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Updated: June 15, 2025
S. A. Smith became a surgeon in the rebel army, and at the close of the war was medical director of the trans-Mississippi Department, with General Kirby Smith. I have seen him since the war, at New Orleans, where he died about a year ago. Dr. Clark was in Washington recently, applying for a place as United States consul abroad.
Davis recognized the gravity of the situation, and in his message to Congress in December, 1863, he admitted that the Trans-Mississippi was practically isolated. This was indeed a great catastrophe, for hereafter neither men nor supplies could be drawn from the far Southwest.
Recovery was indicated by the success of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, in 1898. There were 2,600,000 admissions. The total cash receipts were $1,761,364, and the stockholders in the enterprise were paid dollar for dollar. The city of San Francisco had 500 inhabitants in 1840, 34,776 in 1850, 56,802 in 1860, 149,473 in 1870, 233,959 in 1880, 298,997 in 1890.
We are prone to forget that the Confederacy was practically divided into separate units as early as the capture of New Orleans by Farragut, but a great history of the time would have a special and thrilling story of the conduct of the detached western unit, the isolated world of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas the "Department of the Trans-Mississippi" cut off from the main body of the Confederacy and hemmed in between the Federal army and the deep sea.
Then, again, Sherman had lent Banks two divisions under A. J. Smith, the winter before, to co-operate with the trans-Mississippi forces, and this with the express pledge that they should be back by a time specified, so as to be prepared for this very campaign. It is hardly necessary to say they were not returned. That department continued to absorb troops to no purpose to the end of the war.
Davis succeed in escaping, but for one reason: I feared that if not captured, he might get into the trans-Mississippi region and there set up a more contracted confederacy. The young men now out of homes and out of employment might have rallied under his standard and protracted the war yet another year.
As soon as Kirby Smith became aware that his adversary was advancing to the Red River, he prepared to meet the menace by concentrating on Shreveport the whole available force of the Confederacy in the Trans-Mississippi from Texas to Missouri, numbering, according to his own estimate, 18,000 effectives.
The Mississippi was placed at our control, and the enemy were deprived of those supplies, both domestic and foreign, which they had drawn in so large quantities from the trans-Mississippi territory.
But victories like Olustee, Florida, barren in '64, could not avail them now, even if they had the troops to win them. The lower South was now as much isolated as the trans-Mississippi. Between its blockaded and garrisoned coast on one side and its sixty-mile swath of devastation through the heart of Georgia on the other it might as well have been a shipless island.
Before I came into command, these troops had been scattered over the trans-Mississippi department in such a way that they could not be, or were not, gotten back in time to take any part in the original movement; hence the consideration, which had caused Mobile to be selected as the objective point for Sherman's army to find his next base of supplies after having cut loose from Atlanta, no longer existed.
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