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

[398] 28th of May, there were 7,439 certified deaths by yellow fever. Many hundreds died away from the city and up the river, and many died on the steamers, while attempting to get away. These figures do not include those who died in the suburbs, Algiers, Jefferson City, Aetna, and Carrollton. Thus, of 30,000 total, one in every four died.

No conversations went on in the presence of my officers other than descriptions of the incidents of the attacks of the terrible fever in 1853, when its dead lay in heaps because of the inability of the living to inter them.

An instance was reported to me which was quite laughable. Near the lower boundary of the part of New Orleans known as French-town, which was then, perhaps, the most filthy of all, a poor soldier from Maine, homesick, dreaming of the pure air and bright land-scape of his native State and pining to return thereto, was pacing his weary beat. Naturally he listened to the conversation that went on around him, and accordingly he was attacked in this way: Two newsboys stood near him and one said: “Jack, have you heard the news?” “No, Tom, what is it?” “Got the yellow fever prime down in Frenchtown; two Yanks dead already. It will sweep them all off.”

No surgeon in my army ever saw a case of yellow fever or had any instruction in meeting this hideous foe. A panic seized many of my officers. There were still other reasons for them to pine for home. New troops were being raised, and as the Army of the Gulf had acquired some reputation, the governors of all States, save Massachusetts, were glad to get officers from my army to promote into these new regiments. So, if they could but get home, they would find safety, promotion, and happiness. They were becoming downcast, and I feared the effect of this very despondency in increasing the liability to the disease.

I asked one old New Orleans physician if there were any means of keeping the fever away from the city. He told me there was none. I asked him if there were no means of preventing its spreading over the city. He told me he knew of none, after it once got there. The quarantine might be of some advantage, but if the fever ever got into the city, especially under the circumstances, the city having been occupied by armed forces for many months and being