The Battle of Henderson's Hill (March 21, 1864), also known as the Bayou Rapides, saw a reinforced Union Army division led by Brigadier General Joseph A. Mower opposed by a regiment of Confederate Army cavalry and attached artillery under Colonel William G. Vincent. That evening, during a rainstorm, Mower sent one infantry brigade on a circuitous march to gain the rear of Vincent's command. The brigade's subsequent attack surprised and captured most of the Confederates. Mower could not exploit his minor victory because the arrival of additional Federal army and naval units was delayed. This clash occurred during the Red River campaign of the American Civil War which saw Major General Nathaniel P. Banks' Union army try to seize Shreveport, Louisiana, from its Confederate defenders led by Lieutenant General Richard Taylor.
Worried about Maximilian's Second French intervention in Mexico, President Abraham Lincoln desired military operations to establish United States control over some part of Texas. Over the opposition of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, and Major Generals William T. Sherman and Nathaniel P. Banks, Lincoln and Major General Henry Halleck drew up a plan to use the Red River as an invasion corridor. As commander of the Department of the Gulf, Banks was instructed to coordinate operations with Major General Frederick Steele in Arkansas and Sherman. The plan that emerged was for Banks with 17,000 troops to move up Bayou Teche and link up at Alexandria, Louisiana, on March 17, with 10,000 troops borrowed from Sherman's Military Division of the Mississippi. From there, the combined force would ascend the Red River toward Shreveport. Meanwhile, Steele with 15,000 was supposed to move south from Little Rock, Arkansas, and rendezvous with Banks at either Shreveport, Alexandria, or Natchitoches, Louisiana. Steele's column got underway so late that it fought a separate series of actions.
General Edmund Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi Department had 30,000 Confederate soldiers evenly distributed in three bodies. These were led by Richard Taylor in Louisiana, Major General John B. Magruder on the Texas coast, and Lieutenant General Theophilus H. Holmes near Camden, Arkansas. Taylor had Major General John George Walker's infantry division (3 brigades) at Marksville, Louisiana and Brigadier General Alfred Mouton's infantry division (2 brigades) on the Red River below Alexandria. Vincent's 2nd Louisiana Cavalry Regiment was posted at Vermilionville on Bayou Teche, except for three companies with Walker. Brigadier General Thomas Green's cavalry was coming from Texas and would not reinforce Taylor until the first week of April.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
This page covers Henderson Hill. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.