Louisiana in the American Civil War
Louisiana in the American Civil War begins with a single city, New Orleans, the largest city in the South. The state sat in the southwest of the Confederate States of America, and it controlled that wealthy trade center. It also brought the French Creole and Cajun populations into a country that was otherwise predominantly Anglo-American.
A place like this was bound to be contested. Yet the way the contest played out was strange. Part of Louisiana ended the war treated by Washington as a loyal state with its own elected voices in Congress, even though the state had left the Union. Part of it was left out of the Emancipation Proclamation altogether.
This documentary asks how that happened. It asks what slavery meant to a state like this, how secession was pushed through, and what went wrong for the men who tried to guard the mouth of the Mississippi. It also asks who led Louisiana's soldiers, and how the state found its way back.
By 1860-47 percent of Louisiana's people were enslaved. Enslaved African Americans had already made up the majority of the population in the eighteenth century, under French and Spanish rule. When the United States acquired the territory in 1803 and Louisiana became a state in 1812, slavery was entrenched.
The picture was not simple. Louisiana also had one of the largest free black populations in the United States. White opinion followed geography. Much of the white population, particularly in the cities, supported slavery, while pockets of loyalty to the U.S. government survived in the more rural areas.
The governor in 1860 was a wealthy planter and slave holder named Thomas Overton Moore.
On the 8th of January 1861, Governor Moore ordered the Louisiana militia to occupy the U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge. He sent troops against the two forts guarding New Orleans, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip. A convention to take the state out of the Union met on the 23rd of January.
The order of events was the problem. The military moves came before secession had been established. The state constitution called for a popular referendum to set up a convention, and that step was skipped. Only five percent of the public was represented at the convention. Louisiana declared that it had seceded on the 26th of January 1861.
Moore defended himself in plain terms. He said: "I do not think it comports with the honor and self-respect of Louisiana as a slave-holding state to live under the government of a Black Republican president." The phrase "Black Republican" was an epithet that many Democrats of the time used for Republicans.
In March 1861, George Williamson, the Louisianan state commissioner, addressed the secession convention in Texas. He urged other slave states to leave the Union so they could keep practicing slavery. He said: "With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual."
Ordinary soldiers spoke just as bluntly. One Louisianan artillery soldier said he never wanted to see Black people treated as equals of white people. He complained that there were already too many free Black people to suit him, "let alone having four millions."
King Cotton was the first plan for defending Louisiana and the other Gulf states. The idea was an unofficial embargo of cotton to Europe. Its backers expected that the shortage would push Britain into using its navy to protect the new Confederacy.
The second plan was a fleet of privateers. President Jefferson Davis issued letters of marque and reprisal, which licensed private ships to attack the enemy. The hope was to sweep the sea clear of U.S. naval and commercial ships and, at the same time, to sustain Louisiana's booming port economy.
The third plan rested on stone and iron. Louisiana's defenders relied on a ring of pre-war masonry forts, built under the Third System of American coastal defense. They paired those forts with a fleet of new ironclad warships, meant to keep the U.S. Navy out of the mouth of the Mississippi.
All of these strategies failed. On the Union side, the president had already settled on one idea about the river.
Abraham Lincoln called the Mississippi River the "backbone of the Rebellion." He reasoned that if the Union controlled the river, it would take back the largest city in the Confederacy and split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln moved quickly to back Admiral David Dixon Porter's idea of a naval advance to capture New Orleans.
The plan also served Lincoln's politics. Capturing the port would let the Union supply cotton to northern textile manufacturers and renew trade and exports from New Orleans. The U.S. Navy would serve as a formidable invasion force and as a means of carrying Union troops along the Mississippi and its tributaries.
New Orleans mattered because of its geography. It was the southernmost city on the Mississippi, with access to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. War Department planned early on for its capture. U.S. Army forces took the city on the 25th of April 1862.
Governor Moore had lobbied the Confederate government in Richmond for a strong defense of New Orleans, without success. Two days before the city surrendered, he and the legislature abandoned Baton Rouge as the state capital. They relocated to Opelousas in May.
From Opelousas, Moore organized military resistance at the state level. He ordered the burning of cotton and an end to trade with Union forces. He also recruited troops heavily for the state militia.
Washington took a different path in the territory it held. A large part of the population had Union sympathies, or at least commercial interests that fit with the Union's. So the U.S. government took the unusual step of designating the areas of Louisiana under U.S. control as a state within the Union. That state had its own elected representatives to the U.S. Congress.
For the latter part of the war, the U.S. and the Confederacy each recognized their own distinct Louisiana governor. The split also shaped emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation applied exclusively to states in rebellion against the Union, and New Orleans and 13 named parishes were exempted from it.
Moore's time as governor ran from 1860 through early 1864. The man who took the Confederate seat of government after him came from the army.
William Tecumseh Sherman was president of the Louisiana Military Academy, now LSU, when the war began. He later became a Union general. Louisiana's own sons went the other way. Antebellum residents P.G.T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg and Richard Taylor each commanded significant independent armies, and Taylor's forces were among the last Confederate armies still in the field when the war closed.
Henry Watkins Allen led a brigade in the middle of the war. He then served as the Confederate governor of Louisiana from 1864 to 1865. Randall L. Gibson, another competent brigade commander, became a U.S. Senator as a Democrat after the war.
Several brigadiers earned reputations tied to their units. Chatham Roberdeau Wheat commanded the celebrated "Louisiana Tigers" of the Army of Northern Virginia. Francis T. Nicholls led the "Pelican Brigade" until he lost his left foot at Chancellorsville. St. John Lidell was a prominent brigade commander in the Army of Tennessee. Alfred Mouton was killed at the Battle of Mansfield, and Harry T. Hays also appears among the brigadiers of note.
Henry Gray, a wealthy plantation owner from Bienville Parish, served as a brigadier general under Taylor. Late in the war, voters elected him to the Second Confederate Congress. Leroy A. Stafford was among a handful of Louisiana generals killed in the war. Albert Gallatin Blanchard was a rarity, a Confederate general born in Massachusetts.
The Red River Campaign shows how the fighting in Louisiana followed the water. Battles clustered along the major waterways, and the list runs to more than two dozen named engagements. Early ones include the Battle of the Head of Passes and the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip.
The siege of Port Hudson and the Battle of Milliken's Bend belong to the same river story. So do the Battle of Fort Bisland and the Battle of Irish Bend. The Red River fights include the Battle of Mansfield, also called Sabine Cross-Roads, and the Battle of Pleasant Hill. The list closes with the Battle of Yellow Bayou.
After the war, Louisiana became part of the Fifth Military District. The state ratified amendments to the U.S. Constitution that abolished slavery and granted citizenship to former slaves. With Reconstruction's requirements met, its representatives were readmitted to Congress. Louisiana was fully restored to the United States on the 9th of July 1868.
Federal troops stayed on. Under the Compromise of 1877, Southern Democrats acknowledged Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president, and Republicans agreed to meet certain Southern demands. One was the removal of all U.S. military forces from the former Confederate states. Troops remained then only in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, and the compromise ended their presence there.
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Common questions
When did Louisiana secede in the American Civil War?
Louisiana declared that it had seceded from the Union on the 26th of January 1861. A convention met on the 23rd of January, and Governor Thomas Overton Moore had already ordered militia to occupy the Baton Rouge arsenal and the forts guarding New Orleans on the 8th of January.
When did the Union capture New Orleans in the American Civil War?
U.S. Army forces took New Orleans on the 25th of April 1862. The city was the largest in the South and a strategic port at the southern end of the Mississippi River.
Why was New Orleans important in the Louisiana Civil War story?
New Orleans was the largest city in the South and sat at the southernmost point of the Mississippi River with access to the Gulf of Mexico. Abraham Lincoln called the river the "backbone of the Rebellion," and taking the city would help split the Confederacy in half.
Did Louisiana have two governors during the American Civil War?
Yes. For the latter part of the war, the U.S. and the Confederacy each recognized their own distinct Louisiana governor. The U.S. also designated the Louisiana areas under its control as a state within the Union with its own elected representatives in Congress.
Was Louisiana covered by the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War?
Only in part. New Orleans and 13 named parishes were exempted, because the Emancipation Proclamation applied exclusively to states in rebellion against the Union.
When was Louisiana restored to the Union after the American Civil War?
Louisiana was fully restored to the United States on the 9th of July 1868. Its representatives were readmitted to Congress after the state ratified amendments abolishing slavery and granting citizenship to former slaves.
All sources
18 references cited across the entry
- 4BookThe Capture of New Orleans 1862Chester G. Hearn — Louisiana State University Press — 1995
- 5BookFreedom: a documentary history of emancipation 1861–1867 : selected from the holdings of the National Archives of the United States. The destruction of slaveryFreedmen and Southern Society Project — CUP Archive — 1982
- 7Hearn, pp. 2-31.
- 8BookJournal of the Secession Convention of TexasE.W. Winkler — 1861
- 9BookFor Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil WarJames M. McPherson — Oxford University Press, Inc. — 1997
- 10Official atlas: plate XC.
- 11Chester G. Hearn, The Capture of New Orleans, 1862 (LSU Press, 1995)
- 12BookRed River Campaign, Politics & Cotton in the Civil WarLudwell H. Johnson — Kent State University Press — 1993
- 13Hearn, pp. 22-31.
- 14BookFighting Men of the Civil WarWilliam C. Davis — Smithmark Publishers Inc. — 1991
- 15Hearn, p. 129.
- 16Hearn, pp. 2-3.
- 17BookReunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of ReconstructionC. Vann Woodward — Little, Brown and Company — 1966
- 18BookLouisiana: The History of an American StateAnne Campbell — Clairmont Press — 2007