"Killed as he led his men in a charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, Cailloux was the first of only a few black officers to die in the war. For all his courage and respectability, Andre Cailloux was in the eyes of the Confederates simply a man who deserved not just death but dishonor for his presumption in taking up arms against a superior race. Despite a truce called to permit the removal of te dead and wounded, rebel sharpshooters prevented Union troops from retrieving the bodies of black soldiers. Cailloux lay on the field until July 8, when Port Hudson surrendered. After forty-one days exposed to the elements, his body could be identified only because of a ring he still wore."
She goes on about Cailloux's funeral and then writes,.."Certainly, his death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particulary for black abolitionist."
Certainly Cailloux's death had an effect on free blacks and their cause for full citizenship but the anti-slavery cause? she is leaving out some big facts. Captian Cailloux had been a 1st Lieutenant in the state militia of Confederate Louisiana prior to the fall of New Orleans. She mentioned he had been a free man but left out that he was part of a large community of free blacks in New Orleans that owned property, property that included slaves. How does she know why the Confederates kept the dead blacks soldiers from being removed from the battlefield, were they not most certainly looked upon as traitors to the South? She does not mention that Cailloux's men were sent out as cannon fodder by their white Union commanders to be hopelessly slaughtered. And the survivor's refused to take anymore commands from Union officers in the field during that fight. She either did not research material or initially left it out.
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David Upton