision by the publisher that this reviewer regrets.

Otherwise this reviewer finds little to criticize, and much to praise, in Planting the Union Flag in Texas, and recommends it highly, especially to those interested in the war in the West.