Secession On January 8, 1861, Louisiana Governor
Thomas Overton Moore ordered the Louisiana militia to occupy the
U.S. arsenal at
Baton Rouge and the U.S. forts guarding New Orleans, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip. A wealthy
planter and
slave holder, Moore acted aggressively to engineer the secession of Louisiana from the Union by a convention on January 23. Only five percent of the public were represented in the convention, and the state's military actions were ordered before secession had been established—in defiance of the state constitution, which called for a popular referendum to establish a convention. Moore attempted to justify these actions, saying: "I do not think it comports with the honor and self-respect of Louisiana as a slave-holding state to live under the government of a Black Republican president", using an epithet for Republicans used by many Democrats at the time. The strategies advanced to defend Louisiana and the other
Gulf states of the Confederacy were first, the idea of
King Cotton; that an unofficial embargo of cotton to Europe would force Britain to use its navy to intervene in protecting the new
Confederacy. The second was a
privateer fleet established by the issue of letters of
marque and reprisal by President
Jefferson Davis, which would sweep the sea clear of U.S. naval and commercial ships, and at the same time sustain Louisiana's booming
port economy. The third was a reliance on the ring of pre-war masonry forts of the
Third System of American coastal defense, combined with a fleet of revolutionary new
ironclads, to safeguard the
mouth of the
Mississippi from the U.S. Navy. All of these strategies were failures. In March 1861, George Williamson, the Louisianan state commissioner, addressed the Texan secession convention, where he called upon the slave states of the U.S. to declare secession from the Union in order to continue practicing slavery: One Louisianan artillery soldier gave his reasons for fighting for the Confederacy, stating that "I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free niggers ... now to suit me, let alone having four millions."
Union plans ,
Department of the Gulf Map No. 5, February 14, 1863. The Union's response to Moore's leveraged secession was embodied in U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln's realization that the
Mississippi River was the "backbone of the Rebellion." If control of the river were accomplished, the largest city in the Confederacy would be taken back for the
Union, and the Confederacy would be split in half. Lincoln moved rapidly to back Admiral
David Dixon Porter's idea of a naval advance up the river to both capture New Orleans and maintain Lincoln's political support; by supplying cotton to northern textile manufacturers and renewing trade and exports from the port of New Orleans. The U.S. Navy would become both a formidable invasion force and a means of transporting Union forces, along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. This strategic vision would prove victorious in Louisiana. ==Notable Civil War leaders from Louisiana==