Union Batteries 7 and 8

These batteries belong to the days around June 13. At 11:15 that morning Banks opened a heavy bombardment, kept it up for an hour, then demanded surrender, and Gardner refused. The infantry went in at 3:30 the next morning in fog, with no agreed plan. Dwight's division was misdirected north of Fort Desperate, Grover's division struck the fort, and Paine fell wounded in the center. The Union lost 1,792 men; the Confederates lost 47. After June 14 Banks settled into a longer siege.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 8.2 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.5 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Union Sap — steps away
• Sharpshooter Tower — steps away
• Fort Desperate Artillery — steps away
• Fort Desperate — steps away