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

[392] relief of the poor. There were one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. There were more paroled rebel soldiers in the city than the general had troops within fifty miles of his headquarters. The families of many of those who had gone to Shiloh, Richmond, and the other Confederate armies, were all left behind, generally in a state of destitution. What was to be done?

It was attempted to meet this exigency by the following order:--

headquarters Department of the Gulf, New Orleans, May 9, 1862.

General Order No. 25.

The deplorable state of destitution and hunger of the mechanics and working classes of this city has been brought to the knowledge of the commanding general.

He has yielded to every suggestion made by the city government, and ordered every method of furnishing food to the people of New Orleans that government desired. No relief by those officials has yet been afforded. This hunger does not pinch the wealthy and influential, the leaders of the rebellion, who have gotten up this war, and are now endeavoring to prosecute it, without regard to the starving poor, the workingman, his wife and child. Unmindful of their suffering fellow-citizens at home, they have caused or suffered provisions to be carried out of the city for Confederate service since the occupation by the United States forces.

Lafayette Square, their home of affluence, was made the depot of stores and munitions of war for the rebel armies, and not of provisions for their poor neighbors. Striking hands with the vile, the gambler, the idler, and the ruffian, they have destroyed the sugar and cotton which might have been exchanged for food for the industrious and good, and regrated the price of that which is left, by discrediting the very currency they had furnished, while they eloped with the specie; as well as that stolen from the United States, as from the banks, the property of the good people of New Orleans, thus leaving them to ruin and starvation.

Fugitives from justice many of them, and others their associates, staying because too puerile and insignificant to be objects of punishment by the clement Government of the United States.

They have betrayed their country.

They have been false to every trust.

They have shown themselves incapable of defending the State they had seized upon, although they have forced every poor man's child into their