The battle which settled for all time the bravery of black troops, and ought as well to silence all question about the capacity of colored officers, was the storming of Port Hudson, May 27, 1863.  For months the Confederates had had uninterrupted opportunity to strengthen their works at Port Hudson at a time when an abundance of slave labor was at their disposal.  They had constructed defenses of remarkable strength.  On a bluff, eighty feet above the river, was a series of batteries mounting in all twenty siege guns.  For land defenses they had a continuous line of parapet of strong profile, beginning at a point on the river a mile from Port Hudson and extending in a semi-circle for three or four miles over a country for the most part rough and broken, and ending again at the river, a half mile north of Port Hudson.  At appropriate positions along this line four bastion works were constructed and thirty pieces of field artillery were posted.  The average thickness of the parapet was twenty feet, and the depth of the ditch below the top of the parapet was fifteen feet.  The ground behind the parapet was well adapted for the prompt movement of troops.[34]

On the 24th of May General Banks reached the immediate vicinity of Port Hudson, and proceeded at once to invest the place.

On the 27th the assault was ordered.  Two colored regiments of Louisiana Native Guards, the First Regiment with all line officers colored, and the Third with white officers throughout, were put under command of Colonel John A. Nelson, of the Third Regiment, and assigned to position on the right of the line, where the assault was begun.  The right began the assault in the morning; for some reason the left did not assault until late in the afternoon.  Six companies of the First Louisiana and nine companies of the Third, in all 1080 men, were formed in column of attack.  Even now, one cannot contemplate unmoved the desperate valor of these black troops and the terrible slaughter among them as they were sent to their impossible task that day in May.  Moving forward in double quick time the column emerged from the woods, and passing over the plain strewn with felled trees and entangled brushwood, plunged into a fury of shot and shell as they charged for the batteries on the rebel left.  Again and again that unsupported column of black troops held to their hopeless mission by the unrelenting order of the brigade commander, hurled itself literally into the jaws of death, many meeting horrible destruction actually at the cannon’s mouth.

It was a day prodigal with deeds of fanatical bravery.  The colors of the First Louisiana, torn and shivered in that fearful hail of fire, were still borne forward in front of the works by the color-sergeant, until a shell from the enemy cut the flag in two and gave the sergeant his mortal wound.  He fell spattering the flag with blood and brains and hugged it to his bosom as he lay in the grasp of death.  Two corporals sprang forward to seize the colors, contending in generous rivalry until a rebel sharpshooter felled one of them across the sergeant’s lifeless body.  The other dashed proudly forward with the flag.  Sixteen men fell that day defending the colors.