Freedmen Fight at Milliken's Bend

Before dawn on June 7, 1863, about 1,500 Texans attacked a Union supply depot at Milliken's Bend. Most of its 1,061 defenders were Black soldiers raised only weeks earlier from enslaved people of the Delta, behind a levee fortified with cotton bales. The gunboat Choctaw helped hold a second levee, and the Union lost 652 killed, wounded or missing. The battle changed Northern minds. That December Secretary of War Edwin Stanton cited it as proof that the enslaved man had proved his manhood, and the Army enlisted thousands more Black soldiers. The battlefield now lies under the river.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.

More markers nearby

• U.S. African Brigade — steps away
• Grant's Canal — steps away
• Crescent Plantation — 14 mi
• Scottland Plantation House — 16 mi