Civil War

At Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, General William Dwight sent the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guard into the assault, though they had been working as pioneers on a pontoon bridge and were not meant to fight. They advanced under rifle, field artillery and heavy-gun fire. Captain Andre Cailloux, a free Black New Orleanian, led them until artillery killed him. The attack failed, with the Union losing 293 killed, 1,545 wounded and 157 missing that day. Historians say their conduct did much to dispel the belief that Black troops were unreliable under fire.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 17 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Tickfaw State Park — 20 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.
• Whitney Plantation — 20 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Old State Capitol — 22 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.

More markers nearby

• Civil War — steps away
• The Civil War — steps away
• Cal Ripken, Sr. — steps away
• Ashland — 6.2 mi