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Jim Bradshaw

C’est Vrai: The bravest man that ever lived?

“The bravest man that ever lived.” That’s how Gen. Richard Taylor described Confederate gunboat captain Emelius Woods Fuller, who fought in south Louisiana.
The praise may have been deserved. According to one account, when Fuller was “shot through both arms, the purple tide of life gushing from his wounds” while fighting his single gunboat against four federal boats, “he stood like granite at his post,” steering his boat to safety with his feet.
Fuller was an Ohio native who moved as a young man to south Louisiana, where he built a plantation at Chicot Pass in the Atchafalaya Basin. During the summer of 1862, he and a ragtag band seized a decrepit towboat, armed it with three old guns, and harassed federal boats on the Mississippi River near New Orleans.
They were annoying enough to force a major expedition in October 1862 to clear Confederates from south Louisiana. Five thousand Union soldiers advanced on Donaldsonville, where about 850 Confederates made a cursory stand before scrambling down the bayou toward Brashear City (Morgan City).
As the Confederates retreated, four federal gunboats—the Kinsman, Estrella, Calhoun, and Diana—steamed west to trap the little army at Berwick Bay. Fuller rushed home ahead of them.
Fortunately for Gen. Alfred Mouton, a gale delayed the federal boats just long enough for his troops to get across the bay and regroup near the mouth of Bayou Teche, where he hoped to get help from three Confederate boats under Fuller’s command.
Fuller was aboard the J.A. Cotton and challenged the Federal gunboats as soon as they appeared in Berwick Bay. Then, backing slowly up the Atchafalaya and into the Teche, Fuller kept his bow guns facing any boat that might follow. None did.
Mouton pulled back to a spot near the Cornay plantation, between Brashear City and Franklin, where the bayou was so narrow that the federal gunboats had to approach in single file, which helped the defenders.
The remains of Cornay’s Bridge, which the New York Times described as “nothing but the piles . . . protruding from about three or four feet of water” stretched across the stream at this point and Mouton scuttled two old boats next to the bridge pilings to block the bayou.
Fuller parked the Cotton behind the obstructions and waited. Union Commander Thomas Buchanan sent his four boats up the bayou on Monday afternoon, Nov. 3, their 27 guns pouring steady fire into the Cotton, which was armed with three guns.
The Cotton and an artillery battery on the shore sent the Union boats packing. Fuller reported, “the four federal boats … came up in full confidence of overpowering numbers, giving us broadside after broadside. … The shot and shell literally rained on and about our boat.”
The federal Kinsman was struck 54 times; the other Union boats received lesser damage. Buchanan did not try to come up the Teche again until January, when, once again, the pesky Cotton was the main obstacle.
This time, as federal boats began pounding away at the Cotton, sharpshooters raked the boat with steady rifle fire from both sides of the bayou and from the rear. Undismayed, Fuller blasted away at the enemy.
“The cannonading on both sides was terrific,” according to Franklin’s Planters’ Banner. “Its continuous roar for hours was heard all over the parish. The shattered cypress and live oaks … show the power of cannon balls. … [Rifle balls] flew like hailstones around [Fuller’s] head and body … and he was fortunate to have escaped with three wounds in his arms, two of them very severe.”
The wounded Fuller went home to his plantation to recuperate, recovering enough by the spring of 1863 to take command of Queen of the West, a Union boat that had been captured amid much fanfare on the Mississippi.
On April 14, 1863, the Union gunboats Estrella, Arizona, and Calhoun were anchored in Grand Lake, between New Orleans and Brashear City, when lookouts spotted smoke from a small flotilla led by Fuller and the Queen The exchange of cannon fire had just begun when the Queen was set afire by what some considered a lucky shot from the Arizona.
Fuller was pulled from the water and taken to a hospital in New Orleans, from which he wrote to his wife, “My left foot and ankle was badly injured. . . . My right arm was also fractured at the place where it was broken [during the January battle on the Teche].”
Fuller was in failing health in early June when he and other Confederate officers were put aboard the Maple Leaf to be taken to prison. It’s not clear exactly what happened as the ship steamed off the Virginia shore. According to one history, Fuller, though bedridden, led a plot to overpower the Union guards.
Then, while 70 Confederate officers piled into small boats and escaped, he and several other sick and wounded remained aboard.
He was one of the prisoners who reached Fort Delaware, so feeble he had to be carried from the boat to the prison. He died July 25, 1863, and was buried in the Johnson’s Island Confederate Prisoner Cemetery.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.

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