The African American Experience in Louisiana

which should go hand and hand with the right to vote. This, like many aspects of the African
American experience during the Civil War, was a seed of Reconstruction concerns.
While African Americans in the military were engaging in battle both physical and
political, enslaved African Americans were encountering their own ironies in the Civil War and
endeavoring to change the course of their future. When the war commenced, the demand for
slaves actually grew. In addition to the ongoing agricultural and industrial work of private
individuals and companies, there was now the government work of constructing the
infrastructure of war which required many laborers. The state and the Confederacy impressed
slaves to build forts and help with all manner of military support activities. Conditions were
actually far worse for enslaved people in this situation than on plantations where owners were
invested in their slaves’ well-being. At Fort Beauregard in Harrisonburg, the housing for
enslaved laborers was described as sixty to seventy feet long with just a single door for
ventilation. 125
The Confederate army was not alone in using slaves as laborers for its military
objectives. As part of the Vicksburg campaign of 1862, Union forces endeavored to dig a canal
that would divert the water of the Mississippi River away from Vicksburg. This enormous
undertaking required great numbers of laborers that the army didn’t have, but that nearby cotton
plantations did. With promises of freedom the Union army recruited some 1200 slaves to work
on the canal. 126 Conditions on the project were terrible; disease and death ran rampant and
unbeknownst to the enslaved workers, there was an unwritten caveat that freedom would be
theirs only if the project succeeded. When the futile undertaking was deemed a failure, the
slaves were either returned to their owners by the soldiers or given meager rations and
instructions to return on their own. 127 It must have seemed to these enslaved people that they
were now caught in a war in which both sides were their enemies and there were no allies to be
found.
When the Federal army arrived in southern Louisiana in 1862, by an act of Congress,
slavery was to be maintained in areas of Union control, while slaves in Confederate areas were
declared free. In other words, the much anticipated liberators were not that at all according to
the law. In reality however, Union occupation had a definite freeing affect on the actions of
slaves, even if they continued to work on the same plantations. In some instances, enslaved
workers operated much like labor unions, effectively using slow-downs and strikes to achieve
their demands. One of the most remarkable examples of this occurred at Magnolia Plantation in
Plaquemines Parish, where a slowdown during the busy cane harvest season was followed by a
strike of all of the enslaved women. An attempt by a Union officer to restore the labor order was
ignored and all of the men joined in the strike and directed their time instead to the erection of a
gallows in the quarters. The owner of the plantation finally guaranteed the laborers that they
would be compensated once the crop was sold and they returned to work. 128 In the face of such
organized and intimidating actions by slaves many planters realized that the institution of slavery
125 Ripley, in Vincent, 10.
126 William F. Messner, “The Vicksburg Campaign of 1862: A Case Study in the Federal Utilization of Black
Labor,” in The African American Experience in Louisiana: Part B, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University of
Southwestern, LA, 2000), 57, first published in Louisiana History, 16 (1975): 371-81.
127 Ibid., 58.
128 Ripley, in Vincent, 16.
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