On the 28th, he again attacked and defeated the enemy under the rebel General Taylor, at Cane River.  By the 26th, General Banks had assembled his whole army at Alexandria, and pushed forward to Grand Ecore.  On the morning of April 6th he moved from Grand Ecore.  On the afternoon of the 7th, he advanced and met the enemy near Pleasant Hill, and drove him from the field.  On the same afternoon the enemy made a stand eight miles beyond Pleasant Hill, but was again compelled to retreat.  On the 8th, at Sabine Cross Roads and Peach Hill, the enemy attacked and defeated his advance, capturing nineteen pieces of artillery and an immense amount of transportation and stores.  During the night, General Banks fell back to Pleasant Hill, where another battle was fought on the 9th, and the enemy repulsed with great loss.  During the night, General Banks continued his retrograde movement to Grand Ecore, and thence to Alexandria, which he reached on the 27th of April.  Here a serious difficulty arose in getting Admiral Porter’s fleet which accompanied the expedition, over the rapids, the water having fallen so much since they passed up as to prevent their return.  At the suggestion of Colonel (now Brigadier-General) Bailey, and under his superintendence, wing-dams were constructed, by which the channel was contracted so that the fleet passed down the rapids in safety.

The army evacuated Alexandria on the 14th of May, after considerable skirmishing with the enemy’s advance, and reached Morganzia and Point Coupee near the end of the month.  The disastrous termination of this expedition, and the lateness of the season, rendered impracticable the carrying out of my plans of a movement in force sufficient to insure the capture of Mobile.

On the 23d of March, Major-General Steele left Little Rock with the 7th army corps, to cooperate with General Banks’s expedition on the Red River, and reached Arkadelphia on the 28th.  On the 16th of April, after driving the enemy before him, he was joined, near Elkin’s Ferry, in Washita County, by General Thayer, who had marched from Fort Smith.  After several severe skirmishes, in which the enemy was defeated, General Steele reached Camden, which he occupied about the middle of April.

On learning the defeat and consequent retreat of General Banks on Red River, and the loss of one of his own trains at Mark’s Mill, in Dallas County, General Steele determined to fall back to the Arkansas River.  He left Camden on the 26th of April, and reached Little Rock on the 2d of May.  On the 30th of April, the enemy attacked him while crossing Saline River at Jenkins’s Ferry, but was repulsed with considerable loss.  Our loss was about six hundred in killed, wounded and prisoners.

Major-General Canby, who had been assigned to the command of the “Military Division of the West Mississippi,” was therefore directed to send the 19th army corps to join the armies operating against Richmond, and to limit the remainder of his command to such operations as might be necessary to hold the positions and lines of communications he then occupied.