Lt. Col. Arthur J.L. Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards was the Forrest Gump of the Civil War. He was everywhere. In the space of just three and a half months, he traveled from Brownsville, Texas through nearly every seceded state except Arkansas and Florida, ending up at Gettysburg as Lee’s army made its attack and returning home to England via New York City – passing through just in time to witness the draft riots there. He met virtually anyone who was anybody in the Southern army and visited such places as Natchez, Jackson, Mobile, Montgomery, Chattanooga, Charleston, Richmond, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia.

Of interest here, however, is his visit to Louisiana in mid-May 1863, where he met Edmund Kirby Smith and Gen. Paul Octave Hebert. On his journey from Shreveport to Monroe, he saw plantations where the slave quarters were so numerous, they looked like small villages. A steady stream of planters with their families and possessions – including human chattel – were headed westward, away from the Yankee forces that infested eastern Louisiana along the Mississippi River and had made incursions to Alexandria.

When he arrived at Monroe, he passed through the camps of Walker’s Texas Division, finding them well-armed but poorly clothed. A number of Yankee prisoners – deserters, in fact – were nearby. When Fremantle inquired of their motivation, they insisted  that they had enlisted to fight for the Union, not to free the slaves.

Brig. Gen. Hebert, a former Louisiana governor, West-Pointer, sugar planter, and Mexican War veteran, made accommodations for Fremantle and bade him farewell the next morning as the Briton boarded a boat down the Ouachita River for Harrisonburg.

Fremantle wrote in his diary of Hebert: “He used to hold Magruder’s position as commander-in-chief in Texas, but he has now been shelved at Munroe, where he expects to be taken prisoner any day; and from the present gloomy aspect of affairs about here, it seems extremely probable that he will not be disappointed.”

Hebert need not have worried. Yankee forces wouldn’t arrive at Monroe for another three months. But his anxiety could have driven him to take, or at least, encourage, desperate measures when Yankee prisoners from the Colored Troops fell into his hands after Milliken’s Bend.