Civil War Louisiana (CWLA)

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Civil War Louisiana (CWLA)
CWLA seeks to provide an online resource of any and all material of the Civil War relating to Louisiana with a special interest in the war in Acadiana in southwest Louisiana.
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Saturday, August 18, 2012

Account of 11th Indiana in the Overland Campaign

The 11th Indiana Infantry Regiment served in Louisiana from August of 1863 to August of 1864. Below is an exert from Three Years With Wallace's Zouaves: The Civil War Memoirs of Thomas Wise Durham (page 163) of his experiences in the Overland Campaign in October-November 1863:

"In this campaign into Southwest Louisiana we suffered much from the extreme heat in the early part of the campaign, also from want of water which was fit to drink. Much of the time the only water we could get was in sloughs covered with a heavy green scum and so warm and muddy that it was sickening and caused many of our soldiers to die of fever. Most of the country we passed through was beautiful to look at and was mostly prairie. The Bayous, as they ware called, were more like sluggish or dead-water rivers. All were alive with alligators. There is a skirt of timber all along these bayous, mostly live oak and the trees are covered with Spanish moss which hangs clear to the ground. When the wind is blowing and the moss is waving to and fro it is a beautiful sight. I saw a few large sugar plantations  with vats filled with thousands of barrels of Orleans molasses. All the people, both white and black, in Southwestern Louisiana spoke French and very few could understand English. All the able bodied negroes were gone from the plantations, some had enlisted in the Union army, others had been put in the rebel army by their masters and were building fortifications, but we found hundreds of negro women and children on these plantations."


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Coppens' Zouave Battalion

Coppens' Zouave Battalion
Lt. Colonel George Coppens (seated) and brother, Captain Marie Alfred Coppens.Image sold at auction on Cowan Auctions, for $14,375