The volunteer militia was met with praise in the local press.
The Native Guard consisted of free men of color from New Orleans’ Creole elite who, following Louisiana’s secession, opted to join the Confederate cause in an effort to defend their homes and businesses against a potential Union invasion. A section of the unfinished canal can be viewed near Delta, Louisiana, as part of Vicksburg National Military Park. On July 4, 1863, after 47 days of relentless bombing, Vicksburg ultimately surrendered. He held little confidence in the arduous scheme, but maintained that work on the channel would keep the troops in good physical condition for a planned spring campaign. It resumed again in January 1863 under the command of General Ulysses S. By July 24, the ambitious project was stopped. “The labor of making this cut is far greater than estimated by anybody,” Williams confessed. Shovels began to turn dirt on June 27, 1862, but malaria, dysentery and other diseases quickly spread through the ranks. In the summer of 1862, under the oversight of Brigadier General Thomas Williams, 3,000 men were ordered to begin digging a canal through a peninsula in Madison Parish, opposite Vicksburg, with the goal of allowing river traffic to safely bypass Confederate cannons perched high in a town that slopes down steep river bluffs. Nicknamed the “Gibraltar of the South,” failure to conquer the town split the Union Navy’s control of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Though the port cities of Memphis and New Orleans fell to Union forces early in the Civil War, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg proved to be stubbornly impenetrable. Union soldiers surrendered the next day and Beauregard became one of the Confederacy’s first war heroes. Confederate president Jefferson Davis appointed Beauregard as brigadier general and dispatched him to Charleston, South Carolina, where, on April 12, 1861, the newly minted CSA commander ordered artillery fire upon federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter, located on an island in the city’s harbor. He was dismissed after only five days at his prestigious new post due to his vocal sympathies for the Southern cause. Army’s academy on the Hudson River, Louisiana seceded from the Union. After rising through the ranks of the military, including leading troops in the Mexican-American War, Beauregard was offered the position of superintendent of his alma mater in 1861. He went on to graduate from West Point where he came to be nicknamed “Little Napoleon” (he stood 5 foot 7 inches tall). He did not learn English until age 11 when he was sent away to boarding school in New York. Beauregard was born in 1818 to a French-speaking family that owned a sugar plantation in St. The thirteen reconstructed parishes cast Louisiana’s seven Electoral College votes for Lincoln, but Congress refused to count them since many legislators disapproved of Lincoln’s plans for readmitting the state to the Union. By 1864 the state was partially under Union occupation. Southerners were immediately disdainful of the emerging anti-slavery faction, so much so that in his presidential campaign Abraham Lincoln famously addressed the partisan friction in a speech at New York’s Cooper Union: “hen you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws.” Louisiana did not recognize the Republican Party in the election of 1860 and Lincoln’s name was left off the ballots. The statute’s passage by Congress in 1854 violated the 1850 Missouri Compromise that was inteded to halt the spread of slavery above the 36° 30′ latitude as the U.S. The Republican Party emerged as an abolitionist political force in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. 1860 campaign ribbon promoting Abraham Lincoln for president