The Civil War

Louisiana's militia moved before the state had seceded. On January 8, 1861, Governor Thomas Overton Moore ordered the state militia to take the U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge and Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans. The secession convention met January 23 and declared secession on January 26, without putting the ordinance to a popular vote. The stakes were plain in the census: by 1860, 331,726 of Louisiana's 708,002 people, about 47 percent, were enslaved.

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