It is not the place of historians to dictate who deserves memorialization in the public square. That’s a decision best left to the democratic process where communities and elected officials make such determinations. All we can do is suggest deserving candidates. They are not hard to locate, not even in the old Confederacy.
But, for my money, André Cailloux, a Black captain of infantry in the U. S. Army, belongs at the head of the class. He was killed on May 27, 1863, leading a foredoomed assault against impregnable Confederate works at Port Hudson, Louisiana, just upriver from Baton Rouge.
There was a time when Cailloux was nationally hailed and locally canonized. His New Orleans funeral had the feel of a massive civil rights protest, perhaps the largest the country had ever seen to that point in time, according to his biographer Stephen J. Ochs. For more than a mile, on a sweltering day in late July 1863, Black New Orleanians thronged Esplanade Avenue under a cloudless sky to witness the funeral cortege carrying Cailloux’s remains to the Bienville Street cemetery. Over thirty Black mutual aid societies joined the procession.[3]
In the words of Ochs, it was a heartfelt tribute to the “first black warrior-hero in the Civil War.” Cailloux could lay claim to other important firsts: in September 1862, his commission as one of the first Black officers in the history of the United States Army. But it was his outsize role in the first significant battle in which Black soldiers went on the offensive that truly sets him apart. It is what makes him not just a Black hero, but an American hero, indeed, a saved-the-country hero and thus worthy of the highest honor accorded members of the armed forces, then and now.
In a year filled with momentous tipping points—a federal victory at Gettysburg; the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson and the opening of the Mississippi to Union control—Cailloux’s valor, and that of the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.
Before Port Hudson, Black soldiers were recruited grudgingly and routinely sidelined digging trenches and latrines. It was said that they weren’t manly, that they would cut and run when the fighting got hot. It was a lie. On numerous occasions they repelled Confederate surprise attacks. But that was while fighting for their lives on defense, so the libel lived on. What happened that May morning on one of the Mississippi’s signature hairpin turns vanquished the slander. The mobilization of Black soldiers shifted into a different gear. They weren’t universally sidelined guarding railroad spurs any longer. Growing numbers saw front line combat.