Grant's March Through Louisiana

Milliken's Bend lies on the line between Madison and East Carroll parishes, and at dawn on June 7, 1863, some 1,500 Texans under Henry McCulloch attacked the Union camp there. Its defenders were mostly newly recruited, formerly enslaved soldiers of the African Brigade, with white officers and 125 men of the 23rd Iowa. The Black regiments lost nearly a third of their men, and the 9th Louisiana Infantry (African Descent) lost 66 on the field, the heaviest single-engagement loss of any Union regiment in the Vicksburg campaign. Gunboats drove McCulloch off.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — steps away
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 2.2 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 18 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.

More markers nearby

• Battle for the Mississippi: The Vicksburg Campaign — steps away
• Grant's Canal — steps away
• Parish of Carroll — 0.2 mi
• Soldiers' Rest — 0.5 mi