Aaron Sheehan-Dean

speaker

924 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 24 Aug

Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Battle of Baton Rouge: Civil War on the Mississippi · 5 Feb 2026 podcast

No.

And the number of troops here in Baton Rouge, even by mid-summer of 1862, is only around 3,000.

Again, there are no Confederate soldiers at all.

The Confederates evacuate from New Orleans and move east into the Florida parishes above Lake Pontchartrain.

And so with no obstacles, it requires relatively a small force.

What's important is that there are Union warships in the river.

And listeners need to remember that those warships carry very heavy guns, not the small field artillery pieces that they may have seen if they've been to Civil War battlefields.

The gunships have 9,000 pound cast iron cannons that hurl huge projectiles two miles.

And so that's really the kind of the firepower that they have is much greater than a force of 3,000 infantry with one or two regiments of field artillery might sort of present.

David Farragut is in command of the naval part of this campaign.

Benjamin Butler was his army counterpart, and Butler is down in New Orleans earning the disfavor of New Orleanians for his occupation.

That's a whole other show.

But yes, Farragut is commanding the naval side.

And the incident that you're referring to happens on the morning of May 28th.

One of the officers on Farragut's ships needs to come ashore and he gets into a rowboat.

He's got four cabin boys sort of rowing him in.

And as they reach the shore, a group of guerrillas ride to the edge and fire on the ship and they injure the officer, perhaps kill him.

They can't tell from the ships.

And Farragut has to make a very quick decision about the right way to respond to this.

One option is to organize a platoon of men, lower rowboats, row in, climb the bank, find horses and give chase to guerrillas, who by this point are miles away.

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