A Black Patriot and a White Priest

Stephen J. Ochs chronicles the intersecting lives of the first black military Civil War hero, Captain André Cailloux of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and the lone Catholic clerical voice of abolition in New Orleans, the Reverend Claude Paschal Maistre. Their paths converged in July 1863, when Maistre, in defiance of his archbishop, officiated at a large public military funeral for Cailloux, who had perished while courageously leading a doomed charge against the Confederate bastion of Port Hudson. The story of how Cailloux and Maistre arrived at that day and what happened as a consequence provides a prism through which to view the black military experience and the complex interplay of slavery, race, radicalism, and religion during American democracy's most violent upheaval.