The Texas Overland Expedition of 1863

President Abraham Lincoln is worried about the presence of a French army in Mexico and eager to satisfy the demands of Texas Unionists and New England textile manufacturers for a loyalist government in Texas. He orders Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a Federal presence in Texas in the fall of 1863. Banks sends an army of more than 30,000 Federal troops into Louisiana, hoping to strike at either Galveston and Houston by an overland march across southern Louisiana, or at Shreveport and northeast Texas by a penetration up the Red River. Poor communications between Banks and his commander on the scene, the overcautious nature of Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin, a vulnerable supply line, and a sharp reverse at the Battle of Bayou Bourbeau result in the failure of the expedition, and lead to the disastrous Red River Campaign of 1864.

A detailed account of a pivotal event that changed the course of the war, by an acclaimed expert.

RICHARD LOWE is Regents Professor of History at the University of North Texas. He has published several books on the mid-nineteenth-century United States, and his most recent publication,Walker's Texas Division, C.S.A., won the Museum of the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis Prize for the best book on the Civil War period published in 2004. He is currently editing and annotating Major General John G. Walker's history of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. He can be reached for interview at lowe@unt.edu.