Battle of Jackson, Station One

The fight at Jackson began as a recruiting trip. On August 2, 1863, Brig. Gen. George Andrews sent roughly 600 men from Port Hudson: 250 Black infantry, 50 cavalry of the 3rd Massachusetts, and a section of the 2nd Vermont Battery. Their job was to enlist Black volunteers for the Corps d'Afrique, and they gathered about 50 recruits. Around 5 p.m. on August 3, Col. John L. Logan's Confederate cavalry hit the town. Logan put his strength at about 500; Andrews guessed 800 or more.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audubon State Historic Site — 6.6 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 — 9.9 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 11 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 25 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Centenary College's Main Academic Building — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Two — steps away
• Battle of Jackson, Station Three — 0.2 mi
• Battle of Jackson, Station Four — 0.2 mi