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fundamental purposes of their military service. “Wounded Colored Soldiers in Hospital” after the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner cast themselves as “soldiers for Jesus” and assured the readers of the northern black press that “if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die.” Black soldiers did die in dramatic numbers; one-fifth of the approximately 180,000 who served did not survive the war, although disease proved a far more deadly killer than combat. (Overall, twice as many soldiers died of disease as from battle wounds; ten times as many black soldiers did.) But these deaths promised political as well as spiritual redemption. Black soldiers sought to win a place in the polity, as citizens and as men, through their willingness to give up their lives. “When you hear of a white family that has lost father, husband or brother,” wrote a corporal from the Third U.S. Colored Troops reporting the loss of ten comrades in South Carolina, “you can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden.” Black and white northerners could honor heroic black deaths, even if, as historian Alice Fahs points out, the racist assumptions of many whites made them “only too willing to celebrate the manhood of black soldiers who no longer had any manhood to exercise.”28

“Unidentified Sergeant, U.S. Colored Troops.” Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

Perhaps the most dramatic such celebration, one that became for many African Americans emblematic of the meaning of black service and sacrifice, was the New Orleans funeral of Captain André Cailloux in August 1863. The Christian Recorder judged the event “one of the most extraordinary exhibitions brought forth by this rebellion.” And exhibition it was: of black courage, accomplishment, and solidarity, as well as the strength of a black claim to citizenship in a restored American nation.

Cailloux was one of approximately 11,000 free people of color in antebellum New Orleans. A literate artisan and a property owner, he served as secretary of one of the city’s many Afro-Creole mutual benefit societies. After the fall of New Orleans to federal forces in the spring of 1862, Cailloux helped recruit a company for the Union army. Founded upon a long tradition of military service by New Orleans’s free people of color, including a critical role in aiding Andrew Jackson against the British in 1815, the Louisiana Native Guards claimed distinctions denied other units of nonwhite soldiers, such as the right to serve under company officers from their own community. 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, André 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 the 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.29

Cailloux’s funeral in New Orleans later in the month was intended to compensate for this humiliation. One wonders too if it was in some sense understood—at least by the northern press—as a counterpoint to the elaborate ceremonies that had surrounded the burial of Confederate hero Stonewall Jackson, who had died just days before Cailloux was killed. In New Orleans “immense crowds of colored people” made the streets “almost impassable,” the newspapers reported. Benevolent societies lined Esplanade Street for more than a mile. A parade of fellow soldiers and civic society members accompanied the coffin, draped in an American flag and borne by a hearse pulled by a team of fine horses, to St. Louis Cemetery. A Catholic priest, who had been censured and suspended by the Louisiana archbishop because of his antislavery