During the Vicksburg campaign in Louisiana, Winter Quarters, the home of Haller and Julia Nutt along Lake Saint Joseph, survived because the Union-sympathizing Nutts offered hospitality to Union soldiers and received letters of protection from Ulysses S. Grant, though later Union stragglers destroyed many of its outbuildings. At Milliken's Bend, after the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 led to the formation of the United States Colored Troops, poorly trained and poorly armed black soldiers of the African Brigade defended the Union supply depot against a Confederate attack in hand-to-hand combat, helping free white troops for the siege of Vicksburg. In June 1862, Union troops under Brigadier General Thomas Williams began digging a canal across the base of De Soto Point opposite Vicksburg to bypass Confederate batteries, but sickness, heat, and the river forced a withdrawal; when Major General Ulysses S. Grant resumed the effort in January 1863, heavy rains and floodwaters again defeated the project, and rising deaths led him to abandon it for other strategies to capture Vicksburg and control the Mississippi River. Under wartime occupation, civilians endured shortages and simpler living, while Governor Thomas Overton Moore urged Louisianans to burn cotton crops rather than let this valuable commodity fall into Union hands, making crop destruction an act of loyalty to the Confederacy. The Louisiana Monument in Vicksburg National Military Park, an eighty-one-foot Doric column topped by a granite brazier with an eternal flame, was begun on July 10, 1919, dedicated on October 18, 1920, and later transferred by Governor John M. Parker to the federal government.
