Thomas Courtland Manning

Thomas Courtland Manning came to Alexandria in 1855 from Edenton, North Carolina, and built a large law practice. After serving the Confederacy as the state's adjutant general, he sat on the Louisiana Supreme Court, as chief justice from 1877 to 1880. He was also a Confederate commissioner whose inquiry into the burning of Alexandria in May 1864 reported arson by Union soldiers, while General Banks told Congress the fire began accidentally in an attic. In 1880 he was appointed to the U.S. Senate but not admitted, and President Cleveland later sent him to Mexico as minister.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — steps away
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 0.9 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.3 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.8 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Alexandria — steps away
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — steps away
• The Hotel Bentley — steps away
• Red River — steps away