Siege of Port Hudson 1863: The Native Guards' Charge and the Demoralizer

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Port Hudson, Louisiana, was a town of about 200 people on an 80 foot bluff at a hairpin bend of the Mississippi, just below the mouth of the Red River. Along with Vicksburg it kept open the Confederacy's supply route for Texas horses, cattle and salt while blocking Midwestern farmers from shipping grain and pork to the Gulf, a squeeze that led Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton to warn Lincoln that the fate of the Northwest was trembling in the balance. Confederate general Franklin Gardner held four and a half miles of crescent shaped lunettes armed with heavy guns, including a 10 inch Columbiad Union troops called the Demoralizer. In March 1863 Admiral David Farragut tried to run the batteries at night with ships lashed in pairs, and the grounded USS Mississippi burned and exploded so loudly it was heard 80 miles away in New Orleans.

General Nathaniel Banks, a former Speaker of the House, surrounded the fort with about 40,000 men against roughly 7,500 and ordered an uncoordinated assault on May 27 at the earliest hour practicable. The 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards charged over a pontoon bridge under crossfire, and Captain Andre Cailloux was killed leading them. Their courage drew a New York Times account and helped open recruitment of nearly 200,000 Black Union soldiers. After a failed second assault on June 14, the siege turned to zigzag saps and earth cavaliers while the starving garrison ate mules and rats. Gardner surrendered on July 9 after hearing that Vicksburg had fallen.

• The siege ran 48 days, from May 22 to July 9, 1863.
• Confederates heated red hot shot in furnaces to set wooden Union ships ablaze.
• Defenders powered their cornmeal millstones with a stripped locomotive engine after shelling wrecked the gristmill.
• They dug spent Union bullets out of the dirt to recast them and buried unexploded 13 inch mortar shells as land mines.
• Out of canister shot, Confederate gunners fired scrap metal, chains and nails sewn into shirt sleeves.