Louisiana Tigers - The Original Louisiana Tigers

The Original Louisiana Tigers

The origin of the term came from the "Tiger Rifles," a volunteer company raised in the New Orleans area as part of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat's 1st Special Battalion, Louisiana Volunteer Infantry (2nd Louisiana Battalion). A large number of the men were foreign-born, particularly Irish Americans, many from the city's wharves and docks. Many men had previous military experience in local militia units or as filibusters. They (and the regiments that later became known as the Tigers) were organized and trained at Camp Moore.

Originally, Company B of Wheat's Tigers wore distinctive uniforms similar to the French zouave, with straw hats or red cloth fezzes, blue-striped chasseur-style pantaloons, and short dark blue jackets with red lacing. The Tiger Zouaves apparently wore the fezzes in camp and straw hats while in the field. As time went on, this garb was replaced by Confederate uniforms and what clothing the men could purchase or otherwise obtain from civilians. Within months of arriving in Northern Virginia, Wheat's entire five-company battalion began to be called the Louisiana Tigers.

Excerpts from Schreckengost, Gary: The 1st Louisiana Battalion: Wheat's Tigers in the Civil War (McFarland, 2008): Soon after Louisiana seceded from the United States and joined the Southern Confederacy, Roberdeau Wheat, commander of the battalion, returned to New Orleans from the battlefields of Italy with the intent to raise a company and then a full regiment for Confederate service. And once he proved his mettle in battle, he’d no doubt gain a brigadier’s star. As such, on April 18, 1861, just a few days after U.S. Fort Sumter was attacked by Confederate forces in an expression of their sovereign rights, the New Orleans Daily Crescent carried the following announcement:"We understand that our friend, Gen. C.R. Wheat, is about to raise a company of volunteers, to serve in the Army of Louisiana. His headquarters are on 64 Charles, where we advise all friends of a glorious cause to repair and enlist."

Wheat called his company the Old Dominion Guards to commemorate his native state’s recent secession from the United States and adjunction with the Southern Confederacy. With the help of Obedia Plummer Miller, a well-established New Orleans attorney, former insurance salesman, and Nicaraguan veteran, Wheat quickly recruited fifty or so men to his company, mostly expatriate Virginians, men like Henry S. Carey, a relative of Thomas Jefferson’s, Richard Dickinson, who would become Wheat’s adjutant, and Bruce Putnam, a towering man who became Wheat’s intimidating sergeant major. While Miller, Carey, Dickinson, and Putnam continued recruiting for the Guards, Wheat was able to attract four already-forming companies to his banner—Captain Robert Harris’s Walker Guards, Captain Alexander White’s Tiger Rifles, Captain Henry Clay Gardner’s Delta Rangers, and Captain Harry Chaffin’s Rough and Ready Rangers—which were assembling a few blocks away at Camp Davis on the grounds of the “Old Marine Hospital/ Insane Asylum/Iron Works” between Common and Gravier Streets at South Broad (today’s Camp) Street. Many of the men of these precocious units, unlike those from the more upscale Old Dominion Guards, were former filibusters who had served with Wheat or Walker in Nicaragua. Since the late campaigns, they had slipped back into their old jobs as shiphands, stokers, dock workers, watermen, draymen, screwmen, stevedores, or simple laborers on the New Orleans waterfront. As such, they were considered as being the lowest members of white Southern society. One disgusted observer proclaimed that many of Wheat’s recruits were “the lowest scum of the lower Mississippi...adventurous wharf rats, thieves, and outcasts...and bad characters generally.”

When work was available, these men, mostly recent Irish immigrants, were often relegated to do the most dangerous of tasks, such as servicing decrepit steam engines on Mississippi River packets or digging canals or drainage ditches in the fetid swamps of the lower Mississippi because slaves were too valuable to lose. “The Niggers are worth too much to be risked,” recounted one calculating steamboat pilot. “If the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke nobody loses anything.” Another boat pilot explained that the reason why slaves were not used as stokers on the aged packets was because “every time a boiler bursts would lose so many dollars’ worth of slaves; whereas by getting Irishmen at a dollar-a-day they pay for the article as they get it, and if it’s blown up, they get another.”

In this social hierarchy, Irish laborers, stevedores, and dock workers were at the very bottom. Immediately above them were the ship hands, watermen, and stokers, followed by the draymen who hauled bales of cotton or barrels of sugar, molasses, pork, or flour from the Mississippi docks to the numerous warehouses of New Orleans. Because screwmen were skilled laborers, they received higher wages than stevedores or ship hands and were considered to be at the top of societal ladder. Working in gangs of five, many of them exclusively Irish, the screwmen went into the holds of the cotton ships where they used large jackscrews to compress the bales into the smallest possible size. This was a dangerous way of earning a living, for in the cramped quarters below deck a screwman had little space to dodge a wayward bale. Broken limbs were common and occasionally a heavy bale crushed the life out of a worker.

The Walker Guards were raised under the auspices of Robert Harris, one of Wheat’s former comrades in the Filibuster Wars, who was in his mid-twenties. As the name denotes, many of Harris’s recruits had “smelt powder…saw the elephant… felt bullets” in Nicaragua. Since the late war, Harris reportedly became the operator of a bawdy gambling establishment along the waterfront. The Tiger Rifles, the Delta Rangers, and the Rough and Ready Rangers, however, Wheat’s other cohorts, made no special claim to fame. All that is known about them, other than the fact that they were largely Irish ship hands, dock workers, stevedores, or draymen, is that the commander of the Rangers, Henry Gardner, was a twenty-year-old medical student who had signed a petition which called on the governor of Louisiana to convene a secession convention and declared that the intrepid commander of the Tiger Rifles, Alexander White, was a known felon and river pilot.

Similar to William Walker in stature, the fiery “White,” if that was his real name, was reportedly “the son of a one-time Southern governor,” supposedly from Kentucky. During a game of high-stakes poker in his youth, White claimed that he had shot a man who accused him of cheating. Through the influence of his supposed family, he was able to escape prosecution as long as he left the state and went underground. Fleeing to New Orleans, the vast Southern metropolis where it was easy to get lost, White most probably gambled, conned, and boozed his way through life until the War with Mexico when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy to pilot men and material down to Corpus Christi, Tampico, or Vera Cruz. After his five-year enlistment was up, he settled down, got married, and became the captain of the steamer Magnolia, which hauled goods between New Orleans and Vicksburg. During this time White once again lost his temper, severely pistol-whipped a passenger on his steamer, was arrested and convicted, and as a result, ended up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Baton Rouge. By March 1861, with Louisiana’s secession and the subsequent U.S. blockade, White began to form a company of volunteers around his crew and was even able to rent prime space for a recruiting station at 29 Front Levee, between Gravier and Poydras streets, near the Custom House and Camp Davis.

Wheat, using his gentlemanly appeal, was apparently able to talk Harris, White, Gardner, and Chaffin into forming a battalion under his command with the assurance that all involved would better be able to control their destinies if they acted as one. And with Wheat’s eminent stature as a Mexican War veteran, a Southern partisan, a former assemblyman, and a general officer in two foreign armies, they would no doubt get the choice assignments and equipment. As such, on April 23, 1861, the Daily Crescent carried the following announcement: "Gen. C.R. Wheat, with reference to raising a battalion, invites such of our friends and citizens generally, as feel an interest in the cause, to call at No. 29 Front Levee Street, where they will find the material for the first battalion of the States, and one that will make its mark when called upon."