Louisiana's Tigers

"The veriest offscouring of the earth." That was how one Confederate soldier remembered the men of Wheat's Battalion, better known as the Louisiana Tigers. The Tigers were widely considered, by northerners and southerners alike, the wildest and wickedest unit in the South—a reputation that has long overshadowed the individual lives of the men who filled its ranks. In Louisiana's Tigers: The Men of Wheat's Confederate Battalion, Ross A. Brooks draws on unparalleled research and never-before-seen documents to look beyond battlefield myths, offering a definitive social history of these soldiers.

Louisiana's Tigers meticulously traces the lives and journeys of the battalion's members from the 1830s to their deaths. The men in the unit, products of a nation growing in wealth and size yet torn apart by slavery, were wanderers that fate brought together in New Orleans in 1861: a transient population of immigrants, native-born laborers, criminals, and opportunists. Their lives were as unfixed as that of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat himself, the charismatic military adventurer who led them.

In his exploration of the unit's Civil War years, Brooks focuses on the battalion's strategic role under Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee but also moves beyond the battlefield, delving into the internal and surrounding tensions of this dysfunctional, constructed community and examining the frictions these men sparked among the civilians they encountered. The story continues long after the Confederate defeat, following the Tigers through Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. From building livelihoods, legal or otherwise, to founding and relying on early veterans' relief groups, many of the unit's members struggled to navigate their final years in the postwar South.

Louisiana's Tigers provides an essential look at the men in this singular battalion and the South that created them, unearthing new details of the Tigers' complex history.