Frederick Steele

Frederick Steele's Union army moved south from Little Rock, Ark. (which he had captured the previous September) on today's date in 1864. The flawed plan developed by Henry Halleck in Washington was for Steele to link up with another Union force led by Major General Nathaniel Banks.

Banks, in coordination with the Navy, was advancing northwest up the Red River in Louisiana. Steele could get no farther than Camden, Ark., where he learned that the Red River expedition had come to grief, and only with hard fighting did he get most of his men back to Little Rock. But his campaign was less disastrous than Banks'.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas is not a great fan of Steele, and makes the odd claim that later in 1864 he remained "A conservative Democrat who opposed emancipation". By the spring of 1865, Steele was successfully leading a largely African-American corps in combat near Mobile, Alabama, and it is frankly inconceivable that he favored returning those men and their families to slavery. By 1864, the North -- including its soldiers in the field -- was turning abolitionist, and while Steele had to appease some pro-slavery unionists in Arkansas, I doubt he fully accepted their opinions.