REMEMBERING BRAVERY

Andre Cailloux was the first black Civil War hero. On Sunday, he and all other black soldiers will be honored with a jazz Mass and other festivities.

BY ELIZABETH MULLENER, Staff Writer

On a torrid July day in 1863, there was a funeral in New Orleans that put the city on the front page of newspapers across the United States. It was a funeral with all the trimmings—a marching band playing solemn airs, a horse-drawn caisson with drapes and tassels, an eloquent eulogy. Thousands of people lined the downtown streets for a mile, mostly black, many of them wearing crepe rosettes and holding tiny American flags. "Unprecedentedly large," The Daily Picayune pronounced the turnout.

The man buried that day in square 3 of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 was Andre Cailloux, the first black hero of the Civil War.

For four days before the funeral, his body had lain in state at the hall of the Friends of Order, the coffin covered with a flag, surrounded by candles and flowers, protected by a guard who paced to and fro.

For 41 days before that, however, his body had lain on the battlefield at Port Gibson, Miss., rotting and swelling in the sun like the other black dead. Only the ring Cailloux wore with the insignia of the Friends of order assure his identity. It was on that battlefield that he had fallen, a captain leading his company in a desperate charge against Confederate soldiers who were sitting in rifle nests on a bluff 300 feet over their heads.

The first shot he took was just above his left elbow. But he carried on, his arm dangling at his side.

"En avant, mes enfants! Follow me!" he had exhorted his men as he led them out of the woods and into the battle. The second shot he took did him in.

The soldiers he led were in Company E of the First Louisiana native Guards and the rout at Port Gibson marked the first time black troops had fought in the Civil War. Their courage was well-noted because it put to rest the prediction that black soldiers would never fight bravely. Cailloux, a free black man from New Orleans, was 38 when he died.

By the time the war was over, 180,000 black troops had fought for the Union cause, 24,000 of them from Louisiana, more than from any other state.

On Sunday, Cailloux will be honored again in New Orleans, and all the other black veterans of the Civil War will be honored for the first time, with a jazz Mass, a second-line, a ceremony and a bronze plaque that will be mounted in Square 3 of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.

Before his death, Cailloux was a well-known citizen of New Orleans, respected and admired as a man of character and integrity. After his death, he attained legendary status.

"He became a rallying signal," said Stephen Ochs a Washington historian who has written a biography of Cailloux due out next year from Louisiana State University Press. "He took on a mythological aura.

"For black people, he became a symbol of valor, of rocklike determination, a symbol of black manhood. He had given the lie to the notion that blacks could not fight bravely."

Andre Cailloux was born a slave in 1825 on a plantation owned by Joseph Duvernay near Pointe a la Hache in Plaquemines Parish. When he was 5, his master died and he became the possession of his master’s widow, who moved him and his parents to New Orleans.

As a teenager, he was trained in the craft of cigar-making and learned to read, possibly at the factory, where it was common to have a storyteller who read to workers as they rolled cigars. At 21, Cailloux was emancipated for reasons unknown and shortly thereafter married Felicie Coulon, also recently freed. He adopted Felicie’s son and together, the couple had four more children. He educated his two sons at a school run by local black intellectuals.

Diligent and ambitious, Cailloux bought a piece of property for $200 at Prieur and Perdido streets in 1852. A few years later, he bought a second piece—a Creole cottage Uptown on Baronne Street—for $400. By 1860, he also owned a shop in Faubourg Marigny.

"He was prosperous compared to other free blacks in the country or compared to slave in New Orleans," Ochs said. "But he was not a wealthy man. He was a hardworking artisan who was one sickness away form losing everything."

During the antebellum era in New Orleans, a number of mutual-aid societies were formed for the dual purposes of social activities and burial benefits, perhaps, it is speculated, in reaction to the ferocious yellow fever epidemics. Cailloux joined one of them, Friends of Order, which elected him secretary in 1860.

Although there are no pictures of Cailloux and he left no letters or journals, he does appear in the writings of others. By all accounts, he was trusted and well-liked, a good-looking man who participated actively in the social life of the black Creole community and cut a handsome figure in his uniform. "Striking," is the way he is described in the journal of one New Orleans woman.

A boxer and horseman, he was k own for his manners and his character. He took pride in calling himself "the blackest man in New Orleans."

"He presented a formidable figure, a very martial figure," Ochs said. "This was a guy who commanded a lot of physical respect—and social respect, too. He strikes me as a very decent man, brave and honorable.

"His behavior on the battlefield was not surprising to me. He had shown leadership and initiative throughout his life."

When the war began, many of the benevolent societies formed units in the Louisiana militia. It was traditional for free people of color to offer their military service to the government in power. They had done so since colonial times. It was expected of them, Ochs said, and it would have aroused suspicion had they declined. So Friends of Order became the Order Company in the Louisiana Native Guards, and Cailloux enlisted 100 men, including working slaves, runaway slaves and free black men. He was made their captain.

"The Confederates were nervous about the presence of black troops," said historian Joseph Logsdon at the University of New Orleans. "They didn’t know what was on their minds. People living in a slave society have constant fears of a revolt."

When New Orleans fell to the Union forces, the Native Guards disbanded. But when Union Gen. Benjamin Butler took the reigns of power in the city, he needed troops. He wasn’t going to find them among the white population of Louisiana, and he wasn’t going to get any more form Washington. So he turned to the Native Guards, who offered their services. Cailloux’s company became the color company, carrying the banner for the 1st Regiment.

The Union officers were no happier about the situation than the Confederate officers had been.

"At first Butler told them, ‘Go home, don’t bother me,’" Logsdon said. "It was too radical a notion to have armed black troops fighting for their liberation."

Least happy of all were the soldiers in Company E, who aspired to prove themselves in battle but were relegated instead to heavy manual labor in Louisiana, where they cleared brush and repaired the railroads. They didn’t get their salaries for many months and they didn’t get the $200 bonus they were promised for enlisting. Moreover, they were subject to harassment by white troops, sometimes in the form of racial epithets, sometimes in the form of physical assault.

But they endured and they prevailed and ultimately they went to battle. For Logsdon, it was an eventful moment in the history of the country.

"The fall of Post Hudson in most people’s minds signaled a major turning point in the war. It showed that blacks were not just docile recipients of these favors of Father Abraham but they were active participants in their own liberation and the defeat of slave-holders."

Nearly forgotten for decades, Cailloux in the waning days of the 1990’s is regaining some of the stature he enjoyed a century and a half ago: Ochs’s biography is on the boards, Baton Rouge writer Randy Holden is publishing a novel on the subject, there is a web site devoted to him and an infornal fan club of sorts keeps up with the latest findings.

Helen Johnson, Cailloux’s great-great-granddaughter in Los Angeles, is passionate in her search for information on her famous ancestor. She has heard about him all her life.

"My mother was proud of him, proud of the Cailloux name," she said. "She would just beam when she would say her great-grandfather was a Civil War hero. I often think how happy she would be to know that others have remembered Andre Cailloux and the contributions he made."

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