RELIC Books: One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End

This week on Thurs. Oct. 4 (note the change in schedule) for the RELIC book discussion series on the Civil War in Louisiana we will be discussing Dr. Gary Joiner’s book One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign of 1864 - with a special visit from Dr. Joiner himself!

The title of the book is a quote from General William Tecumseh Sherman as he summed up the Union’s massive failure that was the Red River Campaign. The campaign was the Union's attempt to capture Shreveport and take Louisiana and Texas out of Confederate hands (and while they were at it, free up some cotton to get the New England textile mills running again). Dr. Joiner’s intimate knowledge of the geography of the Red River Valley shines through in his descriptions of Confederate strategy to keep at bay 40,000 Union troops and sixty naval vessels that voyaged up the Red River toward the Confederate capitol of Louisiana, Shreveport.