John Ogee

John Ogee was born in 1841 near Morgan City, Louisiana, in a one-room, dirt-floored log cabin he shared with his parents and three siblings. They were enslaved by Alfred Williams. His mother cleaned and worked in the big house, and his first job was plowing. Around 1863 Union troops came within a mile, taking every ear of corn and slaughtering the livestock, and John, his father and two other men ran away and joined them. His father was killed in an ambush in Mississippi, near Jackson.

John served three years with the Union army. He was at the siege of Vicksburg, where he said it took three days to bury the dead in long furrows plowed by mule teams, and nineteen bodies were put in a single well. He marched through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman. He described lines of a hundred men firing and falling while the next line stepped up behind them, and said that when a thousand guns were pointed at you, "you wishes you'd stayed in the woods."

After the war he worked for wages on the old plantation until Klan violence drove him to Texas. He told of a man named Narcisse Young who was warned the Klan was coming, hid in the trees, and shot several of them before escaping to New Orleans. In 1870 John settled at Taylor's Bayou in Jefferson County, where he worked cattle and farmed. When interviewed at 96 he lived with a daughter in Beaumont.