Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory by Linda Barnickel (review)

In many accounts of African American military service during the Civil War, emphasis is placed on the 54th Massachusetts–led assault on Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863) and (to a lesser extent) the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana (May 22–July 9, 1863). Studies devoted to these respective campaigns include Peter Burchard’s One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment (1965) and Edward Cunningham’s The Port Hudson Campaign 1862–1863 (1963). Much of the general public has come to know of the doomed attack on Fort Wagner via Glory, the moving 1989 film that garnered five Academy Award nominations and won three. Yet to this day, the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana (June 7, 1863) is largely forgotten. With her new book, Linda Barnickel ably addresses this gap in Civil War historiography and memory.

Barnickel opens her study with a chapter on southern outrage in reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation and its attendant authorization of black troops. Confederate legislators and journalists viewed the measure as a violation of civilized warfare and an invitation for blacks to commit atrocities. Senator Benjamin H. Hill (who would later serve in the U.S. Senate) proposed that any Union soldier captured after January 1, 1863 would be assumed guilty of aiding insurrection and murder—with death as his fate. The Jefferson Davis administration’s official policy was not quite as severe, but it still called for the execution of captured commissioned officers when accompanied by armed slaves. Enlisted men and non-commissioned officers would be treated as regular prisoners of war, while slaves captured in arms were to be turned over to state authorities. Despite these ominous warnings, Union recruitment of former slaves proceeded apace, with the African Brigade at Milliken’s Bend taking shape in the late spring of 1863. These men would get their first taste of war just a short time afterward, when a Confederate force led by Brig. Gen. Henry E. McCulloch attacked on June 7. According to Barnickel and contemporaries such as David Dixon Porter and Charles Anderson Dana, the men of the African Brigade acquitted themselves well, despite their inexperience and ineffective weaponry—McCulloch himself acknowledged that the black troops met his charge with “considerable obstinacy.” Thanks in part to such fighting spirit, the Confederates ultimately withdrew from the field. The small but bloody clash at Milliken’s Bend—which included an astonishing 23 percent death rate for the 9th Louisiana Infantry—ended in a Union victory.

But the controversy over the battle and its aftermath was only beginning. Several Union officers accused the rebel attackers of waving the black flag of no quarter, while a contemporary report on the battle by Assistant Secretary of War Dana accused Confederates of deliberately killing black prisoners. Barnickel dismisses the black flag charge and contends that proof of the execution of black prisoners is virtually nonexistent. Yet, she persuasively cites “strong evidence” that two white Union officers were executed following the battle (113). Unfortunately, her position that the controversy over the treatment of Milliken’s Bend Union captives contributed to the eventual cessation of prisoner exchanges is more tenuous: as support for this theory, she cites a published letter by Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the U.S. commissioner for the exchange of prisoners, which did not even mention the June 7 clash.

The final chapter, “Forgetting and Remembering Milliken’s Bend,” is one of the book’s strongest. One of the reasons the battle has faded in memory is that the site no longer exists—a change in the course of the Mississippi River wiped it out early in the twentieth century. Sadly, what nature failed to erase has been obliterated in the years since by the indifference of locals, half-hearted efforts at commemoration, and the necessities born of subsequent wars (an iron tablet in Vicksburg National Military Park honoring the troops of...