January-March

Items in Omeka from January, February, and March.

In Louisiana, General Richard Taylor struggles to amass a reliable army in western Louisiana, while Union troops stand poised to move up the Teche from Brashear City. By the beginning of April, Banks had an army of 16,000 men near Brashear.¹ A few Union sorties up the Teche are unsuccessful in drawing Confederate troops into battle. Work on Grant’s Canal opposite Vicksburg occurs during these months, as described in winters1963; Grant’s forces also engage in several smaller campaigns in the leadup to Vicksburg.

• January: Confederate State Legislature of Louisiana passes an act which “empowered the governor to conscript slave labor to build military defenses.”²
• February: Kirby Smith takes over the Trans-Mississippi Department, establishing headquarters in Alexandria, Louisiana
• February 3: Ulysses S. Grant begins a campaign south from Lake Providence across Carroll and Madison Parishes in Louisiana, prompting the first thoughts of refugeeing by Kate Stone and her family.
• March 3: Kentucky House of Representatives adjourns; end of term of Zebulon Ward in the House.
• March 17: Natchez surrendered (for the second time) to a Union force, but still not occupied³
• March 26: Confederate Congress allows CSA army officers to impress slaves so long as state legislation allows it. Efforts had to made to “hire” or contract with owners first. See Confederate Slave Impressment. Impressments of vehicles, cotton, and other goods also made legal in March.⁴
• March 28: Texan troops under Taylor seize the Union tinclad Diana, which had been sent up the Teche to probe Confederate defenses.⁵

April-June

Items in Omeka from April, May, and June.

• Spring: A strong yield of grains and foodstuffs gives the Southwest its last good harvest of the war, according to kerby1972, 79.
• April 12: A Union force of 12,000 sent by Nathaniel P. Banks and commanded by William Emory and Godfrey Weitzel crosses Berwick Bay and begins moving up the Teche, opening fire on Fort Bisland by nightfall.⁶
• April 13-14: Union troops and gunboats under Grover “open navigation of the Atchafalaya to the Union fleet,” shell Fort Benton, and drive Confederate skirmishers to Franklin.⁷
• April 15: The Avery Family flees Avery Island for Texas.⁸
• April 17: Destruction of salt works at Avery Island by federal troops from Brashear City.⁹ Reports of a break-down of discipline in Union army lead to widespread looting and killing of livestock.¹⁰
• April 24: After a long retreat, most of Taylor’s army reaches Alexandria, exposing most of the sugar parishes to Banks. Kirby Smith also arrives at Alexandria to evacuate headquarters to Shreveport, which was now “swarming with civilian refugees, slave coffles, state legislators, surplus colonels, and skulking privates,” according to kerby1972, 106. But instead of taking Alexandria, Banks halts for two weeks at Opelousas, confiscating cotton, wagons, stock, and commodities from the surrounding area. His “ranks [are] swollen by Negro refugees.”¹¹
• May 1: Nathaniel P. Banks announces plans to raise eighteen black regiments.¹²
• May 8: Banks occupies Alexandria.
• May 10: Arthur J. Fremantle notes in his diary near Monroe that the “road to-day was alive with negroes, who are being ‘run’ into Texas out of Banks’s way.”
• May 14: Banks halts his northward march and turns towards the Mississippi to assist Grant near Vicksburg.
• May 24: Taylor’s Confederate forces reoccupy Alexandria.
• May 27: Banks’s forces participate in assault on Port Hudson, which begins the lengthy siege of the Confederate fort there. Meanwhile, Confederate forces in western Louisiana move back into position and are more or less in the same positions they were in on April 11.¹³
• June 7: Battle of Milliken’s Bend
• June 20: Louisiana legislature passes a “mandatory death penalty for any slave convicted of waging war, revolt, rebellion, or insurrection against the state or the Confederacy.”¹⁴
• June 23: Taylor captures and occupies Brashear City, taking control of 1,700 prisoners of war, 2,000 “contraband” slaves, and numerous vehicles.
• June 24: Thibodeaux also surrenders to Confederate forces.
• June 28: USCT troops repulse Confederate forces at Donaldsonville.

July-September

Items from July, August, and September.

• July 4: Fall of Vicksburg to the Union.
• July 9: Fall of Port Hudson to the Union.
• End of July: Banks’s forces reoccupy Brashear City, which had been gutted and abandoned by Taylor’s troops, who withdrew and camped along the Teche between New Iberia and Vermillionville. Many soldiers straggle away to Texas or elsewhere, however.¹⁵
• August 15, 1863: At the second of the Marshall Conferences, committees grant Kirby Smith wide-ranging administrative power, with bureau offices in Shreveport or Marshall, and Smith announces his Cotton Bureau.
• September 4: Kirby Smith begins advising officers and planters to carry “able bodied male negroes” and transportation behind Confederate lines, because “Every sound male black left for the enemy becomes a soldier whom we have afterwards to fight.”¹⁶
• September 8: Union forces repelled from Texas at the Battle of Sabine Pass.

October-December

Items from October, November, and December.

• October: Banks orders William B. Franklin to attempt an overland march on Texas by moving up the Teche and then heading west, but Franklin’s overland expedition only gets as far as Opelousas before having to retreat back down the Bayou, encamping outside New Iberia for the winter.
• October 24: CSA General Orders No. 138 gives instructions on March impressment law. Empowered commanding officers & engineers to decide if impress was necessary. See Confederate Slave Impressment.
• November 5: Pendleton Murrah sworn in as governor of Texas.
• December 15: Texas state legislature passes a law to encourage manufacturing by giving public land grants to persons or corporations who erected new machinery by 1865.