Placide Bossier

Placide Bossier was an American from Louisiana who died in the American Civil War. A Catholic Creole person who lived a privileged life in high society, for Clement Eaton he exemplified that lifestyle, "a gay life of parties, hunting, fishing, dancing, serenades, and constant fishing".^[1]

Bossier came from Louisiana, the Natchitoches area, and was a Catholic Creole; historian Clement Eaton described him as a "young Creole of fashion". He attended Georgetown University in 1850-1851.^[2] Around 1860, he briefly kept a diary (written in English, and corrected by the family's governess); apparently the study of law bored him, and he spent his time in a rocking chair, thinking about billiards, dinner parties, and the woman he was in love with. The American Civil War was approaching and he exercised with a cavalry company. In January 1861 he voted to secede.^[1]

Bossier joined the 3rd Louisiana Infantry Regiment (Confederate). He was killed on the morning of August 10, 1861, during the Battle of Wilson's Creek,^[3] and died shortly after being wounded. His friend and cousin Alphonse Prud'homme, likewise the son of a slaveholding planter, described his death, and said he met his fate "like a man and a Christian".^[4] News of his death reached his friend in Maryland, James Ryder Randall, that same month.^[5] Randall, who attended Georgetown University with Bossier, wrote a poem named for Bossier in his honor, comparing him to a Crusading knight and citing the motto of Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, "sans peur et sans reproche".^[6] Father Pierre Dicharry, a chaplain, gathered a lock of Bossier's hair in his prayer book, and brought it back home.^[7]