Duncan, Vol. VI., CHAP. XV. and quietly remained. "As the wreck in descending kept close into the Fort St. Philip shore," reports Confederate General J. K. Duncan, "the 1861. W. R. chances were taken by the enemy without changing the position of his boats." Fortunately the Louisiana exploded while abreast Fort St. Philip, and before she had come near enough to cause damage to Porter's ships. p. 532. CHAPTER XVI NEW ORLEANS 1862. HE way was now clear to New Orleans; and CHAP. XVI. as soon as General Butler could get his transports from the Gulf side round into the river again, he proceeded, after occupying the forts, as rapidly as possible up the river with his troops. On the 1st of May the naval forces under Farragut turned over to him the formal possession of the city, and he continued in command of the Department of the Gulf until the following December. The withdrawal of General Lovell, and the abandonment of Forts Pike and McComb at the entrances to Lake Pontchartrain, left him with no serious campaign immediately on his hands; but the task of governing the city of New Orleans was one which put all his energy and shrewdness into requisition. The supply of provisions had been interrupted by the military operations of the rebels themselves before the coming of Farragut's fleet; a portion of these again were carried away with Lovell's retiring army. When Butler came, starvation was close upon 150,000 people of New Orleans.1 1"My efforts to accumulate provisions enough in the city to feed the population had proved abortive, and an examination made a few days previous to the evacuation had satisfied me that there were not in the city pro- CHAP. XVI. To avert this danger was the general's first urgent effort, and he made it successful over all difficulties. His second care was to quell and to control the dangerous disloyalty of the population. An order to his own soldiers forbade, under the severest penalties, the stealing of public or private property; a proclamation to the citizens established martial law and made minute regulations for the preservation of order. He gave to neutral aliens and to loyalists assurance of full protection to persons and property; and to non-combatant Confederates also, so far as the exigencies of the public service would permit. In their most favorable phases, war and martial law are full of necessary sacrifice and harshness, and it may be said that General Butler's military government, firm and vigilant throughout, was tolerant and even liberal to the well-disposed and orderly, but severe against transgressors and the malicious plottings of certain individuals, corporations, and classes in aid of rebellion. These pages do not afford room for an extended review of General Butler's administration. In all the war no man was so severely criticized by his enemies or more warmly defended by his friends. Confederate newspapers, orators, and writers have exhausted the vocabulary of abuse for epithets to heap upon his name, from "Yankee" to "Beast" and "Butcher." Secession sympathizers in England approvingly echoed this defamation; Palmerston in the House of Commons went out of his way to swell the unthinking British clamor by repeating the unjust censure. The whole subject might profitably be buried as part of the "animosities and passions of the war," were it not that Jefferson Davis sought to CHAP. XVI. turn the circumstance to the advantage of the rebellion by a sensational official proclamation declaring Butler" an outlaw and common enemy of mankind, to be immediately executed by hanging" in case of capture, also adding that "all commissioned officers in the command of said Benjamin F. Butler be declared not entitled to be considered as soldiers engaged in honorable warfare, but as robbers and criminals deserving death; and that they and each of them be, wherever captured, reserved for execution." Since the rebel chief thus prominently inscribed Butler and his officers on the historical record, the recitals of his proclamation deserve a passing notice. In the list of reasons assigned to support his declaration of outlawry the allegations of imprisonment or expulsion from the city may be at once dismissed as the ordinary incidents of war, which the Confederates themselves were daily practising in different parts of the country. So also of the complaint of military fines and assessments; manifestly they are a harsh and arbitrary mode of reprisal for treason and hostility, but international law recognizes them and all civilized nations practise them. The charge that Butler armed African slaves for a servile war first disappears technically under Butler's showing that he armed no slaves, but only free citizens of color, many of whom the rebels themselves had enlisted and drilled before his coming; while the whole charge disappears generally under President Lincoln's proclamation and policy of emancipation, begun before Davis's edict of outlawry was issued. CHAP. XVI. There remain therefore but two further points to be examined, the execution of Mumford and the so-called "woman order." Butler to Stanton, 1862. W.R. Davis, Proclama tion, Dec. 23, 1862. W. R. Vol. XV., p. 906. Mumford, it will be remembered, tore down the United States flag, which by Farragut's order was raised over the Mint on the morning of April 27. He remained in the city, openly boasted of his crime, and courted applause for his recklessness. When Butler came, he had him arrested and tried by a military commission which, on June 5, convicted him "of treason and an overt act thereof "; and Butler ordered the sentence to be executed on June 7, on which day Mumford was hanged. Jefferson Davis's proclamation calls this "deliberate murder," "when said Mumford was an unresisting and non-combatant captive, and for no offense even alleged to have been committed by him subsequent to the date of the capture of the said city." Such a recital is the merest quibbling. The rebel President well knew that the flag torn down by Mumford had been raised by Farragut, after the demand of unqualified surrender on April 26; after the reply by the Mayor on the same day, that the city was evacuated by Confederate troops, its administration restored back to him, that it was without means of defense, and promising a "religious compliance" of the people to yield obedience to the conqueror. Mumford's crime was against the sovereignty of the United States, duly claimed and enforced by the commissioned officer and the naval power of the Government, to which the municipal authority had formally submitted. The offender thus violated not only military law but also the sanctity of the Mayor's promise. To declare that |