Exploring Mansfield State Historic Site
On the surface, the land along the 3/4th mile Battlefield Trail at Mansfield State Historic Site appears familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Louisiana outdoors. Wind whispers through long needles of loblolly pines, and you turn at the sound of claws scratching bark to watch two squirrels scurry up a trunk. Cardinals flutter overhead. A woodpecker drums in the distance. In this tranquil setting three miles southeast of Mansfield, Confederate and Union soldiers fought the bloodiest battle of the Red River Campaign.
“So many people died in such a short time,” says Park Manager Amy Boone. “If no one came to collect your body, you were buried in a mass grave.” In the visitor center museum, she points to signage that leads visitors through the chronology of the battle. “People who visit are always most surprised by the number of casualties,” says Boone. On April 8, 1864, Major General Richard Taylor’s Confederate troops nearly destroyed two divisions of the Union’s 13th Army Corps. The Confederates sustained a reported 1,100 casualties, the Union, 2,330. Historians believe the numbers could be much higher.
War correspondent John Russell Young was on the staff of Union General Nathaniel P. Banks and present on the day of the battle. Young published the first account of the 1861 Battle of Bull Run and documented the chaos and carnage at Mansfield: “Suddenly there was a rush, a shout, a crashing of trees, the breaking down of rails, the rush and scamper of men … we found ourselves swallowed up, as it were, in a hissing, seething, bubbling whirlpool of agitated men.”
On April 8, 1864, Union and Confederate soldiers formed a battle line along a split-rail fence similar to this one at Honeycutt Hill. General Alfred Mouton died leading the attack. His monument rises among others at the entrance to the Mansfield State Historic Site.
Also known as the Battle of Sabine Crossroads, the Battle of Mansfield was the last major Confederate victory and, with a combined total of almost 30,000 troops, one of the largest Civil War battles fought west of the Mississippi River. It unfolded in several phases, starting along the Shreveport-Natchitoches Road, which LA Highway 175 now closely follows, and ended along Chapman’s Bayou, three miles southeast of the visitor center.
“All of this was cotton country,” Boone says, explaining the region’s economic importance at a time when New England textile factories starved for lack of the crop. After the surrender of Vicksburg, the Union Army controlled the Mississippi River and looked toward Louisiana. To capture Shreveport, 40 miles north of today’s Mansfield State Historic Site, could mean the end of the war. The battle here, Boone says, “was Louisiana’s great Civil War battle, a turning point in the Red River Campaign.” In a documentary that screens in the visitor center’s research library, historian Gary Joiner says that the decisive victory kept the Confederate government in place for another year. Indeed, on April 9, 1865, one year and one day after the Battle of Mansfield, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Virginia.
More than a century after Lee’s surrender, the Virginia-born photographer Sally Mann began photographing Civil War battlefields using a mid-19th century photographic process. In her artist statement for this work, Mann speaks of the trees growing today at Manassas and Appomattox as “silent witnesses to so much of what happened on my poor, heartbroken Southern soil — so many of them are ancient, and surely they hold deep in their woody souls that which happened when the lives of men intersected with theirs when they were saplings ….”
Mann’s images urge the viewer to witness the ways that the past echoes inside the present. Another Southerner, the Mississippi Nobel laureate William Faulkner, reminds us of what so many in the South know intuitively. “The past is never dead,” he writes in “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past.” The photographer and novelist address our inheritance as people born here, in this place, rather than in another. Their work stands against the cacophonous rush of contemporary life and its goal to convince us that the immediate reigns supreme and little about the past remains worth knowing. But while we can look, we should remember to see. And while we can see, we should remember to acknowledge what came before.
