Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[257] remarkable records of the war. Any story of New Orleans is incomplete without the hero, Benjamin F. Butler. This man, who was to reap the fruits of the victory of the Federal fleet, and enact the part of military ruler in New Orleans, was an example of that reputation so easily made, in the North by brazen assertions, sensational dispatches, and coarse abuse of rebels. Gen. Butler had been a small lawyer in Massachusetts; his first experiment in politics was that of a Northern man with Southern principles; he was a delegate to the Charleston Convention of 1860, and he was accustomed to relate with singular satisfaction the circumstance that he had voted in that body, more than forty times, for Jefferson Davis as the nominee for President of the United States! When the war broke out, he was a ready convert to the popular doctrine in his State, and went in advance of it in his expressions of ferocity towards the people of the South. He had already made himself infamous in Baltimore by his war upon non-combatants; by browbeating quiet citizens; by examining courts in which the severity of the military judge was curiously mingled with the peculiar skill and disreputable adroitness of the pettifogger; and by his quick and apt invention of various instruments of moral torture. The appearance of the man was extraordinary and revolting. He had small, muddy, cruel eyes; one of them was curtained by a drooping lid; and there was a smothered glower in them indicative of ill-contained and violent passion. The other of his features were almost covered up in enormous chops, with little webs of red veins in them; and the whole expression of his face was that of a lecherous coarseness and a cunning ferocity.

Such was the tyrant of New Orleans. He inaugurated his rule in the subdued city by the following order, directed against the women of New Orleans, which at once made his name infamous in all the Christian and civilized countries of the world, and obtained for him in the South the popular and persistent title of the “Beast:”

The infamous “woman-order” was the prelude to a rule in New Orleans that excited the horror and disgust of the civilized world. The