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Polignac's Texas Brigade With a New Preface by Alwyn Barr |
The only foreign general of the Confederacy was Prince Camille de Polignac, and the oddly assorted brigade of Texans he led during part of the Civil War fought unheralded in the Trans-Mississippi. Originally published for the members of a small historical association in 1964, Polignac's Texas Brigade was the first book to discuss the Red River campaign of the Civil War.
Some five thousand men, raised largely from North Texas in 1862, served in three cavalry regiments, which were dismounted in 1863 to fight as infantry. In the steaming swamps of Louisiana, they held back the Union forces occupying New Orleans. They saw action at Stirling's Plantation, Bayou Bourbeau, and Sabine Crossroads, Louisiana; at Prairie Grove, Arkansas; and at Shirley's Ford and Newtonia, Missouri. They endured a fearfully cold winter march through Indian Territory; bombardment by huge gunboat shells along the banks of the Mississippi, Ouachita, and Red Rivers; staggering Union volleys at Mansfield; a sundown charge at Pleasant Hill; and a stand-up, no-quarter fire fight along Yellow Bayou.
Alwyn Barr's study of this little-known brigade not only details an aspect of the less-studied war in the West, but also shows the war at the level of the common soldier. "Although the men of Polignac's brigade served in secondary campaigns with a limited effect on the outcome of the conflict," Barr concluded, "they were very much a part of the American Civil War, and a factor in those events which took place west of the Mississippi River." This little masterpiece of Civil War history now includes a new preface by Barr that updates what is known of the brigade and its significance to the Trans-Mississippi campaign.
"the author has skillfully followed . . . unit and command changes and yet has been able to sustain a continuous narrative as the brigade moved across the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and back to Texas."—Southwestern Historical Quarterly
ALWYN BARR is a professor of history at Texas Tech University and a past president of the Texas State Historical Association. He has published three other books and some forty articles on Texas, African American, and military history. He lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Number Sixty: Texas A&M University Military History Series
Polignac's Texas Brigade
ISBN 0-89096-814-4 paper $12.95
LC 97-51441. 6x9. 104 pp. 8 b&w photos.
2 maps. Bib. Index.
Military History. Civil War. Texas History.
Publication Date: March 1998 .
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