Edward at War
Three moments from the two years Edward Bennett served in the Twenty-Third Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry — the retreat from Mansfield, the improvised dam at Alexandria that saved a fleet, and the trenches at Fort Blakely on the day the war ended without his knowing it.
The Battle of Mansfield
The Battle of Mansfield — also called Sabine Crossroads — was fought on April 8, 1864, on a single road through pine forest forty miles south of Shreveport. It was the worst day of the Red River Campaign for the Union Army. General Nathaniel Banks’s advance up the Red River, meant to secure cotton and press into Texas, collided with a Confederate force under General Richard Taylor and broke.
Edward Bennett and the Twenty-Third Wisconsin did not arrive at Mansfield until the retreat. They did not fight there. But they marched the ground.
In 2018, more than a century and a half later, Doug Waidelich walked that same battlefield in the rain, reading the markers, looking for the place his great-great-great-grandfather’s regiment would have passed through on its way north a few weeks after the killing.
Book: Chapter 6 — Mansfield: The RetreatBailey’s Dam
By early May of 1864 the Red River had fallen so low that Admiral David Dixon Porter’s Union gunboats sat trapped above the rapids at Alexandria, Louisiana. Ten iron vessels, worth millions, were about to be abandoned or destroyed to keep them out of Confederate hands.
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey of the Fourth Wisconsin proposed a wing dam. Logs, stones, sunken coal barges, whatever the river could be made to hold. Thousands of soldiers went into the water and the timber to build it. Edward Bennett was one of them.
The dam raised the water high enough. The fleet came over the falls. The gunboats were saved. It remains one of the most remarkable feats of military engineering of the war.
Edward carried the memory of it for the rest of his life. When he rewrote his diary at seventy, the Alexandria river work was among the passages he took most care to preserve.
Book: Chapter 5 — The Red River, April 1864The Battle of Fort Blakely
Fort Blakely stood on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, one of the last major Confederate positions still holding out in April of 1865. The Union assault came in the late afternoon of April 9. Edward Bennett and the Twenty-Third Wisconsin went over the works with the rest of their brigade.
On the same day, a thousand miles to the northeast, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Edward and the men beside him did not know it. They fought the last major infantry engagement of the American Civil War not knowing that the war was, for all practical purposes, already over.
News of Appomattox reached the army at Blakely a few days later. A week after that, on April 15, Lincoln was dead. The Twenty-Third Wisconsin then marched into Mobile, occupied it, and began the long wait for discharge that would not come until January of 1866.
Edward walked into Mobile under occupation in the last week of the war. He would not be home in Wisconsin for another nine months.
Book: Chapter 9 — The Last Winter