A minie' ball shattered Andre's left arm. The stinging numbness shocked his entire being and dropped him to the ground. The 37 year old knew instantly that his career as a boxer was over. Still, the handsome captain struggled to his feet. He held his sword aloft in his still strong right arm and with horse shouts rallied his company for yet another charge. Then, as the men rushed forward for the sixth time against the fortifications of Port Hudson, Captain Andre Cailloux (pronounced Cah-you) relinquished command of company K, of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards and dropped back.
Five days after Grant threw his “forlorn hope” against the defenses at Vicksburg, Major General Nathaniel Banks repeated the tactic against the defenses of Port Hudson. And with the same results.
The Dutch origin of the phrase - “Verloren Hoop”, meaning lost heap - reflects the influence of Marquis de Vauban's competitor, Baron van Coehorn - who designed forts for the Republic of Holland. In German these units were called “Verloren Haufen” - forlorn heap. In France they were the Lost Children - “Les Enfants Perdus” - and in Norman English, they were the “avant-garde” or “vanguard”.
The troops chosen were either the best the army had to offer, or the most expendable. But from the Greeks who hid inside a wooden horse to defeat the walls of Troy, through the German Storm Troops who overwhelmed French trenches in 1918, they always represented a desperation when technology favored the defense. With a tactical advantage, such as a siege tower at Troy, such forlorn hopes were occasionally successful. But usually, as at Vicksburg on 22 May, 1863, and Port Hudson on 27 May, 1863, they failed. And in failing at Port Hudson, they failed a nation which desperately needed the very men who were being sacrificed, men like Andre Cailloux.
He was born into slavery on 25 August, 1825, on a plantation less than 20 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. When he was five his owner, Joseph Duvernay, died, and eventually the child became the property of Duvernay's daughter Aimee and her husband, William Bailey.
Then in June, the Bailey's sold Andre's mother, and took the child with them to New Orleans. As soon as he came of age, he was sold into apprenticeship to a cigar maker.
Andre thus arrived in the fastest growing city in the United States, with a population of 46,000 souls. In 1830 a thousand steamboats burdened with corn, cotton and tobacco from Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri, tied up along the New Orleans levee.
Then in 1831, six miles of rails were laid to Lake Pontchartrain. Five more years and the new lake port saw 169 ocean going steamships, almost 300 sail driven packets, sloops and brigs, all transferring cargoes bound for or coming from American Atlantic ports, Europe and South America. Within ten years the number of riverboats docking at the Crescent City had doubled, and residents had topped 100,000. The number of river boats doubled again by 1850, and the city added 40,000 more residents.
Andre was also lucky in that he was African in his genes and Cajun culturally, meaning French in his language and Catholic in his religion. His new home had been founded by the French in 1718, and then occupied by the Spanish for 40 years - between 1762 and 1802. That history left slavery more plastic here than anywhere else in the America.
Laws still forbade mixed race marriages, but were often ignored because of a shortage of socially acceptable white females. This necessitated the “Quadroon Placage –. educated black women - or quadroons - who “married” white men. These woman and their mulatto children became a middle third race. They could not vote, but they had property rights, which also meant the right to read and write, sign contracts, and for their mixed race children to inherit. By 1850 the city contained 144,000 white residents, 14,000 slaves and 11,000 “gens de couleur libres”, or free blacks.
At the age of 21, Andre Cailloux filed a petition for his manumission with a police court. Supported by his owner, the all white jury granted his petition in 1846. The very next year Andre married Felicie Coulon, a free Creole woman of color, and adopted her son. He then established his own tobacconist shop. By 1852 he had moved his business to the corner of Prieur and Perdido streets, and moved his growing family – 2 more sons - into a cottage on Baronne Street.
In late 1852, the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western railroad began laying tracks out of
Algiers , Louisiana – on the west bank of the river from New Orleans. By 1857 the line had reached 83 miles south west to Brashier City, where construction stopped. But still, the line into the rich delta lands proved profitable. In addition, the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad headed north from the Crescent City as far as Canton, Mississippi, before the start of the war ended construction on that line.
By 1861 Andre Cailloux was a community leader, handsome and athletic, a boxer and a horseman, equipped with hard earned social graces and sophisticated language. Andre began calling himself with pride, “The Blackest Man in New Orleans.” In January of 1860 he opened a second tobacco shop, the same month in which Governor Thomas Overton Moore had taken Louisiana into succession.
Moore's Secretary of State, George Williamson, was explicit concerning the future of race relations. “ Louisiana”, Williams told his audience, “looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery...” Governor Moore asked the loyal citizens of Louisiana to show their support with a lantern in their front parlors. And in that light, and the more threatening flames of pine torch processions through the New Orleans' streets, the black residents, free and slave, saw the shadow of the noose tightening about their necks.
For the time being, free blacks in New Orleans still held the right to serve in the militia, and Andre formed a company of them, presumably to defend their city. They were called the Native Guards, but in contrast to white militias, they were never issued uniforms or weapons. As one Louisiana artilleryman explained, "I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free niggers . . . now, to suit me...”.
But Andre continued to drill his little black band along with the white recruits on the grounds of the Metairie race track until February of 1862. As soon as a federal fleet under Admiral David Farragut approached the head of the pass at the mouth of Mississippi River (above), the governor informed the men of color that their help was not wanted, and they were ordered disbanded.
The governor's prudence did nothing to save the largest and richest city in the Confederacy. Farragut captured New Orleans in April of 1862. And in May, 44 year old Massachusetts political general Benjamin Franklin Butler (above) arrived with 5,000 soldiers. Butler saw slaves as property to be seized – contraband. But free blacks were an unknown quantity, unlike Jews, whom Butler hated with a passion.
Being painfully short of men, and listening to the treaties from Andre Cailloux and others, in September Butler authorized the formation of the Native Guards in the Federal army.
Butler's orders were that only free blacks could enlist. But with the Native Guards officered by blacks, the induction of escaped slaves began almost immediately, allowing the Guards to expand to 3 full regiments, all with blue uniforms and muskets.
Then Major General Nathaniel Banks arrived to replace Butler, bringing with him 30,000 fresh troops. No longer in desperate need of soldiers, Banks felt less need for the Native Guards, and began replace their black officers with whites.
As the Army of the Gulf marched up Bayou Techee the guards found themselves chopping wood and moving dirt behind the lines. The lack of respect and Bank's attitude drove many to walk away until there were only about 1,500 left in all three regiments.
Then in May of 1863 Banks was forced to bend to General Hallack's orders and return to Port Hudson. He divided his army at Alexandria in Mid May. Some , 10,000 men retreating back down Bayou Techee, to Bashear. They dug in there to guard the southern approaches to New Orleans. That freed Banks, at the head of 20,000 men, to move by boat down the Red River to the Mississippi. Stripping a division each from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Banks now had some 30,000 men for an assault on Port Hudson, in addition to the 3 regiments of The Louisiana Guards.
Thirty Federal guns began blasting the rebel defenses from the land and the river at about 9:00 am, and about 9:30 General Sherman's division struck out from Slaughter's Plantation. By 10:00 am when that attack became bogged down, Bank's ordered the 1st and 3rd Native Guards to rush the northern flank of the fortifications, where the land met the muddy Mississippi. The assumption was that with the proper elan, the rebel line was certain to break somewhere.
At 200 yards, the rebel troops opened fire, in such volume that the attack dissolved into confusion, and the black Yankees took cover among willow trees. The officers – black and white – rallied the men to continue – only to have them driven back again. Again the men were rallied, and again they were driven to ground. Then finally, with the wounded Captain Cailloux (above) in the lead, some 1,000 black men in blue uniforms reached the edge of the the ditch. Following Cailloux's sword, the men stood for an instant and then let fly a volley of murderous fire aimed at the rebel forts and trenches. Heads down, as if charging into a hurricane wind, the guards surged forward into the ditch and up the slope.
It was then the rebel artillery let lose a coordinated volley of grape and canister, shredding the battle flags of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and the assault troops. And a few yards behind the attacking line a jagged piece of shrapnel, tumbling and spinning at high speed struck the wounded Captain Cailloux in the head, blowing off a chunk of his skull, and spewing what had once been the brave ambitious man across the Mississippi River mud.
Out of the 1,000 Native Guards selected as the Forlorn Hope, 36 were killed and 133 were wounded, a casualty rate of almost 20%. The rebels did not lose a single man. General Banks told his wife, “They fought splendidly!”. Said one of the defenders, “We mowed them down, and made them disperse, leaving their dead and wounded on the field to stink."
Across the entire front, Banks lost 2,000 men on Wednesday 27 May, 1863. The following morning, Thursday, 28 May, 1863, the rebels accepted a truce and the bodies of some 2,000 white Yankees were retrieved from the field to be identified and buried with honor. But the Confederate gunners, who had suffered only 500 dead and wounded, would not allow the removal of a single black skinned corpse from the Native Guard's battlefield. Those dead would lay in the Mississippi river mud for another 47 days.
They would be far from the last last black men to die in the fight against white supremacy.
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