The First Louisiana Special Battalion:
The number of Confederate Zouave units was vanishingly small. And of them all, only one has achieved any enduring reputation — the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion, raised in New Orleans in 1861 under the raffish and charismatic Chatham Roberdeau Wheat. Gary Schreckengost’s history of what became known simply as “Wheat’s Tigers” is a well-written account of the five infantry companies which served under Wheat until his death at Gaines’ Mill on June 27, 1862. Strictly speaking, Co. B was the only component of the Special Battalion that called itself “Tigers” and the only ones who actually wore a Zouave-style uniform — brown jackets, red fezzes, and blue-and-cream-striped pantaloons. But hardly anyone ever spoke strictly about Wheat’s battalion, and in short order the entire battalion was known as “Wheat’s Tigers” and popularly assumed to be an all-Zouave unit. Schreckengost begins with the Falstaff-sized Wheat, who began his military career at age 19 as a lieutenant in the Mexican War, then kept his sword sharpened as a mercenary “filibusterer” in Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1850s. The point of these expeditions was the advancement of slavery into Latin America, so when the Civil War broke out, the promotion of slavery led Wheat into Confederate service. The men he recruited were largely the same who had volunteered to serve in his filibustering expeditions. Although their numbers fell short of full regimental strength, Wheat was allowed to organize them as a “battalion” with himself as major. Partly, this exception was because no other regiment seemed eager to have these ruffians. By all accounts, Wheat’s battalion was the off-scouring of the New Orleans dockyards, the brass-knuckle riffraff whom the interrupted traffic on the Mississippi had rendered unemployed in 1861. They and Wheat fought aggressively — if not very wisely — with unsheathed Bowie knives in defending Matthews’ Hill at First Bull Run. Then they were brigaded together with other Louisiana regiments under Richard Taylor and shipped to the Shenandoah to fight under Stonewall Jackson. Next they returned with Jackson to Richmond for the Seven Days’ Battle. After Wheat’s death at Gaines’ Mill, the Special Battalion (now down to only 64 officers and men) was absorbed into the other Louisiana outfits in the Army of Northern Virginia. The name “Tigers” lived on when Harry Hays adopted it for his 1st Louisiana brigade (5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 14th Louisiana). Wheat’s veterans resented this, but they were no more able to hold onto their peculiar nom-de-guerre than the original Pennsylvania Bucktails were to theirs. Schreckengost votes with the veterans, and he closes his brief history with the dissolution of the Special Battalion in August 1862. And for the most part, he has done an admirably thorough job of research as well as narration. There is, all the same, an odd carelessness in his identification of sources: his citation to Alexander Boteler’s SHSP article on Stonewall Jackson misreads Jackson’s offer to “transfer this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna” as “the Potomac to those of the Susquehanna” (p. 119); his citation to Dowdey’s edition of the Lee wartime papers should have been to the Boteler article (p. 199); and one entire block quotation that Schreckengost identifies as the words of Richard Taylor (and cites as such) is actually from Henry Kyd Douglas (p. 167). Despite his thorough attention to detail, Schreckengost still fails to clarify that the Special Battalion was first absorbed into Gaston Coppens’ French-speaking 1st Louisiana Zouave Battalion, and only after Antietam merged with Harry Hays’ 7th Louisiana, and then Hays’ brigade (J.W. Minnich, “Picturesque Soldiery,” Confederate Veteran 31 [August 1923], 295.). By then, these Louisianans had become as much an “orphan brigade” as John Breckinridge’s Kentuckians. It’s time their tale was told, and this book does it well. Reviewer: Allen Guelzo Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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Photographs, maps, bibliographies, appendices, index, 211 pp. 2008, McFarland,