House in Bossier Parish, Louisiana was "the birthplace of secession" in 1860

ROCKY MOUNT, La. (KTAL/KMSS)—I was two years old when my grandparents joined a little country church in Bossier Parish. If that hadn’t happened, I might not have learned that Rocky Mount, Louisiana, was the birthplace of Southern secession.

Today, Rocky Mount, Louisiana, is a tiny unincorporated community between Benton and Plain Dealing. But when I was a child, it was on its way to becoming a historic destination.

“Don’t ever forget this history,” Brother Gene Ingram, our pastor, told me one Sunday afternoon when I was a child. We were standing in the open-air hallway of an old house in the woods near New Bethel Baptist Church. At the time, the old house was known as “the birthplace of secession.” But I was much too young to understand what the term secession actually meant.

Years later, I went to check on the old house and found that it was no longer in the woods.

The old dogtrot house hadn't caved in on itself. It was just gone. And it took me several years to find out what happened to the old house.

Here is the old home's controversial story.

Hughes House history

Alex Hughes built the “Hughes House” in Rocky Mount, Louisiana, in the 1840s. During the Civil War, he rented the dogtrot house to his nephew, and after the war, Confederate Captain William J. Hughes bought the house from his uncle.

The Hughes family continued to live there until 1888.

But Hughes House wasn’t meant to be a house. It was actually the overseer’s office at Hughes Plantation.

Hughes House was first reclaimed from the woods in the 1960s, but after it was restored in Rocky Mount and turned into a museum, people began breaking into it to steal antiques.

As years passed, the old house, restored only a decade before, became overgrown by the woods and was in danger of becoming lost history.  

In 1972, Hughes House was donated to the Bossier Restoration Foundation, Inc. But without funds to move and restore the home, the Bossier Restoration Foundation could do little more than let the old house sit in the woods for decades.

That's when I saw the old house. I was young, and I thought it was a million years old. I had no way of knowing that it had been restored only a decade before.

Hughes House was moved to Benton in 1995. Now, it is fully restored again and sits in downtown Benton with other buildings that have also been moved from Rocky Mount, including an original 1-room schoolhouse and a log cabin.

When I visited the old house when I was a little girl, I vowed never to forget the history of the Hughes House. But as I grew older, I realized what had happened in the old house.

The birthplace of secession

Christine Tucci leads historical tours at the Hughes House, which now sits in downtown Benton at Heritage Village.

“There’s no fireplace in this room because they didn’t want them getting comfortable,” she said as we entered the parlor where plantation owners from Northwest Louisiana once voted to secede from the Union.

On a recent tour of Hughes House, Tucci explained that men gathered at the house to secede because they had just learned Abraham Lincoln had been elected president and couldn’t stand it. The prominent plantation owners could not imagine living in a country where Lincoln was in charge, so they decided to do something drastic.

Here's what they did.

The Free State of Bossier

“On this day, the 26^th of November, 1860, the following resolution was offered and accepted. Whereas we are in the midst of a revolution, and as it is necessary for the honor of the State of Louisiana and the protection of the interests of her citizens to form military companies, we, the undersigned, do hereby form ourselves into a Military Minutes Rifle Company to be called the Minute men of Bossier Parish and adopt the following resolution, viz; That we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, to sustain the rights of the State of Louisiana against the aggressions of the Black Republicans. On motion, it was resolved that we meet at Rocky Mount for final organization on the 5th of December at eleven o’clock a.m. and that the proceedings of this meeting be published in the Caddo Gazette and the Bossier Banner. – Messr. John W. Rabb, chair; Messr. W. T. Crawford, secretary”

The group also declared the newly seceded land was to be called the Free State of Bossier.

What’s ironic about the Free State of Bossier is that during the 1850s and 60s, a ‘free state’ referred to a state that did not allow slavery.

Such was not the purpose of naming Bossier a free state in 1860. 

Was the “Free State of Bossier” the first secession in the South?

Nov. 26, 1860, when the Free State of Bossier was formed, is an incredibly early secession date—especially when we consider the first state to secede from the Union didn’t do so until almost a month later, on Dec. 20, 1860.

J. P. Benjamin of Louisiana delivered a speech in the U.S. Senate on the right of secession on Dec. 31. The state of Mississippi seceded on Jan. 9, 1861. Florida seceded the next day, and Alabama the day after. Georgia and Louisiana would leave the Union before the end of the month, and Texas left on Feb. 1. On the 4th of February, the Confederate States of America were created. By June, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee joined the Confederacy, too.

But despite how things might appear when we look backwards at history, the state of Louisiana wasn’t expected to secede. The truth about how close the vote was for staying with the Union wasn’t even published until decades after the Civil War.

That’s why the secession at Hughes House is so ironic.

The vote for Louisiana's secession

Louisiana’s secession wasn’t a given in 1860. The biggest city in the South was New Orleans, and she was a port city with strong ties to the North. Ships came in and out of New Orleans on their way to and from eastern ports, and many northern businessmen were influential in the Crescent City. The Irish and Germans in New Orleans were mostly abolitionists, and farmers in the northern part of the state and in the southern hill country were often Unionists.

But in the parishes along the Red and Mississippi Rivers, secessionists were numerous. Plantation owners had control of the land, the crops, the money, and the vast majority of people enslaved in Louisiana.

Those plantation owners, however, were not the majority vote. When Louisiana Governor Wiliam H. Gist was asked, in Oct. 1860, whether Louisiana would side with the Union or secede, the Governor said, “I shall not advise the secession of my state, and I will add that I do not think the people of Louisiana ill ultimately decide in favor of that course.”

An election held by parish delegates on Jan. 7, 1861, less than two months after Rocky Mount's secession, resulted in a secessionist victory. However, the secessionist vote was in doubt for decades until records of the vote were formally published in JSTOR in 1970.

And no, that’s not a typo. The results were published in nineteen-seventy, not eighteen-seventy. 

And unlike our ancestors who lived in Louisiana in the 1800s, we now know the results of the secession vote.

In Jan. 1861, as Louisiana’s all-white male citizens were voting to decide whether Louisiana would turn toward or against the Union, there were four different types of delegates: secessionists, cooperationists, conditional unionists, and unconditional unionists.

The secessionists wanted to secede from the Union no matter what, and the unconditional Unionists wanted to stay with the Union no matter what. The situation was like the husband dead-set on getting a divorce and the wife who is still giving their marriage everything she’s got.

The cooperationists, however, were kind of loosey-goosey about leaving the Union. They favored leaving the Union if there was a united Southern action. The conditional Unionists were akin to the cooperationists. Only the conditional Unionists were actually trying to stop a secessionist victory in the election. 

It's important to note that in the presidential election in November 1860, only a few months before Louisiana’s secession, the Southern Democrat (John C. Breckinridge) received 22681 votes in Louisiana.

Southern Democrats in Louisiana were notoriously pro-slavery.

But get this—the Constitutional Union candidate received 20,204 votes in Louisiana, and the northern Democratic party got 7,625 votes.

Had Louisiana Unionists not been divided on whether to vote for the Constitutional Union Candidate or the Northern Democratic Party candidate, Louisiana Unionists would have won the Governor’s office.

And even today, divisions within political parties can still cost physical majorities from winning elections.

Louisiana secession numbers

The vote for secession in late 1860 was also a mess. In Bossier Parish, 407 voted for secession, while 379 voted against it. In Claiborne Parish, 658 voted for secession, while 896 voted to remain with the Union. Caddo Parish had 751 votes for secession and 123 votes for the Union. Desoto Parish had 666 votes for secession and 50 votes for the Union.

Ultimately, the votes for secession cast by citizens throughout the state of Louisiana totaled 20,602, while 18,748 voters opted to stay with the Union.

By February, a month after the election, the actual returns from each parish had not been published. Citizens called for the convention to publish the results, and the secessionists voted not to disclose the figures.

Even the Picayune suspected the “secessionist majority” in the convention was trying to hide something.

The truth about Louisiana's secession

The election returns remained with Louisiana authorities until the Civil War ended. Then, in 1865, federal troops seized many records and shipped them to the War Department. The War Department sent the returns to the National Archives, which returned them to Louisiana in 1961—smack in the middle of the Civil Rights movement when many Louisiana politicians were trying to keep segregation in place.

It wasn’t until 1970, a full 110 years after the original statewide secession election, that the results of the vote were finally published.

We know that 47% of Louisiana voters wanted to stay with the Union, and 53% wanted to secede. The number of secessionists who were delegates at the convention was not representative of the number of secessionists in Louisiana’s voting population.

The secessionists did win the election in Jan. 1861. But it was by a very slim margin.

Conclusion

It has long been claimed that northwest Louisiana was the birthplace of Southern Secession. However, Rocky Mount’s secession in Oct. 1860 did not undergo the democratic process required for the state of Louisiana to secede.

When a legal secession vote occurred in the state in late, just prior to the convention, the following parishes in Louisiana voted to stay with the Union: Ascension, Assumption, Caldwell, Catahoula, Claiborne, Concordia, East Baton Rouge, East Feliciana, Jefferson, Lafourche, Natchitoches, Ouachita, Sabine, St. Helena, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, Terrebonne, West Baton Rouge, and Winn.

It is an absolute fact that Louisiana seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1961 after the Rocky Mount secession in 1860. But it is false to say all, or even the vast majority, of Louisiana voters wanted to secede from the Union.

Almost half of Louisiana’s voters in 1861 wanted to stay with the Union instead of joining the Confederacy.

The author's takeaway

I am a historic preservationist. I also researched and wrote about Louisiana's lost history, particularly the history of equal rights movements in NWLA.

I recently took a tour of Hughes House, and as I walked through the dogtrot hallway, I felt every possible emotion. I thought about my grandparents and my pastor, who were all with me the previous time I walked through the house. All of them are gone to the other side now.

I also thought of how complex our history is here in NWLA. Most of us have sentimental ties to places that were part of our history, and maybe some of those places make us and others uncomfortable today. But old buildings like the Hughes House are important.

We don't have to agree or disagree with what happened at historic sites. But we do need to protect these old buildings because they are brutally honest in a way that our words can't be. Walking through these old buildings gives us a real sense of what it was like to be human and be alive in a completely different time period.

And it's important that we save historic sites for future generations.

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