Southern Ties: Fighting crossed Tri-parishes’ path

Saints part ways with popular veteran playmakers
March 11, 2014
Kelley Ann Domangue
March 11, 2014
Saints part ways with popular veteran playmakers
March 11, 2014
Kelley Ann Domangue
March 11, 2014

The acrid aroma of burning oak logs wafted over the fields near La. Highway 1, just north of Thibodaux, where men in soldier’s dress drilled the manual of arms.

Their uniforms were gray and simple – mostly – except for a few who were a little dressier, signifying rank.


And for just a moment, if you squinted just right, you could pretend easily that it was 1863, perhaps.

At the E.D. White site, Civil War re-enactors and a troop of Boy Scouts camped out in tents last weekend. The re-enactors fired a period cannon, occasionally led off with musket fire during training, and shared with visitors information about what things were like when the Lafourche region was embroiled in war.

The group, which includes members of the Randall Lee Gibson Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, annually re-enacts activities of Bouanchaud’s Battery, a component of the Pointe Coupee Artillery.


The program is presented through the auspices of the Louisiana State Museum, which operates the E.D. White site, once home of Edward Douglas White, governor of Louisiana from 1835-39, and his son, Edward Douglass White, who was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1894 and served as chief justice from 1910-21.

Denis Gaubert, a Thibodaux attorney and Civil War historian, was asked if the weekend encampment ever gets old.

“Sometimes it does,” he said. But the opportunity to share history and perhaps spark interest in preserving it within others, he averred, keeps him coming.


The encampment is not a restaging of any actual battle, but a demonstration of what life may have been like for some of those who fought.

For 19-year-old Lawrence Arceneaux, dressed in uniform, the thrill of re-enactment is strong during this, his second year of making camp.

“It brings me closer to knowing some of what it was like,” said Arceneaux, a history major at Nicholls State University, as he paraded with arms, along with Charles Tucker of Mississippi. Under the command of Dustin Milam, a re-enactor from Patterson, they performed the manual of arms and, occasionally, let go with musket fire.


Although not known for major battles like Gettysburg or Manassas, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes were the sites of dozens of individual dramas that played out during the war.

For most of that time the region was under federal occupation, the responsibility of the Department of the Lafourche. There were movements of blue-coated soldiers on trains running from Boutte to Schriever.

Skirmishes in the woods, swamps and fields alongside Bayou Lafourche, particularly from Donaldsonville to Thibodaux, were common as teams of Confederate guerillas raided federal camps.


One local event, well recorded in the dispatches of federal commanders, involved the killing of two union soldiers in May 1863. A detachment of federals was marching from Houma to an area further south, at Grand Caillou Bayou, where a blockade-runner boat called the Fox was said to be unloading.

Four federals took sick and were transported back to Houma by wagon, where they were attacked by a group of local citizens who saw it as their duty to fend off the invaders. Two soldiers were killed and two wounded, all from an Indiana company.

“The bodies of the murdered men were stripped, then kicked and clubbed until they had lost almost all resemblance to human bodies, and finally, thrown by some Negroes into a hole two feet deep, dug in the very public square of the town of Houma,” reads one account. “The mound of earth heaped over them was conspicuous to all residents and travelers. One of the wounded men, after almost incredible adventures, escaped. The other was thrown into a filthy calaboose at Houma, with a Negro convict.”


When people with knowledge of the attack were seized by soldiers they were ordered to disinter the two dead soldiers, place them in coffins and bury them in the church grave yard at the center of town, though there is no record of the burial at the Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales.

“Albert Wood, lawyer and editor of the Houma Ceres; Morelle, formerly a Confederate lieutenant; E. N. Dutrail, deputy parish clerk; B. Cooper, blacksmith; Gilbert Hatch, son of a planter; D. W. Crewell, carpenter at the plantation of a man named Connelly; Howard Bond, a lad, brother of Howard, and both living with their father, a wealthy planter near Houma, overseer on Bond’s plantation; F. Gatewood, living on plantation 8 miles from Houma; Doc. J. L. Jennings, Houma; William H. Hornsby, son of S.H. Hornsby, grocer in Houma (the latter being also indirectly implicated). These, together with other parties unknown, were the active participants, so far as the people of Houma could determine, in the tragic events above related,” an officer’s dispatch states.

“Jennings, Wood, Morelle, and the Bonds appear to have been the moving spirits; Jennings was the chief of those who robbed and abused the bodies of the dead. He it was, and Howard Bond, who sent 3 boys on the night of the murder 2 miles on the road from Houma to Terre Bonne Station to burn a bridge over a bayou on Larette’ plantation, to delay, and if possible by Mr. Larette. Howard Bond then attempt to destroy the bridge himself, but was also prevented by Mr. Larette. The boys sent on this errand were a brother of Howard Bond, William Hornsby (whom I arrested), and a lad whose name was not obtained. It was averred as a reason for sending these boys that should they be arrested their youth would protect them form punishment.”


The Hornsbys who are mentioned are ancestors of Terrebonne Parish Councilman Red Hornsby, who was not aware of his familial connection to the war until this week.

“It makes me think,” he said. “I think about what it was like for the people then, and try to imagine it in the context of the people here today.”

A diligent Internet search, local history buffs maintain, can turn up lots of other drama that occurred in both parishes.


Nicholls State University professor Steve Michot is among historians who have studied the involvement of the region.

At home as well as in far-flung battlefields, ancestors of local families played major roles.

“Look at the Confederate muster rolls,” he said. “You can see the names, Boudreaux, Benoit, Thibodeaux and Cheramie. Here, much of the history is unique to the topography.”


Charles Tucker, at left, and Lawrence Authement perform maneuvers during encampment at E.D. White historic site in Thibodaux Saturday. 

JOHN DeSANTIS | SENIOR STAFF WRITER