After New Orleans was captured by David Farragut's fleet on April 25, 1862, the Louisiana state government evacuated the capital at Baton Rouge and burned all cotton in the city to keep it out of Union hands. The gunboat USS Iroquois took possession of the city on May 9. On the 23rd, a naval officer was ambushed by guerillas so Farragut retaliated by ordering his flagship USS Hartford to bombard Baton Rouge. A force of 2,500 troops under Brig. Gen Thomas Williams arrived in the city on May 29.Williams was a New York native who graduated West Point in 1837 and was a math professor there for a time. He served in the Mexican War, was promoted to captain, and married the daughter of an Army surgeon. During the 1850s, Williams was posted at Fort Mackinac near the Canadian border and later in Florida and the Utah Territory before becoming an artillery instructor at Fort Monroe in Virginia. When the Civil War began, he was promoted to major in the regular army and then a volunteer brigadier general. Williams commanded along the Potomac River, then in North Carolina, and was assigned to Ben Butler's occupation force in New Orleans.The 3,000 troops in Williams's command labored in the sweltering Louisiana summer heat to dig a canal across the base of De Soto Point on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Vicksburg so as to create a route that Navy vessels could avoid the formidable Confederate artillery around the town.
At the same time, Earl Van Dorn, the Confederate commander in Mississippi, planned to retake Baton Rouge which would then allow him to threaten New Orleans. On July 27, five thousand troops under John Breckinridge set out and were reinforced by a small infantry command led by Brig. Gen Daniel Ruggles. The ram CSS Arkansas was also coming down the river. Union army intelligence got word of the move and on August 4, Williams arranged his troops in a line of battle a mile outside Baton Rouge. Few of them had been in combat before and they were poorly provisioned as most Union supplies were in New Orleans.Breckinridge arrived near Baton Rouge but Union scouts spotted his army. Nonetheless, he gave the order to attack at daybreak on August 5. A bitter street fight occurred in downtown Baton Rouge and Williams was shot in the chest and killed. Col. Thomas Cahill took over. Cahill ordered a retreat to prepared defensive lines near the state prison under the protection of Union gunboats, which opened fire. CSS Arkansas arrived but its engines died four miles short of the city and the skipper of the vessel ordered it set on fire to prevent its capture. With his naval support gone, Breckinridge gave up and ordered a retreat. Union troops also abandoned Baton Rouge a week later, fearing that New Orleans was threatened, but came back in October. Breckinridge's troops went on to seize Port Hudson and would retain control of it for 11 months.
A total of 836 men were killed, wounded, or captured in the battle. Thomas Williams's body was transported with other Union dead and wounded on the steamer Lewis Whitman on August 7, but it collided with the sloop USS Oneida in the Mississippi River near Donaldsonville and sank.There exists an urban legend that Williams was killed by friendly fire, that his own soldiers detested him as a martinet, and that they deliberately held him in front of a cannon and fired it. However, there is no evidence of this and accounts of the battle from participants unanimously agree that Williams was shot with a rifle bullet during the urban fighting in the city; the story that he was fragged by being held in front of a cannon was easily circulated due to the loss of his body.
My old home town. There’s not much of a battlefield apart from some markers as the city long since paved everything over. CSS Arkansas was a beast, having previously shot it out with Farragut’s whole fleet, and things would have been spicy if it hadn’t had the usual mechanical issues for Secesh ironclads. It’s now buried under the levee on the west side of the river. By the time the Yankees did a reset, Port Hudson had been heavily fortified and it took a naval battle and grueling siege to take the place, falling only after the surrender of Vicksburg rendered it untenable. It was a mini Vicksburg, the first real high ground upstream on the Mississippi, overlooking a treacherous bend on the river and surrounded by hills, ravines and swamps making an ideal defensive position. I explored the battlefield as a kid and my friend’s dad knew some old farmer whose back porch looked like a Civil War museum with artifacts he’d plowed up.
>>18293908probably some newspaper ran the sensationalized account of him being held in front of a cannon and without a body there was no way to disprove it
>>18293908>>18293979Are there any documented cases of fragging in the Civil War? Even with all the asshole officers and disgruntled troops nothing springs to mind. There were formal duels and incidents like Forrest and a junior officer getting into it, friendly fire accidents like Stonewall Jackson, but deliberate fragging? Seems like it would be easy to do in the chaos of battle.
>>18294167Every time an unpopular martinet general like Charles Winder was killed in battle there were always unsubstantiated claims of fragging.
maybe not but Braxton Bragg was almost fragged in the Mexican War when a private tried to explode an artillery shell under his cot
>>18293906>A bitter street fight occurred in downtown Baton RougeHow often did this kind of thing happen during the Civil War? Most of the major battles you hear about happen in fields and forests on the outskirts of population centers, not within them.
>>18294680Fredericksburg a few days before the main battle when the Army of the Potomac drove Barksdale's brigade out of the town.
>>18294680Despite being the state capital with a ludicrous Moorish style state house, Baton Rouge wasn’t very big and any action was on the outskirts of town, so not exactly bayou Stalingrad. Day one of Gettysburg is one of the few other house to house fights I can think of.
>>18294738About 5,500 people during the war.
>>18294738>Baton Rouge wasn’t very big and any action was on the outskirts of townas the OP map shows it did in fact occur in the downtown
The town was mostly destroyed in an accidental fire started four months after the battle.
>>18294758Any “downtown” in a city of 5,500 would be close to the river. There’s no major structures like the prison, asylums, Capitol or arsenal where the battle took place and even if there’s a street grid it was just vacant lots or small wooden structures. Even today, downtown Baton Rouge is by the river and the battle site is cemeteries and low rise residential. >>18294761The fire gutted the Capitol building and Baton Rouge didn’t become the state capital again in the 1880s. It was always one of those hick cities that became the state capital to offset the power of the giga metro in a state, like Albany or Lansing. Baton Rouge was a sleepy river port until it became a center of the petrochemical industry in the 20th century.
