Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 4.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[541] responsibility of this disobedience—a responsibility, moreover, in which Smith had a share, for it was perfectly clear to him that he could not at this moment abandon the fleet and the army. All he asked was to set himself right at headquarters, whose approval was not open to question, but it was in the hope of resuming immediately an offensive campaign and seeking prompt revenge for the disaster at Mansfield. Banks, on the contrary, hesitated; he dared neither to advance nor retire: he was looking every moment for the enemy to make a grand attack, and intrenched himself as if it lay with him to remain in this position, which the falling of the waters, however, was soon to render inaccessible even to the smallest craft.

If Kirby Smith had indeed, in thinking better of it, attempted a general attack, it would still have been in his power to inflict upon the Federals an irreparable disaster and to capture their fleet, which the Union army, because so badly handled, would not have been able to defend perhaps. But, now assured of the safety of Shreveport, which was no longer menaced on any side, his only thought was to turn his forces against Steele, in spite of the distance that lay between them. The news that the latter, having learned, as we shall tell farther on, of Banks' defeat, was falling back on Little Rock, ought to have stopped him, for by going in pursuit of him he was losing all chance of returning in time to Red River to give the finishing-stroke to Banks' defeat. On the contrary, it hastened his departure. The divisions of Churchill and Walker had left Mansfield on the morning of the 14th for Shreveport; on the 16th, Kirby Smith put himself at their head to march northward. There was left to Taylor only Polignac's division, reduced by this time to twelve hundred muskets, and the cavalry reinforced by Steele's brigade recently arrived from Texas. Green had been succeeded by Wharton, an experienced and enterprising officer, whom we have seen at work in Tennessee. Polignac had left Mansfield on the 14th with his infantry for the purpose of making a junction in front of Grand Écore with the cavalry that stood in the way of Banks' army. Any other adversary would have made him pay roundly for his hardihood in posting himself at the head of a mere handful of foot-soldiers and a thousand or so of cavalry in the face of more than twenty thousand fighting men. But the Union general had no further