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MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
Confederate General John C. Pemberton stripped che Mississippi Gulf Coast of supplies and the last of its troops in late 1862 in order to garrison Fortress Vicksburg. Courtesy, Confederate Museum, Richmond
few weeks later Steede received orders to do just that. In an October 29 letter of protest to Pemberton, Steede asserted that his troops, then numbering 640 men,
needed to protect their own hnmpx-fmm the minions of Beast Butler and his black allies, for this very day I am informed that ... the negroe regiments enlisted at New Orleans are to be stationed on Ship Island and to make descents on the Sea Coast of Mississippi.
Steede’s information was remarkably correct. The Second Regiment Louisiana Infantry Native Guards, a black regiment formed in September and October, was to be sent to Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island and to Fort Pike on the Rigolets.
Pemberton sent an officer to the coast in November to investigate the situation. In his communique the officer praised Steede’s Rangers and exposed Claiborne as a spy. He further reported that the white inhabitants were going over to the federal lines for food in droves and that several hundred slaves had gathered on Cat Island and were engaged in making charcoal and turpentine for the enemy. He advised an immediate attack on Cat Island to retrieve the slaves and the retention of Steede's men in the area to harass the enemy and prevent their taking the large herds of cattle and sheep in the piney woods.
Pemberton ordered Steede’s Rangers to leave the coast and join his army. Half obeyed, and the other half disbanded to stay behind and protect their families. When he heard about Pemberton’s order, Alfred E. Lewis, owner of Oldfields Plantation in West Pascagoula, wrote Pettus: “There is nothing here now to prevent ten well armed Yankees to roam fifty miles in the interior, for there is not one old man in ten that has a gun load of powder.”
Hired artisans, aided by escaped slaves, had greatly advanced the brickworks of the fort on Ship Island by December 31. That night the commandant confided in his diary:
.. .the darkeys had a New Years and Emancipation Ball in the dining, hall of the Fort workmen. They had a gay old time of it. Most of the Captains of the fleet were present and I went in with them. I was some what afraid of a disturbance but everything went off quietly.
At the stroke of midnight January 1, 1863, those “darkeys” and all the others in the states still at war with the Union achieved freedom by the terms of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Nine days later elements of the Second Regiment Louisiana Infantry Native Guards under the command of white officers left New Orleans to occupy Fort Pike and Ship Island.
Since Ship Island was being used as a political prison by the Federal authorities in New Orleans, some of the black troops became guards while the rest continued construction work on the fortifications. Three months later their bored commander, Colonel Nathan Daniels, decided to liven things up with a raid on East Pascagoula.
Daniels loaded 200 black troops aboard the steamer General Banks, formerly the Creole, and sallied forth accompanied by a gunboat escort. At 11:30 a.m. on April 9 the troops landed on the town wharf and immediately seized the hotel, raising the Stars and Stripes above its cupola.