Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[394] having arrived from New York, I directed my commissary to “sell to families for consumption, in small quantities, until further orders, flour and salt meats, viz.: pork, beef, ham, and bacon, from the stores of the army, at seven and a half cents per pound for flour, and ten cents for meats, city bank notes, gold, silver, or treasury notes to be taken in payment.” Flour went down from sixty to twenty-five dollars a barrel in the course of thirty days, and for those who had means to purchase, starvation was not possible.

But still the question of how the poor were to be fed ultimately, and at whose cost, pressed back upon me, and that was complicated with another question which was, how the health of the city was to be guarded and preserved. The yellow fever had always within the memory of man been the scourge of New Orleans, returning every summer with such virulence as to drive from the city all unacclimated persons who could get away. In 1853, the victims of yellow fever were so numerous that there were no means of burying them, and so they were removed by cremation, their bodies being piled up for that purpose in heaps. And yet, even after that terrible warning, no method or means of prevention in the future had ever been had. The reason for this is best told in the words of a leading editorial in the True Delta, the proprietor of which, it will be recollected, was so ardent a secessionist that he refused to print my proclamation. The editorial was printed after he was disciplined for his secession conduct.:--

For seven years past, “said the True Delta, of May 6,” the world knows that this city, in all its departments,--judicial, legislative, and executive,--has been at the absolute disposal of the most godless, brutal, ignorant, and ruthless ruffianism the world has ever heard of since the days of the great Roman conspirator. By means of a secret organization emanating from that fecund source of every political infamy, New England, and named Know-Nothingism or “Sammyism,” --from the boasted exclusive devotion of the fraternity to the United States,--our city, from being the abode of decency, of liberality, generosity, and justice, has become a perfect hell; the temples of justice are sanctuaries for crime; the ministers of the laws, the nominees of blood-stained, vulgar, ribald caballers; licensed murderers shed innocent blood on the most public thoroughfares with impunity; witnesses of the most atrocious crimes are either spirited away, bought off, or intimidated from testifying;