ily. When the end came at last the effective force,
outside of the cavalry, hardly exceeded 8,000, while even of this
small number nearly every officer and man might well have gone on
the sick-report had not pride and duty held him to his post.

This will seem the less remarkable when it is remembered that the
garrison during the same period suffered in the same proportion,
while from like causes less than a year before Breckinridge had,
in a much shorter time, lost the use of half his division. Butler's
experience had been nearly as severe.

To the suffering and labors that are inseparable from any operation
in the nature of a siege were added insupportable torments, the
least of which were vermin. As the summer days drew out and the
heat grew more intense, the brooks dried up; the creek lost itself
in the pestilential swamp; the wells and springs gave out; the river
fell, exposing to the almost tropical sun a wide margin of festering
ooze. The mortality and the sickness were enormous.

The animals suffered in their turn, the battery horses from want
of exercise, the train horses and mules from over-work, and all
from the excessive heat and insufficiency of proper forage. There
was never enough hay; the deficiency was partly eked out by making
fodder of the standing corn, but this resource was quickly exhausted,
and after the 3d of July, when Taylor sealed the river by planting
his guns below Donaldsonville, all the animals went upon half or
quarter rations of grain, with little hay or none. At length, for
two or three days, the forage depots fairly gave out; the poor
beasts were literally starving when the place fell, nor was it for
nearly a week after that event that, by the raising of Taylor's
blockade below and the arrival of supplies from Grant above, the
stress was wholly relieved.

The two colored regiments, the 1st and 3d Louisiana Native Guards,
besides strongly picketing their front, were mainly occupied, after
the 27th of May, in fatigue duty in the trenches on the right.
While the army was in the Teche country, Brigadier-General Daniel
Ullmann had arrived at New Orleans from New York, bringing with
him authority to raise a brigade of colored troops. With him came
a full complement of officers. A few days later, on the 1st of
May, Banks issued, at Opelousas, an order, which he had for some
time held in contemplation, for organizing a corps of eighteen
regiments of colored infantry, to consist, a