Artillery Ridge

May 27 came in pieces. Union lines had closed around Port Hudson by May 22, and Banks planned a single blow with about 30,000 men against a garrison of about 7,500. Instead the attacks arrived one after another. Weitzel's column went in around 6 a.m., Dwight sent in the Native Guards at about 10, and Thomas Sherman's men attacked from about noon to 2 p.m., after Banks threatened to relieve him. The Confederates lost about 235 men that day, a small fraction of the Union toll.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.4 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.0 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Fort Babcock — steps away
• Union Battery No. 4 — steps away
• Union Battery No. 3 — steps away
• Union Battery No. 6 — 0.3 mi