Civil War

Civil War. Louisiana's Role in the War. , Louisiana occupied a highly strategic location during the Civil War. Home to both the South's largest city, New Orleans, as well as the largest Confederate training base in the Gulf South at Camp Moore, and positioned to control the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Bayou State was certain to be a target of military operations. The North's “Anaconda Plan” for subjugating the South required the capture of the Mississippi River both to cut the Confederacy in two and deny the eastern Confederate armies resources from the west, especially Texas beef.

In the spring of 1862 a powerful Federal naval force advanced up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico intent on capturing New Orleans. At a sharp bend in the river the Confederates occupied Forts Jackson and St. Philip, both outdated masonry fortifications, supported by a small “mosquito fleet” of boats determined to contest the Federal advance. In what would become the largest naval battle in American waters, the Federal navy forced its way past the forts and successfully captured New Orleans in April 1862. The poorly defended city had seen most of the troops assigned to its defense drawn off to other threatened theaters of the war only months before the city fell.

Following the fall of New Orleans the Federal navy steamed north and captured Baton Rouge. A desperate Confederate effort to recapture Baton Rouge in August 1862 failed when Union gunboats in the Mississippi River provided devastating firepower that decimated the Confederate attack. Confederate efforts to offset this advantage diminished when the ironclad ram Arkansas proved unable to arrive at the city and drive the Federal navy off. In the aftermath of the Battle of Baton Rouge the Confederates fortified the bluffs over the Mississippi at Port Hudson, Louisiana and grimly held on to a small, yet critical, portion of the River between Port Hudson and Vicksburg, Mississippi.