Union Sap

A sap is a trench dug forward under fire, a few feet at a time, to bring attackers close enough to storm a wall or blow it up. After his assaults failed, Banks turned to that slower method. His engineers pushed saps and trench cavaliers toward the Confederate lines and dug three mines, two under the work called the Priest Cap and one under the Citadel. A general bombardment began on June 26, and a new assault was planned for July 11. Gardner surrendered on July 9, two days before it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.6 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

• Sharpshooter Tower — steps away
• Fort Desperate Artillery — steps away
• Fort Desperate — steps away
• Union Batteries 7 and 8 — steps away