Introduction to the Project Acadians in Gray
As
the song says, I was born on the bayou. Almost. Two
and a half miles from the old wood-framed American Legion Hospital in which I
was born, down a blacktopped road now lined with expensive houses, east of
my hometown of Jennings, flows Bayou Nezpique, a tributary of the Mermentau
River. So, close enough. I am bayou born and bred, a bona fide Louisiana Cajun,
with Acadian ancestry on both my father’s and mother's sides of the family. And that, of course, has
everything to do with why I am pursuing this project.
I
was not always proud of being a Cajun. In my
adolescent years in the 1960s many of my friends were "regular"
Americans whose families had migrated to southwest Louisiana to work in the oil
fields or run businesses connected with that ubiquitous industry. It was uncool
for kids my age with names like Cormier and Fontenot to
listen to and admit that they enjoyed "chanky-chank" music, the waltzes and vigorous
two-steps that our parents and grandparents loved so
much. My grandparents spoke little English, and my parents never bothered to
teach their four children our native tongue. My parents were born in the late
1920s and were the first generation of Cajun children to be subject to Louisiana’s
mandatory school attendance law (1916) and the subsequent law which dictated
that only English could be taught in Louisiana's public schools (1921). My
parents could speak only Cajun French when they entered first
grade at the tender age of six, and they were literally beaten by their teachers into speaking English. My mother remembers those
spankings vividly, and, perhaps more tellingly, my father never did learn to read
and write in either of the two languages he spoke. When I entered first
grade in the mid-1950s, teachers no longer spanked Cajun children for speaking
French in the classroom; at least, I never witnessed such punishment in any of
my classes. But my parents didn’t know that. They consciously,
lovingly chose not to teach us Cajun French and spoke it at home only when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying.
Thus, I required the services of an interpreter, usually my mother, to speak at
length with any of my grandparents or other elderly Cajuns who struggled with
English.
I will never forget,
when I was very young, an insensitive gentleman asked me my name. "Ohhhh," he
grinned, hearing the name "Cormier," "you’re a little coonass."
I had never heard the term before or, more likely, had ignored it, not applying
such a nasty name to myself. But here was an adult, the voice of knowledge and
experience, calling me such a thing. It was as much
the man’s tone of voice as the word itself that told me this was nothing to be
proud of. When I protested to my mother—family name Miller,
pronounced Mee-LUH by her Cajun father—she informed me that I was indeed a coonass and that I should get used to it.
Needless to say, these are not the kinds of youthful
experiences that instill pride in ones unique cultural heritage.01
I became interested in the War of 186106 at an early age,
reading avidly in the Times-Picayune the adventures of Johnny Reb and
Billy Yank. There was never any doubt where my sympathies lay—I was a
Johnny Reb through and through. Damn the Yankees for invading our sacred soil!
Give a piercing Rebel yell, boys, for the good old Stars and Bars! Generals Lee,
Jackson, and Bedford Forrest were living, breathing heroes to me. My friends and
I went downtown to the Morgan and Lindsey store and bought those cheap felt gray
Rebel caps with the Battle Flag glued securely to their crowns and the
anachronistic crossed rifles emblazoned above their visors. We fashioned Enfield
muskets from sticks and boards, and fought for the glorious South with the
fierce determination of our Confederate forebears. I gave no thought then to my
Cajun ancestors of the 1860s—it was nothing to be proud of, remember—but I
knew that the Cajuns were living in Louisiana during those momentous days of
conflict. I just wasn’t sure if any of my people had worn the
Confederate gray. I asked my parents and grandparents, but they had no clue.
For
a long time I wasn’t even sure if the war had been fought in Louisiana west of
New Orleans. My head was full of Shiloh and Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga,
and Appomattox. Bisland and Irish Bend, Mansfield and Pleasant Hill were unknown
to me until my last years of high school. Even then I assumed that my
ancestors, being Cajuns from Carencro and Opelousas, had taken to the
swamps when the Yankees came and avoided a struggle that was not their own.
Though I majored in history in college and read avidly about the war, the myth
of Cajun indifference to the world at large kept its hold on me. Occasionally I
encountered references to "Frenchmen" or "Creoles" in
Confederate units that fought in Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. I don’t
remember seeing any references to "Cajuns" or "Acadians" in
those units. The notion of my own flesh and blood fighting for the Confederacy
held no interest for me—perhaps I was afraid of what I’d learn about my
Cajun ancestors, such is the hold of youthful prejudices on the mind of the
adult—until I got hooked on family genealogy.
That’s when I met my paternal great-grandfather,
Joachim Cormier of Carencro, in the pages of Father Donald Hebert’s Southwest
Louisiana Records. Joachim had two younger brothers, Lasty and Clémile,
and I was puzzled to find no evidence of Lasty’s marriage or offspring, but
such are the vagaries of genealogy. I had settled in Virginia by then, so
access to Louisiana genealogical records was difficult for me. On a visit to my
Louisiana relatives I found a set of Father Hebert’s Records in
my hometown library and spent hours going through it, searching for
ancestors, but back in Virginia I tended to neglect my genealogy research.
About this time I took an after-hours tour of the
Museum of the Confederacy with the Richmond Civil War Roundtable. We were
allowed to see the museum’s wonderful collection of books in the closed stacks
adjacent to the reading room, and, while perusing the shelves for interesting
titles, I noticed a copy of Winchester Hall’s Story of the 26th
Louisiana Infantry. I was amazed to find a Confederate regimental history
written by a participant, and especially a regiment from my native state. I
opened the book to see what I could find there, and what happened next destroyed
in a flash those prejudices I held against my Cajun ancestors and their
role in the Civil War. There on page 155, as plain as day, in the roster of the
26th Infantry’s Company A, were Privates Clémile, Joachim, and
Lasty Cormier—my great-grandfather and his two younger brothers!
On page 97 I
discovered why I had never found a marriage record for Great-uncle Lasty:
"June 5, 1863: Wounded mortally in the head by a shell." He had
died in the trenches at Vicksburg. I shared my joy of discovery with my fellow
Civil Warriors, and soon I was a compatriot in a local camp of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans.
I searched for my own copy of Winchester Hall and was
chagrined to learn that it was a rare, long-out-of-print volume that sold for
hundreds of dollars. Soon, however, a reprint of the book appeared, and I
purchased a copy. I read avidly of the fighting at Chickasaw Bluffs and in the
bloody siege of Vicksburg, battles in which my flesh and blood had fought
the invading Yankees. Company A of the 26th Louisiana Volunteers was
a thoroughly Acadian unit—the Lafayette Prairie Boys, they called themselves.
In their ranks were Moutons and Martins, Bernards, Broussards,
Babineauxs, Brasseauxs, Breauxs, Boudreauxs, Comeauxs,
Dugass, Doucets, Duhons, Duboiss, Guidrys, Landrys,
LeBlancs, Mires, Melançons, Roys, Savoies, Sonniers,
Trahans,
and Thibodeauxs—family names familiar to me back in my native Louisiana, the
surnames, in fact, of some of my own cousins. These Acadians had not run away to
the swamps and prairies when the invader set foot on their sacred soil. These
Acadians—Lasty Cormier and Martin Thibodeaux, Charles Bergeron, Melville
Naquin, Théodule Babin, Clitus Boudreaux, Adelin Hebert, and many others—had
sacrificed their lives for the cause they cherished: Southern independence.
They had worn the gray and butternut, by God, and had fought and died
for Louisiana and the Southern Confederacy. I hoped that someday someone would tell the story of every
Acadian unit that fought for the South.
Fate, for what reason I cannot say, has handed that
task to me.
METHODOLOGY and SCOPE
I
must first explain why I call this project Acadians in Gray.
The terms "Acadian" and "Cajun"
are often used interchangeably, but they are not exactly the same people. The
Acadians are the people who lived in the French colony of Acadie,
later British Nova Scotia, from the 1630s until they were forced from their
homes by their British overlords in the 1750s. Many of them returned to old
Acadia after the French and Indian War. Most did not. The Acadian exiles who
made their way to Louisiana a decade after the dispersal and settled on the
Mississippi River above New Orleans, along Bayous Teche and Lafourche and on the
southwest Louisiana prairies, by necessity had to assimilate to a very different
environment, both natural and human. These Acadians inevitably intermarried with
French Creole, German, Spanish, Irish, Native American,
African, Foreign French, and
even Anglo families already in the
area or who arrived in the region in subsequent decades. It is this rich
gumbo of assimilated peoples who became the Cajuns of South Louisiana.
Some
might say that this
project should be entitled Cajuns in Gray. Studies by Glen Conrad, Carl Brasseaux, and James Dormon
reveal that by the 1860s the descendants of the Acadian exiles were
thoroughly assimilated into a new culture of their own making in the
prairies and bayous of South Louisiana--today's Cajun culture.
However, standard dictionaries reveal that the word "Cajun" did not appear
in print until 1868, three years after Appomattox. The use of the word
"Cajun" in the context of the War of 1861 thus would be anachronistic.
The Cajuns existed as a culture in 1861; they were just not called that, at
least not in print, until after the war was over.02
Hence
the title Acadians in Gray.
The
use of this term is more than an accommodation to euphony and historical
accuracy, however. I have
used Acadian family names as the basis by which to determine which Confederate
units contained a significant number of Cajuns. As the Acadians were the
progenitors of the Cajun culture, so here they are the major determinants of what was
or what was not a significantly Cajun unit in the armies of the Confederacy.
It
stands to reason that where there was a significant number of
"Acadians" in a military company, there was a significant number of
"Cajuns."
From Bona
Arsenault’s monumental five-volume
genealogy of the Acadians, I compiled a list of families who were exiled from
Nova Scotia and who settled in Louisiana. Works by Stephen A. White, Robert C. West,
Albert J. Robichaux, Jr., and Timothy
Hebert supplemented and clarified what I found in Arsenault. I then combed
Andrew B. Booth’s three-volume Records of Louisiana Confederate Soldiers
and Louisiana Confederate Commands, as well as the index to the Compiled
Service Records of Confederate soldiers in the National Archives, Napier Bartlett’s
Military Record of Louisiana, and other sources that contain rosters of
Confederate units from Louisiana, and noted those Acadian surnames that appeared
therein.
Using these names—100 of them—I compiled a list of Confederate units that
contained a significant number of these Acadians, and it is these units that
form the basis of this study.
To make certain that no significantly Cajun unit went undetected, I chose
additional families who are not
Acadian in origin but who intermarried with the Acadians before the war and added them to
my list of families ... over 700 surnames so far.03
By
a significantly Cajun unit I mean that if there were at least 25 individuals with Acadian/Cajun surnames
from my list who at any time were assigned to a
company or battery, that unit made the roster of Acadians in Gray.04
A total of 129 companies and batteries, 10 battalions, and 32 regiments, including a cavalry battalion from Texas, have made the list of
significantly Cajun
units. The inclusion on this list of a regiment of free blacks from New Orleans, the
1st Native Guards, attests to the racial as well as cultural diversity of the Cajuns of
Louisiana. A close
study of Arthur Bergeron’s Guide to Louisiana Confederate Units
reveals that these units fought in every major theater of the War: the East,
the West, and the Trans-Mississippi. Thus, the scope of this study, like the
bayou on which I was born, runs deep and wide—almost the entire expanse, in
both time and space, of this nation’s bloodiest, most significant conflict.
In conclusion, I must beseech my Cajun cousins et
cousines to approach this project with an open mind as well as a joyous
heart. I make no special claims for our people in my study of their role in the
War of 1861. There were heroes and scoundrels among them no more and no
less than among other ethnic groups who fought on either side in the war. I am
determined to tell their story warts and all, dire la verité. If I anger
any of my fellow Cajuns by exposing an ancestor’s less-than-heroic war record,
I am truly sorry for that. I can only say that I am an historian, not a cultural
apologist, that what I reveal here is what the historical record has revealed to
me. I will not, as our Cajun ancestors would scoff, chanter des midi a
quatorze heures!05
[To
Progress Report & General Information]
