GENERAL BUTLER IN NEW ORLEANS.*
VERY few Englishmen will, we fear, condescend to road a eulogistic life of General Benjamin Butler. Arriving at a moment when the country was sympathizing fiercely with the South, yet half ashamed of its sympathy, his famous Order 28 at New Orleans gave the required excuse, no inquiry was made, no defence allowed, but General Butler was at once set down as the type and flower of all that was evil in Yankee training, Yankee manners, and Yankee disposition towards its foes. The Northern friends of secession caught back the cry from England, General Butler was considered a safe mark, and for months he was attacked as the incarnation of spite, despotism, and corruption. It was not till he quitted New Orleans that a reaction set in, and even now, though his countrymen have forgiven him, it is with a sense that there was much to forgive which has stirred-up Mr. Parton to this biography. It is worth reading, for Mr. Parton has before him a character which he, the biographer of Andrew Jackson, thoroughly understands, and though he writes as a eulogist he is so far truthful that his hero's acts may be ,judged by indifferent readers pretty readily from unconscious admissions. General Butler appears in his pages very much what his
portrait would indicate—a stem, efficient, straightforward tyrant, without the smallest disposition to cruelty, but with an inflexible determination to make his own cause succeed, upright as a politician, and personally kind, but with a certain coarseness of fibre in his moral composition offensive to men of more refined or softer habits of thought. For instance, he recommended Mr. Buchanan to arrest the Commissioners who announced the vote of secession as traitors, and try them before the Supreme Court, as a means of testing the validity of the ordinance. Tho act would have been legal enough, the Supremo Court being the one tribunal with power to decide between a State and the Union, but finer-nerved men felt instinctively that the Commis- sioners were in reality men bearing a flag of truce, and that their arrest would be considered by North and South a gross breach of honourable faith. General Butler did not see it, and replied to the indignant question of Mr. Ord, " Would you hang us by the grim joke, " Certainly not, unless you were found guilty." That is the man ; always efficient, always within the law, but obtuse to those considerations which involve a mingling of morality and taste ; and Jacobin in the lengths to which he would carry his resolves.
General Butler is the grandson of an old soldier of the War of Independence, Captain Zephaniah Butler, of Connecticut, who had fought under General Wolfe at Quebec, and the son of John Butler, of New Hampshire, who enlisted in the volun- teers who followed Jackson at New Orleans. Losing his father at an early age, he went to the district school, and afterwards to Waterville, a Baptist college, where a student was expected to train himself for the ministry, but also to do three hours' manual labour as a contribution towards his expenses. The labour was expended on chair-making, and the professors seem all to have been clergymen of the very nar- rowest type. Young Butler, however, was not of the lads whom pro- fessors mould, and he grew up with a powerful frame, a keen, self- willed, Yankee spirit, and a sense of half-scorn for almost all above him of which we must quote one comic and characteristic instance. It was the custom of Waterville to compel the students to attend morning prayer by a fine, which Butler, being exceedingly poor, felt as a hardship. One day one of the professors preached a sermon full of Jonathan Edwards' theology.
"1. The Elect, and the Elect alone, will be saved. 2. Of the people commonly called Christians, probably not more than one in a hundred will be saved. S. Tho heathen have a better chance of salvation than the inhabitants of Christian countries who neglect their opportunities. Upon these hints tho young gentleman spoke. Ho drew up a petition to the faculty, couched in the language of profound respect, asking to be excused from further attendance at prayers and sermons, on the grounds so ably sustained in the discourse of the preceding Sunday. If, he said, the doctrine of that sermon was sound, of which he would not presume to entertain a doubt, he was only preparing for himself a future of more exquisite anguish by attending religious services. Ho begged to bo allowed to remind the faculty that the church in winch tho sermon was preached had usually a congregation of six hundred persons, nine of whom were his revered professors and tutors; and us only one in a hundred of ordinary Christians could be saved, three even of the faculty, good men as all of them wore, were inevitably damned. Could he, a more student, and not one of the most exemplary, expect to be saved before his -superiors ? Far be it from him a thought • General Butler in New Orleans. history of the Administration of the Department of the Gulf in the Year 1862; with an Account of the Capture of New Orleans, and a Sketch of the Previous Career of the General, Civil and Military. By Jamie Parton, Now York : Mason Brothers. 1864.
so presumptuous. Shakespeare himself had intimated that the lieutenant cannot expect salvation before his military superior. Nothing remained, therefore, for him but perdition. In this melan- choly posture of affairs it became him to beware of heightening his future torment by listening to the moving eloquence of the pulpit, or availing himself of any of the privileges of religion. But here he was met by the college laws, which compelled attendance at chapel and church ; which imposed a pecuniary fine for non-attendance, and entailed a loss of the honours duo to his scholarship. Threatened thus with damnation in the next world, bankruptcy and disgrace in this, ho implored the merciful consideration of the faculty, and asked to be excused from all further attendance at prayers and at church."
The professors treated this cool logic as irreverent, but did not expel the logician, who after several furious contests against dogmatic theology quitted college, " weighing only ninety-seven pounds," but resolved to become a lawyer. He went first, however, on a two years' cruise to the cod fishery off Labrador, an occupa- tion which completely restored his health, and then returning to Lowell, read law, fought the mill-girl suits, taught in a school, and by eighteen hours' work a day managed to keep body and soul together. A Yankee readiness and adroitness, a keen wit and inexhaustible contentiousness, soon, however, brought him practice. He became a leading barrister, studied every trade, machine, interest, and science with which he came in contact, gradually came to be regarded as the soul and chief of the Hunker Democrats of Massachusetts, i. e., Democrats who would let slavery alone, and was the Breckinridge candidate for the governorship of the State. This, when the war broke out, marked him out for command. He claimed as a Brigadier-General of militia to lead his brigade, and Governor Andrew, not sorry, perhaps, to be rid of a possible rival, gave him the commission. We have no space to follow General Butler's career in Baltimore and Fortress Monroe, and need only mention that his counsel was always for decided and rapid action, and that the famous expression, " Slaves are contraband of war," which commenced the work of emancipation, was his. He was selected to com- mand the expedition against New Orleans as the only man who honestly believed it could be taken, and took it, greatly as- sisted by Commodore FaiTagut, commanding the attacking fleet.
New Orleans, however, though Captured was not subdued. The city bad been for years the head-quarters and focus of all Southern rowdyism. An immense crowd of "loafers," many with- out regular occupation or means, infested the streets, controlled the ballot-boxes, nominated the judges, selected the police, and affected to rule every one except a few immensely wealthy planters, who governed them by money. These rowdies had gradually dissolved society till New Orleans had become the most bloodthirsty city in the world—a city where every man went armed, where a sharp word was invariably answered by a stab, and where the average of murdered men taken to one hospital was three a day. The mob were bitter advocates of slavery, held all Yankees in abhorrence, and guided by the astute brain of Pierre Soule, whilom ambassador to Spain, resolved to contest with General Butler the right to con- trol the city. They might as well have contested it with Buona- parte. The first order issued by the general indicated a policy from which he never swerved. The mob had surrounded the St. Charles Hotel, threatening an attack on the building, than the general's head-quarters, and General Williams, commanding the troops round it, reported that he would be unable to control the mob. " General Butler, in his serenest manner, replied, t Give my compliments to General Williams, and tell him if be finds be cannot control the mob to open upon 'them with artillery.'" The mob did that day endeavour to seize Judge Summers, the Re- corder, and he was only saved by the determined courage of Lieutenant Kinsman, in command of an armed party. From this moment the General assumed the -attitude he never abandoned, that of master of New Orleans, intending and often doing justice, but making his own will the law. He at first retained the muni- cipal organization, but finding the officials incurably hostile be sent them to Fort Lafayette, and thenceforward ruled alone, feeding the people, re-establishing trade, maintaining public order, and seeing that negroes obtained some reasonable measure of security. Their evidence was admitted, "Louisiana having, when she went out of the Union, taken her black code with her," the whipping-house was abolished, and all forms of torture sternly prohibited. That he was occasionally severe seems certain, but not so certain as that nothing but severity could have restrained New Orleans. There never was, since Gomorrah fell, such another city. We have spoken of the rowdies, these were the respectables:-
"A lieutenant searched a certain house in New Orleans, in which Confederate arms were reported to be concealed. Arms and tents were found stowed in the garret, which were removed to that grand
repository of contraband articles, the Custom House. A gentleman of venerable aspect, with long white . hair and a form bent with premature old age, was the occupant of the house from which the arms and tents were taken. In the twilight of an evening soon after the search the most fearful screams were heard proceeding from the yard of the house, as if a human being was suffering there the utmost that a mortal can endure of agony. A sentinel who was pacing his beat near by ran into the yard, where he beheld a hideous spectacle. A young mulatto girl was stretched upon the ground on her face, her feet tied to a stake, her hands held by a black man, her back uncovered from neck to heels. The venerable old gentleman with the flowing white hair was seated in an arm-chair by the side of the girl; at a distance convenient for his purpose. He held in his hand a powerful horse-whip, with which he was lashing the delicate and sensitive flesh of the young girl. Her back was covered with blood. Every stroke of the infernal instrument of torture tore up her flesh in long dark ridges. The soldier, aghast at the sight, rushed to the guard-house, and reported what he had seen to his sergeant, and the sergeant ran to head-quarters and told the General. General Butler sent him flying back to atop the old miscreant, and ordered him to bring the torturer and his victim to head-quarters the next morning."
The single defence offered by the whitehaired old gentleman, who had in the meanwhile pickled the girl's back, was that he had a right to do as he liked with his own servant. Butler sent him to Fort Jackson, where, says Mr. Parton, in a burst of that anger which a man does right to feel, " I am happy to say he died within a month." Still worse stories were investigated by the General, and his contact with slavery seems gradually to have worked all proslavery tenets out of his mind. At all events he levied three regiments of coloured men, compelled the planters to treat the slaves as hired freemen, so subjugated the mob that New Orleans became as safe as Boston, and while feeding the people made the city healthy by a well-devised drainage. No one after reading Mr. Parton's account can doubt that he was a benefactor to New Orleans.
There remain the four great charges against General Butler—the execution of Mumford for hauling down the flag, the " woman order," the treatment of Mrs. Philips, and personal corruption. On the first charge any soldier who reads the evidence will pronounce an instant acquittal, Mumford's act being, in truth, the final attempt of the mob to override the authority which repre- sented law and order. On the second, Mr. Parton has not changed our opinion. There never was the slightest intention that any woman should be outraged, but the wording of the order was intended to place any woman who insulted the Union, i. e., dis- played strong political feeling, on a level with street-walkers, and was a needless insult, betokening grievous want of tact, judgment, and delicacy of feeling. It succeeded, like every other measure of' General Butler's, and his troops were New Englanders who do not insult women ; but it was discreditable alike to him and to the men whose irritation at female contempt induced him to issue it. In the case of Mrs. Philips, the General must be pronounced harsh, arbitrary, and unjust. She had laughed, he said, when the remains of a Yankee officer went by, a mere bit of woman's spite at worst, and one which she strenuously denied, and the General sentenced her, in an order calling her a bad, dangerous woman, to Ship Island. She was, however, allowed a servant, and released after a few weeks' detention. We must add that the story circulated in London by Northerners to explain the act, an attack on Mrs. Philips' character, was a blunder made also in New Orleans, a very notorious person of the same name having been mistaken for her. Lastly, as to the charge of corruption, we can give no decided opinion. It seems proved that General Butler never in any case of any kind took money for official acts, and the only question is whether his official power helped his brother to the accumulation of the very great fortune which Mr. Parton admits he made in a very short time. Our own impression is that the General was not corrupt in the ordinary sense of the term, but that with his usual obtuseness to the finer delicacies of life he did not object to his brother using the immense consideration the connection gave him to further his own speculations. How- ever that may be, this biography leaves on our minds no doubt that the Union possesses in General Butler a man of rare and original capacity, extraordinarily fitted for constructive adminis- tration, and without any tendency to cruelty, though with that in- difference to the feelings of others so often m irked in very strong men. Of all the men who fill our European history the one he is most like—strangely like—is Frederick the Great.
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