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Re: Big congrats to Steven Mayeux
In Response To: Big congrats to Steven Mayeux ()

Thanks, Drew. I've been watching your blog to see when you'd pick up on this. Didn't take you long.

The book is a history of Fort DeRussy, from its beginning as a steamboat landing in the 1850s up through its recent acceptance as a State Historic Site. It goes into detail on all three battles that took place at the fort, as well as an in-depth account of the capture of USS Indianola below Vicksburg by an expedition that outfitted at DeRussy. And then there's all the goings-on that occurred between the battles. The Red River Campaign gets a lot of coverage, but that's only about half of the book. And there's a bio of Lewis DeRussy in the appendices.

I personally think its a good book. I found it fascinating the first six or seven times I read it. (It's gotten kind of old now.) It took me ten years to write it, so when I was proofing the thing I was coming across stuff I didn't even know I knew.

I did find that by going into intensive detail on one small part of the war, I found things that have been ignored (or missed) by the historians who cover the big picture. For instance, David Porter was an inveterate liar, who wildly embellished his official reports. This is totally overlooked by all of his biographers, but I give multiple examples in my book. And I think my coverage of the Indianola affair is the first time the entire incident has been detailed. Every other published account I've come across - and there have been a lot of them recently - focus on "Porter's Hoax" which caused the Confederates to blow up the captured boat. My book points out that Porter's real hoax was in fooling modern historians into believing in "Porter's Hoax." (In fact, when the dummy gunboat was sent down the river, Porter was unaware that Indianola had been captured, or was even in trouble.)

I'm not a historian by training, so my book may not read like your standard Civil War history. I probably focus more on people than on tactics, strategies, and political ends. But I do cover that, too. The story of the fort has a lot of interesting facets: land battery vs gunboat fight, naval battle, land battle and siege, Eastern confederates in the trans-Mississippi (only at DeRussy?), contraband camp, gunboat station, cotton-stealing expeditions, runaway slaves, deserters, prison life, civilian interaction, local militias, and more.

Anyway, thanks for the plug. Hope you'll like the book.

One aggravating thing - even after ten years of researching and writing, I'm still finding out new things. One of the Yankees who helped capture the fort had a Texas cousin on the inside. Found that out too late to put it in. Guess that will have to be in the second edition.

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Big congrats to Steven Mayeux
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Indianola article
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