A DAM FINE SOLUTION

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to determine that boats with 7-foot drafts sitting in three feet of water aren’t going anywhere. Yet that was the dilemma Union Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter faced as he attempted to navigate his Mississippi Squadron down the Red River in late April 1864. The entire Red River Campaign, in fact, may well have ended abruptly at a low-water spot off Alexandria, La., were it not for the practical genius and engineering skill of a Union officer from the backwoods of Wisconsin.

The Red River Campaign was an ill-conceived Federal Army–Navy offensive in the spring of 1864, which soon became known, according to one chronicler, as “one of the biggest military fiascos of the Civil War,” and by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman himself as “one damn blunder from beginning to end.” The mission ostensibly was for the combined Union force to proceed up the unpredictable Red River through Louisiana, seize the strategically vital city of Shreveport—home of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department’s headquarters—and then establish a presence in eastern Texas while commandeering as much Southern cotton as possible.

Under the joint command of Admiral Porter (who had earlier expressed grave doubt as to the campaign’s viability) and the inept, hard-luck political general Nathaniel P. Banks, the operation was the largest land-and-water expedition of the war. Banks’ force of more than 30,000 men was to act in concert with a 33-vessel flotilla consisting