Andre Cailloux

Andre Cailloux (1825 – May 27, 1863) was one of the first black officers in the Union Army to be killed in combat during the American Civil War. He died heroically during the unsuccessful first attack on the Confederate fortifications during the Siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana. Accounts of his heroism were widely reported in the press, and became a rallying cry for the recruitment of African Americans into the Union Army.

His reputation as a patriot and martyr long outlived him. In an 1890 collection of interviews, Civil War veteran Colonel Douglass Wilson said, "If ever patriotic heroism deserved to be honored in stately marble or in brass that of Captain Caillioux deserves to be, and the American people will have never redeemed their gratitude to genuine patriotism until that debt is paid."

Born a mixed-race slave in Louisiana in 1825, Cailloux lived his entire life in and around New Orleans. As a young man, Cailloux had been apprenticed in the cigar-making trade. He was owned by members of the Duvernay family until 1846, when his petition for manumission, which was supported by his master, was granted by an all-white police jury in the city of New Orleans.

In 1847, Cailloux married Félicie Coulon, a free Creole of color, who also had been born into slavery, but freed when her mother paid her purchase price. Cailloux and Coulon had four children born free, three of whom survived to adulthood.

Félicie's mother Feliciana had been an enslaved mulatto woman. She had participated in the local plaçage system as the common-law wife of a white planter, Valentin Encalada, for several years. Although Félicie was not Encalada’s daughter, she was born into slavery because of her mother's status and was his "property" as the child of her mother. (This was according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem in slave law.) Feliciana bought her daughter's freedom from Encalada in 1842.

...
Wikipedia