Customer Reviews

Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi

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Students of the Civil War should be in Lawrence Hewitt's debt for his study of the Port Hudson campaign but I am not sure if they are. I have very ambivalent thoughts on this book. While neglected, the Port Hudson campaign was an important one with many interesting aspects from how freed slaves would fight to the coming of Reconstruction. Hewitt is a solid writer and he presents an interesting look at the start of the campaign and the battle on May 27, 1863 to take Port Hudson. He offers an excellent narrative of the successful Confederate defense of Port Hudson on that day...and then spend less than ten pages writing about the siege of the Confederate garrison and its ultimate surrender to federal forces on July 9, 1863. It's as if a study of the Gettysburg ended on the night of July 1, 1863--it looks like a Confederate victory--but then putting the events of the next two days in a few pages. Hewitt does not come off as an advocate of the Lost Cause--he is very kind, to the point of admiration, to the freed slaves who were fighting at Port Hudson. Was this a doctoral thesis that threatened to go on forever and some advisers prevented from being a comprehensive study of the campaign? I have no idea. The back cover says this work is about the longest siege in American history but the dramatic conditions of the siege--Confederates eating rats, Yankees dying of the fever--are quickly brushed over. Hewitt is a fine writer who should have been more ambitious. The book clocks in at less than 200 pages of real text as is--another 50 to 75 would have improved this book a good deal. The book is not a failure by any means. It's not a bad book and Hewitt is a good craftsman of sentences and paragraphs. But it is anti-climatic to say the least and does not offer what the publisher promised. Readers looking to understand this important and neglected Civil War campaign need to look elsewhere.

Without Port Hudson the Vicksburg campaign would not have been needed just as without Vicksburg , Port Hudson surrendered . It was the river between them that made them vital to the Confederacy . The use of the Red River to bring goods and men from west of the Mississippi river to the rest of the Confederacy such as Texas beef , leather , horses , other foods stuffs and weapons purchased abroad shipped to neutral Mexico , then to Texas , across to Louisiana , down the Red River to cross the Mississippi between the two fortifications , to wagons and rail transport . This book tells the tail of Port Hudson from its start too its surrender . The Author does a great job describing an almost blow by blow graphic description of the partial passing of Port Hudson by Admiral Farragut's fleet in chapter 5 and does an equally fine job describing the two land assaults on Port Hudson . The book is obviously well researched and is well written . The only reason for four stars is it could have used a couple more maps showing the locations of the many smaller skirmishes of the campaign . What we call skirmishes in the Civil war would have been rated as battles in our earlier wars , but for the scale of the American War for Southern Independence . The writer's descriptions of the battles are mostly told from the northern view due probably to the greater availability of Union records . Much of the Southern records were destroyed during the war or simply lost during the hard times that followed in the south . The book comes across as a very balanced look at this little told but major siege . This is a good read .

This is a book of the battle of Port Hudson, Civil War account of how Port Hudson changed the strategy of the civil war. History buffs, good book.