Small battle has big local consequences

The following story includes a composite account of the Battle of Georgia Landing, fought Oct. 27, 1862 at Labadieville. It drew on a variety of sources including The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; Scarred By War: Civil War in Southeast Louisiana by Christopher G. Pena; Fire In The Cane Field: The Federal Invasion of Louisiana and Texas by Donald S. Frazier and a number of first-person memoirs researched by The Times. The books mentioned are available in print and online versions and provide far more detailed accounts than the digest presented here, not only of the Georgia Landing battle but many other aspects of the war’s effect on the Bayou Region.

– John DeSantis

On the southbound side of La. Highway 1, just north of Georgia Road, a freshly-minted plaque was dedicated last week, marking the approximate spot of a battle fought 152 years ago.

“We gather today to commemorate the battle of Georgia Landing, to memorialize those who fought, bled and died here on both sides,” said Roger Busbice of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who gathered with about a dozen people, some dressed in period uniforms and bearing various forms of Confederate flags.

As motorists whizzed by Saturday, some gaping out of their windows at the curious – and colorful – roadside throng, guest speakers relayed stories relating to the battle, fought near what is now the Supreme Sugar refinery. Although some small subdivisions and businesses now dot the battlefield, much in the area is unchanged.

Cane fields radiate for miles, and a few patches of forest remain. Despite the modern distractions, mental transport to late 1862 is not difficult.

TOMBSTONE TABLE

The United States had already been at war with itself for 18 months by October, with both sides suffering massive casualties at Bull Run, Shiloh and Antietum.

New Orleans had fallen, Baton Rouge was under federal control, and sleepy Donaldsonville had already been unmercifully shelled and plundered.

Rebel guerrilla attacks on Union boats, supply trains and traveling soldiers in what was then called the Lafourche Region – the areas south and west of New Orleans all the way to Berwick Bay – were taking a toll, and Gen. Benjamin Butler, military governor of New Orleans, had concerns.

Control of New Orleans meant control of the Mississippi River, vital to federal interests. Additionally, the Lafourche Region’s crops and livestock held great potential value for the federal effort.

On Oct. 25, acting on Butler’s orders, Gen. Godfrey Weitzel, left Carrolton with 4,000 fresh federal troops, traveling the river on personnel carriers escorted by gunboats and landing near the place where the Sunshine Bridge now stands.

A Confederate force under Col. W.G. Vincent slipped out of Donaldsonville unseen, seeking to avoid confrontation with with Weitzel’s much larger army.

Preparing for the next day’s march, Weitzel’s federals took shelter where they could.

“Our regiment slept on the floor of a church and I ate my supper off a tombstone, in the cemetery,” then-35-year-old Capt. John W. DeForrest of the 12th Connecticut wrote. “At six in the morning we commenced our our march, following (Bayou Lafourche) in a westerly and then a southerly direction, one regiment of infantry and one company of cavalry on the right bank, the remainder of the brigade on the left.”

Altogether, Weitzel had 2,500 infantrymen and 250 cavalry. Thibodaux was their destination.

BURNING BOATS

A vicious fall front moved along with the army, blowing hard rain and sleet over fields where some cane had already been harvested and where some still stood.

For some who lived along the bayou, word that Weitzel’s troops were on the march sowed anxiety and fear.

“The wind wailed fitfully or burst in angry gusts, dense rain fell, it was very cheerless, and our hearts were heavy with the tiding just received, that the Yankees had landed,” wrote Josephine Pugh of Woodlawn plantation. “The grand army would soon be upon us, and war with all its attendant horrors.”

Destruction begun far before the battle.

“I destroyed every boat I passed as a prudential military measure military measure,” Weitzel later wrote in his report.

Weitzel’s army interrupted their march for sleep, with DeForest noting “It was the dreadful exposure to the night air and sleeping in damp clothes that worried me, and not the proximity of hostile balls and bayonets..”

While Pugh and other property owners viewed Weitzel’s march as a harbinger of doom, other residents beheld it as a tool of benevolent providence.

Jubilant slaves greeted the passing Yankees with cheers, hurrahs and blessings, rushing up to them, offering to help however they could, soldiers they saw as a band of liberating angels, and to travel with them.

“Go with us they did by the hundreds,” DeForest recalled. Weitzel’s rear swelled with slaves, along with the mules and wagons some took from their plantations.

REBELS RALLY

In Thibodaux, Gen. Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred Mouton, whose 18th Louisiana fought valiantly and was nearly halved at Shiloh, where he himself was wounded, received word that Weitzel was heading his way. His Confederates headed up the bayou. Joining them were the Crescent Regiment, another group that saw combat at Shiloh, Semmes and Ralston’s batteries, both light artillery units, and the Terrebonne Regiment militia, who met up with Vincent’s fellow Confederates.

They held their line near Georgia Plantation, with troops lying in the underbrush as an advance Massachusetts cavalry party led by Lt. Solon Perkins approached.

A skirmish broke out, with heavy fire from both sides at around 11 a.m.

“With drums beating, fifes screaming and banners flying we tramped along, listening to the slow pummeling of artillery two miles away,” DeForest wrote.

Weitzel’s army advanced; he ordered some of those on the east bank of the bayou to the west bank, across portable pontoon bridges he had earlier ordered built, pulled down the bayou by mules.

Mouton had ordered floating bridges as well but those orders were never carried out. With a sizable number of his forces on the side of the bayou along which La. 308 now travels, Mouton was at a loss to get them to the other side. By 4 p.m. the battle was at full pitch.

The once bucolic Assumption Parish countryside was transformed into a smokey hell of officers’ shouts and barks, the shrieks of horses, and the whistling of shells.

Col. Homer Baxter Sprague of the 13th Connecticut recalled that he and his troops “could see very few of our antagonists, though the innumerable puffs of white smoke and the terrible roll of their musketry and cannon fully revealed their position.”

“UNCEASING FIRE”

Members of the 13th Connecticut were frustrated by an order to refrain from firing, despite the deaths of two officers of the 8th New Hampshire and “a tempest of missiles … hissing past us, tearing through our colors, our clothing, and our persons. Forward, still forward we pressed, shoulder to shoulder, and still we were the targets of their two batteries and three infantry regiments.”

The order to fire – finally given – resulted in a “tremendous roll of musketry” with both Connecticut units advancing.

“Both regiments poured in an unceasing fire, all the while marching steadily forward. The fence beneath which the first line of rebels lay, was splintered, riddled, honeycombed.”

DeForest, in his memoirs, recalls the horror of the battle in some detail.

“At the second volley, hearing on my right a sharp crash of broken bone, followed by a loud “Oh” of pain and horror, I glanced that way and saw Color Sergeant Edwards fall slowly backward, with blood spurting from his mouth and a stare of woeful amazement in his eyes,” DeForest wrote. “A bullet had shattered his front teeth and come out behind his left jaw. He clung to the colors as he dropped, but Corporals Dutton and Kelly dragged them out of his hands; and after a brief pully-hauly between the two they remained with Kelly, a veteran of the British army.”

INCONTINENT RETREAT

There were acts of heroism and of cowardice, with the latter less frequently documented.

The 33rd Louisiana, according to one officer’s report, “ran incontinently” from the fray.

With inferior weapons and expected reinforcements not yet arrived, the Confederates were trapped, with a marais, or forested swamp, at one side and ability to cross the bayou, to what is now the La. 308 side, thwarted. Casualties were mounting.

Col G.P. McPheeters of the Crescent Regiment was among the higher-ranking officers killed as he prepared, according to some accounts, to order a retreat of his unit. Shot while staring straight ahead at federals, he took a bullet to the head.

“When our men reached him he was lying on his back and facing us, his head supported by a thorn-bush, his handsome face grey with death, and one eye lying on his cheek.” wrote DeForest. “He seemed to be about 30 years old, a man of noble height and presence, with Grecian features.”

In his final report of the battle Mouton wrote that McPheeters “fell gallantly and nobly defending our sacred cause at the head of his command.”

Sprague wrote of a spirited Southern defense that wilted with the forward charge of his unit.

“See, the rebel line wavers,” he wrote. “Their officers frantically brandish their swords and in vain try to hold their men. Many are leaping out of the rifle pits. Many more are fluttering their white handkerchiefs in token of surrender.”

Federal troops made for the forests and cane-fields pursuing the fleeing rebels, capturing prisoners and inflicting more casualties.

SAVING THE FORCE

There is question as to whether Mouton was actually present at the height of the battle, having suffered at the time from a particularly bad bout of rheumatism. At least two accounts place him as being at a nearby plantation. There is no mention of this in his official communications. But there is no question of his final decision to retreat, having determined that he was in a no-win situation.

Confederate forces, including the sick and wounded, made their way to Thibodaux but didn’t stay long. A separate convoy had been sent by Mouton to Gibson, by way of Chacahoula. His intelligence indicated that additional gunboats were already en route to Donaldsonville from New Orleans. To the east, federal forces were en route by rail towards Boutte, although they would have a difficult time going beyond Bayou des Allemends since Mouton had sent an order for the trestle there to be burned.

“My object, could I have united my force, was to make a desperate resistance and to drive the enemy back if possible, but when my reinforcements failed to come in no alternative was left too me but to maneuver with the enemy and save my force,” Mouton later wrote.

His official report states that the losses in Labadieville were five soldiers killed, eight wounded and captured or missing 186. Also killed were three horses, with nine additional mounts wounded.

Weitzel’s official report lists 18 killed, 74 wounded and five captured or missing.

THIBODAUX ENTRANCE

As federal forces traveled the nine miles to Thibodaux the next day, more liberated slave families joined in the line of march.

“It was with inexpressible pride that we bore the blue flag of Connecticut and the hated Stars and Stripes through the half-deserted streets, keeping step to the music of our re-enspirited and splendid band,” Sprague wrote. “ No welcome greeted us from the white race. They closed their doors and window-shutters, or scowled with eyes askance from verandas and balconies.”

More former slaves swarmed the columns, many with mules, as well as “horses, wagons, house-furniture, provisions, bundles of clothing, bedding, with their wives and infants, till the bayou was thronged with them for miles.”

The question became exceedingly perplexing, ‘’ What to do with them?”

Many of the able-bodied black men enlisted in United States Colored Troops units including Native Guard and the Corps d’Afrique.

After quelling rebel activity in Raceland, Weitzel’s armies returned to Thibodaux, where a number of houses were abandoned and found to be ransacked. Union camps were established at Ridgefield Plantation – the current site of St. John’s Episcopal Church – and later at Acadia Plantation, its house

The Lafourche Region was under federal occupation, and many of its residents none too happy about it.

Within eight months blue and gray would clash again, just north of Thibodaux, near the federal encampment at Lafourche Crossing.

Small battle has local consequences