In a comment to my Holocaust Day post, commenter/internet buddy absurdbeats wrote “The history matters—the actual history, the actual lives and deaths of millions of human beings. Not the mythification and weaponization of history, but the actuality of it. The actual horror of it.” Truer words have never been spoke.

In something of that spirit, and following in the rather formidable footprints of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’ve decided to mark Confederate History Month — by learning and blogging about a handful of real Southern heroes about whom I had never heard until TNC mentioned them (so far, we’ve learned about General George Henry Thomas, Elizabeth Van Lew, and Robert Smalls, if you want to catch up!). Today being the last day of CHM, we look at the last hero I took up back when TNC threw their names out: Andre Cailloux.

Andre Cailloux

Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation in 1825, Andre Cailloux’s owner moved his family to New Orleans when Cailloux was five years old. There he worked in a cigar factory as a teenager, and at 21 was manumitted, “for reasons unknown.”

Cailloux fairly quickly came to establish himself as a respected member of New Orleans’s business community, well-known and well-regarded. Married to a former slave, Felicie Coulon, he adopted her son and together they raised another four children, sending two of them to a Black-run school. He bought property and opened his own shop, was known as a boxer and a horseman, and was apparently bi-lingual, as he is known to have encouraged the men who later served under him in both English and French — and he reportedly liked to refer to himself as “the blackest man in New Orleans” (!). Stephen Ochs, author of A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that Cailloux “was prosperous compared to other free blacks in the country…. But he was not a wealthy man. He was a hardworking artisan who was one sickness away from losing everything.”

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the state of Louisiana formed the Louisiana Native Guards, a militia of people of color that was intended for show rather than as an actual fighting unit within the Confederate Army. Apparently many Black men who joined did so for fear of reprisals, but when New Orleans fell to Union forces in September 1862, a reconstituted Native Guards was mustered into the Union Army, with many joining gladly. Cailloux was among their number, and was made a captain. Stephen Ochs writes that he “proved an effective recruiter”:

Like the other black officers, he welcomed both free people of color and runaway slaves into the ranks, both groups apparently sharing a common agenda of freedom and liberation and recognizing that military service would enhance their claims to greater equality. Respected in his community, polished in manners, athletic, and charismatic, the thirty-eight year-old Cailloux exuded confidence and authority and cut a dashing figure that debunked the stereotype of black servility and inferiority.

The efforts of all the Black officers were, unsurprisingly, met by the active resistance of many in New Orleans’s white community and from white soldiers, many of whom refused to obey their Black superior officers.

In May 1863, the Louisiana Native Guards were assigned to the Union troops already engaged in efforts to wrest the Mississippi River’s Port Hudson from Confederate control. The battle was desperate, not least because the rebel forces held the high ground, but Captain Cailloux is reported to have worked his lines methodically, calming his soldiers, before leading them in a screaming, and frankly kamikaze, charge: “En avant, mes enfants! Follow me!”

Quickly shot in his left arm, Cailloux continued to plunge into the fray, his right arm holding his sword aloft as he continued to shout direction and encouragement to those behind him. Another shot hit him in the head, however, and he fell dead on the spot.

Along with many of those who fell alongside him, Cailloux’s body lay in the field in which he died for 41 days before he was brought back to New Orleans for burial — but

[it was a funeral] 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.

Joseph Logsdon, a historian at the University of New Orleans, told the Times-Picayune that

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 [Lincoln] but they were active participants in their own liberation and the defeat of slave-holders.

To Cailloux biographer Ochs, it only makes sense that Cailloux was at the very forefront of that turning-point:

He presented a formidable figure, a very martial figure…. 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.

*****

The South produced many heroes in those horrible years, many men and women who did whatever they could to advance freedom and preserve the Union. I don’t know exactly what was in the minds of those who first proposed a “Confederate History Month” (indeed, I’d rather not think too much about it), but I know the most important piece of that history: The Confederacy failed — and in great part because of the efforts of Southern patriots like General George Henry Smalls, Elizabeth Van Lew, Robert Smalls, and Andre Cailloux. I am grateful to each and every one of them.

May their memories be for a blessing יהי זכרם ברוך

In a comment to my Holocaust Day post, commenter/internet buddy absurdbeats wrote “The history matters—the actual history, the actual lives and deaths of millions of human beings. Not the mythification and weaponization of history, but the actuality of it. The actual horror of it.” Truer words have never been spoke.

In something of that spirit, and following in the rather formidable footprints of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’ve decided to mark Confederate History Month — by learning and blogging about a handful of real Southern heroes about whom I had never heard until TNC mentioned them (I started with General George Henry Thomas and continued with Elizabeth Van Lew, if you want to catch up!). Today’s hero: Robert Smalls.

Robert Smalls

We actually just missed Robert Smalls’s birthday: He was born on April 5, 1839 in a South Carolina slave cabin. It’s known that Smalls’s father was a white man, probably either John K. McKee, Lydia Smalls’s owner, or a Jewish merchant named Moses Goldsmith. Lydia was 49 when Robert was born, and he was her only child.

Until he was 12 years old, Smalls worked as a house slave; after that, he was hired out, initially only allowed to keep $1 a month of his pay, but at age 18 (and by now a married man) he negotiated a deal by which he was able to keep $15 a month. When Smalls’s wife Hannah Jones (15 years his senior) gave birth to their first baby, a daughter they named Elizabeth Lydia, he negotiated a second deal — one by which he was able to buy his wife and their little girl for $800. Robert and Hannah’s second child, Robert, Jr., was born the same year that the Civil War broke out, in 1861.

As a hired hand, Smalls worked in a wide range of professions, including waiter, lamplighter, stevedore, ship rigger and sailor — and these last two would quickly prove of particular importance to the Union Army.

Hired as a deckhand on the Confederate transport steamer Planter, Smalls was soon made its pilot. The 147-foot vessel was docked outside the home and office of its commander, Brigadier General Roswell Ripley; on May 13, 1862, it was loaded with armaments intended for Confederate forts. Before dawn, however, Smalls and a crew of Black men commandeered the ship and sailed to a nearby dock where his wife and children and several slaves were waiting on a second ship.

Sailing past rebel forts, Smalls’s knowledge of the ship and the Confederate Navy allowed him to evade capture: He wore the captain’s hat and stood as a captain would in the pilot house, giving the appropriate whistle signals until he reached the Union blockade, where he raised a flag of surrender before the Union vessel could fire. Thus Smalls presented the Union Navy with what the northern press soon referred to as “the first trophy of Fort Sumter.”

‘One of the most heroic acts of the war,’ reported the New York Times on May 19, 1862. Later, the commander of the Union navy along the South Atlantic coast, Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, pronounced it ‘one of the coolest and most gallant naval acts of war.’ (Historynet.com)

Newspaper editorials citing Smalls’ gallantry shattered stereotypes about the capability of blacks. An editorial in the New York Daily Tribune said, “Is he not also a man – and is he not fit for freedom, since he made such a hazardous dash to gain it? . . . Is he not a man and a hero – whose pluck has not been questioned by even The Charleston Courier or The New York Herald? . . . What white man has made a bolder dash, or won a richer prize in the teeth of such perils during the war? . . . Perhaps [blacks are inferior to whites] but they seem to possess good material for improvement. Few white men have a better record than Robert Smalls.” (The Robert Smalls Foundation)

Just learning this little bit about Smalls, I was struck by the sheer arrogance involved in hiring a slave to pilot a Confederate vessel. Did the commander and crew think him uninterested in freedom, or lacking in the courage or foresight to try to gain it? Did they think the Union cause so baseless as to be unworthy of his (or their) attention? Was Smalls a “good nigger,” one they believed would never “run off”? What kind of one-dimensional understanding did they have of this man? This was, after all, a man who had negotiated an actual salary (however small) from his own master, and managed to purchase the freedom of his wife and child — and to the tune of what would be equivalent to more than $20,000 in today’s currency — all before he was even 22 years old.

I’m also struck by the age of Smalls’s wife — did growing up with an older mother teach the boy to appreciate the wisdom of age? And then there’s the fact that his mother was forty-nine years old when he was born. Even today, that’s pretty late to be having a baby! What’s the story behind his conception? Was it rape, or did Lydia have a relationship — however understood — with either or both of the white men who may have been Robert’s father? Was there joy at finally having a child of her own? Was their sorrow at bringing another person into slavery? And did she — please God — live long enough to see her only child become an American hero?

I hope she did. I hope she knew that the child born into a slave cabin ultimately won the freedom of more than a dozen other slaves, and made a crucial contribution to advancing the United States to the day — mere months later, on January 1, 1863 — on which Mr. Lincoln would declare that “all persons held as slaves… are, and henceforward shall be free.”

In a comment to my recent Holocaust Day post, commenter/internet buddy absurdbeats wrote “The history matters—the actual history, the actual lives and deaths of millions of human beings. Not the mythification and weaponization of history, but the actuality of it. The actual horror of it.” Truer words have never been spoke.

In something of that spirit, and following in the rather formidable footprints of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’ve decided to mark Confederate History Month — by learning and blogging about a handful of real Southern heroes about whom I had never heard until TNC mentioned them. (I started last Wednesday, if you want to catch up!) Today’s hero: Elizabeth Van Lew.

Elizabeth Van Lew

Born in 1818, Elizabeth Van Lew was the well-educated daughter of a wealthy businessman in Richmond, Virginia — which was, you’ll recall,  the capital of the Confederacy. Much like General George Henry Thomas, however, Van Lew both opposed slavery and was loyal to the Union.  “She risked everything that is dear to man,” reads a sign at her grave, “friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself, all for one absorbing desire of her heart — that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved.”

Van Lew’s opposition to slavery came to the fore and found expression early on: When her father died in 1843, she learned he had written into his will that his slaves could never be legally freed — so she reached some sort of agreement with them, simply telling the former slaves that they could leave if they chose, and paying them wages when they stayed on to work for the family. The money her father left her was spent buying and freeing the slaves of others.

Van Lew also took bold action in support of the Union once war broke out. She got food and bribe money to Union prisoners, hid prisoners of war who had managed to escape (and even the occasional stolen Union body), and was herself a spy, conveying to the Union army information regarding Confederate attack plans. Her spy ring known was known as the Richmond Union Underground, and some of the former slaves she had freed were among the Underground’s agents. According to Elizabeth Van Lew: Civil War Spy: “General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army, highly valued her work as a spy. The messages she delivered to him were some of the most valuable information he received and helped ultimately to lead the Union to victory.”

And as if that weren’t enough, she passed this information on in a secret code of her own devising:

Another Southern hero — and something of a feminist foremother, to boot!