Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, 1862–1863 91
its size. In New Orleans, only every seventh resident was black, but the city’s
10,689 “free people of color” constituted nearly half of the black population. Not
only did these free people form a community larger than most Louisiana towns;
Northern-born white residents of New Orleans far outnumbered the entire population
of Baton Rouge, the state capital. Apart from its site near the mouth of the
Mississippi, New Orleans’ heterogeneous population made it an attractive target
for a federal offensive. 3
Outside New Orleans, in the sugar parishes, another set of circumstances differentiated
southeastern Louisiana from the cotton-growing region. Planters whose
wealth derived from sugar were in competition with the sugar-producing Caribbean
colonies of Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Unlike
cotton producers, they never dreamed of having the European powers over a barrel.
Louisiana sugar planters sent 78 percent of their product to the Northern states.
They advocated high tariffs and tended to vote Whig. Half of the sugar parishes
favored Douglas or Bell in the 1860 presidential election and sent anti-secession
delegations to the state convention that winter. A large black population, an unusual
proportion of which was free; a Northern- and foreign-born white population
that was the largest in the Confederacy; and a commercial interest that was in large
part anti-secessionist all combined to make southeastern Louisiana unique among
Southern regions where Union forces tried to gain a beachhead. 4
In New Orleans and throughout the French-speaking part of Louisiana, many
“free people of color” belonged to families that traced their liberty back to the
colonial eighteenth century, when European slave owners often freed their mixedrace
offspring. The 1860 federal census described 15,158 of the state’s “free colored”
residents as “mulatto” and only 3,489 as “black.” The legal status of these
people and their descendants was somewhere between that of whites and enslaved
black people. “Free people of color” could travel without the passes that were
required of slaves and could own property (some, indeed, were slaveholders themselves),
but they did not enjoy full civil and political rights. Among Louisiana’s
other legal oddities, it was the only state that admitted men of African ancestry to
its militia. Some of the ancestors of these men had belonged to the American force
that repelled a British invasion in 1815, and their descendants in 1861 had not
forgotten it. Full of civic zeal, they organized a regiment called the Native Guards
soon after the fall of Fort Sumter. Its officers came from the elite of “free colored”
society. When they asked the secessionist state government for a chance to guard
Union prisoners of war that September, though, Louisiana declined with thanks.
Then, in January 1862, the state legislature passed a new militia act, inserting the
word “white” as a qualification for membership. The disbanded Native Guards
went home to await developments. Two months later, nearly to the day, they were
recalled to duty when a federal fleet appeared in the mouth of the Mississippi
1860–80 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 17, explains the extent of the
district and the origins of the term.
3 Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, pp. 195, 452, 615.
4 “Unlike cotton planters, sugar planters had no delusions about sugar being king.” Ted Tunnell,
Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1984), p. 17. Maps showing the votes of the sugar parishes in the
1860 presidential election and the secession convention are on pp. 11 and 12.