1991 Chapter 5 Historic Setting

The Project Area During The Civil War

During the Civil War, several important events occurred along Bayou Teche. During the spring of 1862, Union forces occupied Brashear City, terminating the distribution of goods by rail to markets on the Mississippi River. The Confederate army fortified Bayou Teche in order to protect the salt mines at Petite Anse Island (now Avery Island). These defenses included the earthworks at Fort Bisland, and the placement of obstructions in the Teche downriver from the fort. The obstructions included the steamer Flycatcher and a schooner loaded with bricks, both of which were sunk crossways in the channel. In addition, numerous live oak trees were placed in the channel to impede navigation of Bayou Teche by Union vessels. Finally, navigational aids were removed from along the Atchafalaya River and Bayou Teche to hinder the navigation of these waterways by the Union Navy (Raphael 1975:55-56; Wells 1979).

In November 1862, four Federal gunboats attempted to ascend Bayou Teche to destroy the Petite Anse salt works. However, they were stopped at Bisland by the Confederate battleship Cotton. Following two days of naval engagement, the temporarily defeated Union vessels retreated down the Teche to Brashear City (now Morgan City).

In January 1863, four Federal gunboats, this time accompanied on land by seven infantry regiments, artillery, and cavalry, ascended the Teche, and engaged Confederate troops and the Cotton just downstream from Fort Bisland, near Cornay’s Bridge. Following an indecisive battle on January 13, some of the Union troops, the 8th Vermont, retreated to a sugar house, probably Bethel’s lower sugar house on the east bank. That evening, the regiment set a long line of campfires between the sugar house and the swampy edge of the lake to the north, giving the Confederates the impression numerous Union troop reinforcements had arrived. Later that evening, the Confederates burned their ship Cotton, and scuttled it crossways in the bayou to form an additional obstruction. Having achieved their objective of destroying the Cotton, the Union forces retreated downriver to Brashear City. During the engagement, the houses of P. C. Bethel, A. A. Fuselier, and Numa Cornay were destroyed (Raphael 1975:67-72; Goodwin, Poplin et al. 1988:38-39).

The Battle of Bisland occurred April 12-13, 1863. Union land and naval forces under Maj. Gen. Banks ascended the Teche, and engaged Confederate naval forces, and the entrenched Confederate troops, under Maj. Gen. Taylor. The battle, which is discussed extensively elsewhere (Goodwin, Poplin et al. 1988), delayed the Union advance up the Teche, and prevented the effective strangling of the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson, and the severing of Confederate supply lines along the Red River.

The project area was reoccupied during the summer of 1863 by Confederate troops, who refortified at Camp Bisland. In September, they withdrew in front of the advancing Federal army, who recaptured Franklin, Louisiana. By April 1864, the Union troops withdrew to Brashear City. No additional campaigns were conducted by the Federals to recapture the Teche (Goodwin, Poplin et al. 1988).

The Civil War engagements and troop movements had a profound impact on the land and land usage within the project area by changing the physical features of the plantations, disrupting their operations, and impoverishing the planters of the area. The uppermost tract in the project area was Fairfax Plantation, which Dr. Thomas Bisland had acquired from Judge Joshua Baker in 1858 (Figure 8). A noteworthy event took place at Fairfax Plantation on February 11, 1861, shortly after the secession of Louisiana Dr. Bisland’s wife, the former Margaret Brownson, gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Bisland. This little girl was to become a nineteenth century reporter, editor, feminist, and advocate of the cause of the working woman, first in New Orleans and then in New York City. Later in life she wrote a novel, A Candle of Understanding, about her childhood at Fairfax Plantation (Conrad 1988:73-74; Hansen 1941:389-390). Her father served as a surgeon with the Confederates at Vicksburg. He was captured and then paroled there on July 4, 1863 (Booth 1984:195). In the meantime, Mrs. Bisland and her children took refuge at Natchez. In her autobiographical novel, Elizabeth Bisland described the family’s return to Fairfax Plantation after the fighting ceased, and gives a vivid description of the depredations of both the Confederate defenders and the Federal invaders (Wetmore 1902:28-30).

Dr. Bisland’s planting operation was ruined by the war. He found that he could not complete payment to Joshua Baker for Fairfax Plantation "...in consequence of the general exhausted condition of the country...." Therefore, the doctor had to retrocede Fairfax Plantation to the judge in 1865 at the conclusion of the conflict. A clause in the retrocession gave to Joshua Baker "all rights that he may have against the United States Government as compensation for property taken, used, destroyed or emancipated and which was formerly attached to and connected with the said Fairfax Plantation..." (COB 0, Folio 659, Act 10905 St. Mary Parish Court House).

Judge Baker obviously intended to make a claim against the Federal government for the destruction at Fairfax Plantation on the basis of his loyalty to the Union in the armed conflict. A strong opponent of secession in Louisiana, he refused to lend support to the Confederacy and simply sat out the Civil War. After much of Louisiana fell to Federal troops, he was elected to Congress in November 1863 by that portion of Louisiana that was restored to the Union. Nevertheless, the radicals in Congress refused to seat the delegation from restored Louisiana, many of whom like Judge Baker were planters and slaveholders. When Fairfax Plantation was retroceded to him in 1865, Baker was living in Terrebonne Parish. On his return to Fairfax, he received an appointment .Torn General Winfield Scott Hancock to be military governor of Louisiana. Baker served as governor from January to July, 1868 (Conrad 1988:31).

Although he lived just outside the project area, William T. Palfrey of Ricohoc Plantation provides exact data on the financial loss experienced by the planters of the region during the Civil War. Just before the invasion of the Teche, Palfrey listed his total assets at $243,596.24, and his liabilities at $12,691.19. At the conclusion of the war in October 1865, he listed his total assets at $114,532.85, less than half of his holdings before the invasion. His antebellum investment in slaves, $46,043.00, was eradicated, and the value he placed on Ricohoc plantation was reduced from $85,208.83 to $36,058.83 (Sitterson 1953:206-207).

Palfrey’s diary also states that the Confederate bivouac. Camp Bisland, was actually on Palfrey’s, property rather than on Dr. Bisland’s. Furthermore, Palfrey complained that the Confederate defenders committed almost as many depredations as the Federal invaders (Roland 1957:70-71).

Palfrey’s diary also effectively sums up the effect of the conflict nr. crio project area. In March 1864, he wrote:

Our beautiful Parish is laid waste & is likely to become a desert - Plantations abandoned fences & buildings destroyed, mules, horses & cattle driven off by the federals, the negroes conscripted into the army or wandering about without employment or support, & stealing for a living - Those who remain are insolent & refractory, and in the domestic family arrangements the few who continue with their owners are more trouble...than they are of use....There can be no crop made in the country and of course starvation will be the dreadful consequence. All this is fearful to consider, and if indiscriminate plunder & massacre do not supervene we may be considered lucky - The Lord help us - such is war, civil war (Sitterson 1953:214).

Exact details of the losses experienced by other planters in the project area are difficult to obtain. An important source of information about the physical damage to the vicinity can be acquired from a captured Confederate map of St. Mary Parish (Figure 10). A partial list of structures destroyed in the conflict would include a sugar house destroyed at Mrs. Meade’s upper tract; Pinckney C. Bethel’s residence at Grandwood on the right bank, his bridge across the Teche, and his sugar house at Live Oak Grove in the project area; the Cornay family’s dwelling and sugar house, both on the right bank, and their bridge across the Teche; Alfred Fuselier’s residence in the project area; Mrs. Stanley’s sugar house on the right bank; Thomas Wilcoxon’s house and sugar house, one of which was in the project area; and Richard Lynch’s sugar house on the left bank of the bayou on a point where it joins the Atchafalaya.

Born into slavery on Ricohoc Plantation, Ellen Betts left a vivid account of the Civil War. Her descriptions are sometimes extravagant, but many of the facts of her narrative can be confirmed in her former master’s diary. She wrote:

Then first thing you know the Yanks and the Democrats ’gun to fight right there. They a high old mountain front Marse’s house, and the Yanks ’gun pepper cannon ball down from the top that hill. The war met right there, and them Yanks and Democrats fit for twenty-four hours straight running (Botkin 1945:128).

There was not, of course, a “high old mountain" in the project vicinity, and she probably was trying to describe an Indian mound that became involved in the conflict. Mrs. Meade’s upper tract, just below Ricohoc, was known as Mound Place after the Civil War.

Some of the soldiers who fell in the fighting on the Teche were buried on Mrs. Meade’s upper and lower tracts, on Pinckney C. Bethel’s plantation, and at the Cornay tract. In 1868, those soldiers whose graves could be identified were reinterred at Chalmette National Cemetery (Edmonds 1979:416).

Extracted 24 Jun 2020 by Norma Hass from "Historical and Archeological Investigations of Fort Bisland and Lower Bayou Teche, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana" by Defense Technical Information Center, published 02 Jun 1991, pages 45-105.