Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Chapter 4
Southern Louisiana and
the Gulf Coast, 1862–1863
Control of the Mississippi River was an objective that federal officials bore in
mind even before hostilities began. Commercially important since the days of the
first trans-Appalachian settlements, the river was the route by which a large part of
the South’s chief export, cotton, reached the world. Toward the end of its course,
the Mississippi meets the Red River in low, flat land between Natchez and Baton
Rouge. Because of the level terrain, parts of the flow of both rivers join to form a
distributary stream called the Atchafalaya River, which flows south to empty into
the Gulf of Mexico at Atchafalaya Bay while the Mississippi itself turns gradually
to the southeast. Every landowner’s lot in southeastern Louisiana included river
frontage, a vestige of the region’s French colonial heritage. Rivers and bayous substituted
for roads, carrying planters’ produce and purchases to and from market.
They also provided routes for escaping slaves and, later, for raiding parties from
both sides in the Civil War. Throughout the region, levees and drainage canals
were, and still are, prominent features of the landscape (see Map 2). 1
Around the confluence of the Red River and the Mississippi and to the west
and south of it lay the “sugar parishes” of Louisiana. North of there, and up the
Mississippi past Memphis, the planters grew cotton. Both crops required plenty
of land and labor, and the lower Mississippi Valley was home to large plantations
and some of the highest concentrations of black people in the United States. In the
cotton-growing “Natchez District”—the five Mississippi counties south of Vicksburg
and the three Louisiana parishes across the river—nearly 106,000 black residents
outnumbered the region’s whites by more than four to one. Only 407 of the
106,000 were free. 2
The population of New Orleans was quite different. The city’s 168,675 residents
made it the nation’s sixth largest and the only thing approaching a metropolis
in the Confederacy. Charleston, the next most populous, was less than one-quarter
1 Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 190; Martin Reuss, Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin
(Alexandria, Va.: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1998), pp. 19–23.
2 Sam B. Hilliard, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1984), pp. 34, 36, 38, 43, 71, 77; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History
of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 174–88; U.S. Census
Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1864), pp. 194, 270. Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District,