American Civil War
The United States Army occupied the Baton Rouge Barracks and Arsenal until January 1861, when the State of Louisiana seized the post and turned the operation of the arsenal over to the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy held Baton Rouge until its evacuation during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862. Union troops retook and reoccupied the Baton Rouge complex in May 1862.
The Confederates attempted unsuccessfully to retake Baton Rouge Battle of Baton Rouge (1862) (in August 1862). Union forces renamed the Pentagon Barracks and Baton Rouge Arsenal as Fort Williams after Union General Thomas Williams, killed in the battle. Union soldiers built earthworks to protect the complex, incorporating an old Indian mound into the defenses.
Read more about this topic: Pentagon Barracks
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, american, civil and/or war:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elderstalk squirts, charged with rose water?”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)