Battle of Richmond, Louisiana

In the early summer of eighteen sixty-three, while Grant's army tightened its stranglehold on Vicksburg thirty miles to the east, the Trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War was alive with Confederate effort to break the siege by striking Union supply lines in Louisiana's river bottoms.

The small town of Richmond, Louisiana, not far from where you are now, was the site of one of those attempts. Confederate General John G. Walker commanded the division known as Walker's Greyhounds, aggressive Texas infantry who had already struck Union positions at Milliken's Bend and Lake Providence earlier that month, trying to cut the lifeline feeding Grant's army.

On June fifteenth, eighteen sixty-three, Walker moved against Richmond, where Union forces under General Joseph Mower held a strong position. Walker brought somewhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand men; Mower had around twenty-five hundred. What followed was largely an artillery exchange, both sides trading cannon fire across the bottomland.

Mower sent most of his brigade around to the right, but the bayou proved impassable. Walker, satisfied his wagons and ambulances were safe, withdrew across Roundaway Bayou, burning the bridge behind him, and abandoned Richmond. The Union controlled the field.

The strategic significance was real. Every Confederate supply line and relief corridor that Grant's army cut or defeated in these weeks around Louisiana made the Vicksburg garrison a little more isolated and a little more desperate. The Battle of Richmond was one more link in that chain of isolation, a small fight in a forgotten corner of the war, but part of the relentless strategic pressure that forced Pemberton's surrender three weeks later on July fourth.

The town of Richmond itself is gone today, absorbed into the surrounding farmland, leaving little trace of the day two armies argued over its possession in the Louisiana summer heat. For the families who lived along these river bottoms, the war was never abstract. It was smoke and cannon fire, Confederate soldiers passing through, Union troops camping on the fields, and a grinding uncertainty about whose army would come next and what they would take.