Suggested reading:

(1) Thomas Walter Brooks and Michael Dan Jones, "Lee's Foreign Legion: A History of the 10th Louisiana Infantry" (Privately printed in Canada, 1996)

(2) Edward Pinkowski's "Pills, Pen, & Politics: The Story of General Leon Jastremski 1843-1907" (Captain Stanislaus Mlotkowski Memorial Brigade Society, Wilmington, Delaware, 1974).

Brooks and Jones state that Captain Jastremski was "the closest thing to a Pole in the regiment [the 10th Louisiana Infantry]" having been "born in France, of a Polish exile Jewish father, and a French aristocratic Catholic mother." How the authors concluded that Dr. Vincent Jastremski, Leon's father, was Jewish rather than Catholic is not clear, and this conclusion appears at odds with the Jastremski family genealogy presented in Pinkowski's work. It matters not. An estimated 3,000 men of Jewish descent proudly served the Confederacy and The Captain Stanislaus Mlotkowski Memorial Brigade Society in Wilmington, Delaware proudly proclaim Captain Jastremski to be Polish and one of their own! Captain Jastremski was honored at a Catholic Mass on the parade ground at Fort Delaware on June 19, 1974 along with Captain Stanislaus Mlotkowski, a Polish immigrant and Philadelphia resident who had commanded one of the Union guard companies at Fort Delaware from 1862 to 1865. Descendants of Leon Jastremski came from Louisiana for the ceremony.

Leon Jastremski, a 21 year old Confederate volunteer, enrolled with the Louisiana Swamp Rifles [Company E, 10th Louisiana Infantry] from Point Coupee Parish at Camp Moore, Louisiana on July 22, 1861. Interestingly, he was not from Pointe Coupee Parish. His parents had moved from France to Lafayette [Vermillionville] in 1845 where they both died in 1856. Orphaned at thirteen years of age, Leon moved to Abbeville, Baton Rouge and then down to New Orleans working as a printer's helper and as a drugstore clerk. Unable to find work in the summer of 1861, he wandered up to Camp Moore and enrolled in Confederate service with the Pointe Coupee company.

Jastremski rose through the ranks of the 10th Louisiana Infantry from Corporal to Sergeant Major and finally to the rank of Captain. He was a POW at Fort Delaware in the summer of 1862 and was released and exchanged in August 1862 to return to duty with the 10th Louisiana. He was detained at Fort Delaware again in 1864 having been captured during the Battle of the Wilderness on May 10, 1864. Captain Jastremski was selected to be a member of the "Immortal 600" - a group of Confederate officers who were sent from Fort Delaware to Charleston Harbor to be placed under the guns as a matter of retalitation in August 1864.

Leon Jastremski was a Captain in the Confederate army and became a Brigadier General in the Louisiana National Guard after the end of Radical Reconstruction. He was a three term mayor of Baton Rouge after the war and twice ran for Governor of the State of Louisiana. The Fort Delaware Society [http://www.del.net/org/fort] has copies of Edward Pinkowski's 1974 biography of Jastremski for sale.