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Updated: June 26, 2025
The Duke of Berwick's corps was the more powerful, numbering thirty-four battalions and fifty-five squadrons, and this raised the Duke de Vendome's army to over 110,000, and placed him again fairly on an equality with the allies.
Purchasing Belle Isle, an island off the coast of Attakapas, he removed his family there about 1824. He was successful in his new vocation; but not liking an island residence, where he was twenty miles from a neighbor, he purchased a residence upon Berwick's Bay, and a portion of Tiger Island, which was immediately opposite, and there made a new plantation, which is now the site of Brashear City.
He got those young popinjays out of their chaises by a single glance, which acted like a grenade when the fuse is touched off. The regiment of Saxe came marching in, however, every officer in his place, and Count Saxe riding at the head of it. When the Duke of Berwick's eagle eye saw this his countenance cleared as if by magic; he had looked like a thunder cloud before.
At the point where the united Red and Washita Rivers join the Mississippi, which here changes direction to the east, the Atchafalaya leaves it, and, flowing due south through Grand Lake and Berwick's Bay, reaches the Gulf at Atchafalaya Bay, two degrees west of its parent stream, and by a more direct course.
Night stopped the enemy's advance, and Mouton, deeming his force too weak to cope with Weitzel, turned the Cotton across the bayou, and scuttled and burned her to arrest the further progress of the Federal boats. Weitzel returned to Berwick's, having accomplished his object, the destruction of the Cotton, supposed by the Federals to be a formidable iron-clad.
An iron-clad or two in Berwick's Bay, and the road at Plaquemine held by troops, supported by vessels in the river, would close all egress from the Lafourche, and the enemy could make arrangements to bag us at his leisure; while Grant's army and Porter's fleet, now set free, might overrun the Washita and Red River regions and destroy Walker's division, separated from me by a distance of more than three hundred miles.
Undisturbed, we removed not only all stores from Berwick's, but many supplies from the abundant Lafourche country, including a large herd of cattle driven from the prairies of Opelousas by the Federals some weeks before. On the 21st of July, we ran the engines and carriages on the railway into the bay, threw in the heavy guns, and moved up the Teche, leaving pickets opposite Berwick's.
The remainder of Vincent's regiment was on the Teche. Increased activity and concentration at Berwick's Bay, and a visit of Sherman to New Orleans to confer with Banks, warned me of the impending blow; and on the 7th of March Polignac was ordered to move at once to Alexandria, and thence, with Mouton's brigade, to the Boeuf, twenty-five miles south.
Coxe's Life of Marlborough throws great light on the period, and is very valuable. Macaulay's work will, of course, be read. See, also, Bolingbroke's Letters, and the Duke of Berwick's Memoirs. A chapter in the Pictorial History is very good as to literary history and the progress of the arts and sciences.
Dilly you must know that an English Benedictine Monk at Paris has translated The Duke of Berwick's Memoirs, from the original French, and has sent them to me to sell. I offered them to Strahan, who sent them back with this answer: "That the first book he had published was the Duke of Berwick's Life, by which he had lost: and he hated the name."
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