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

[410] to do with yellow fever germs, was at night put on one of the fires. The fuel was piled about it until a very large fire was built. Then the whole heap was allowed to burn to ashes. Those were the only cases of yellow fever in New Orleans that year.

I was obliged to cremate the bodies of the dead for the safety of the living, as they would have been buried above ground. Nobody is buried underground in New Orleans, but the places of interment are little brick receptacles which are not always particularly tight.

Now I do not pretend that in all that was done by my order in New Orleans, exactly proper surgical and medical courses were taken. I do not mean to say that I used anywhere nearly correct and proper surgical and medical practice in my treatment of the disease. And I do not attempt to defend it either, as the best way of dealing with the yellow fever. Far be that from me. I only did what was the best thing I could find to do when I was obliged to do something.

But I will say that in 1864, two years afterwards, I applied exactly the same method in the city of Norfolk, Virginia, a port which the yellow fever never before shunned when it came to the Atlantic coast. In 1857, if I get the date right, there was more than a decimation of its unacclimated inhabitants by the yellow fever, and a great many thousand dollars were subscribed that year by the good people of the North to aid the distressed place. It had not improved any in cleanliness in 1864, for it had been in military possession for four years by the troops of both sides,--and I am afraid both equally nasty,--until it was the filthiest place I ever saw where there were human habitations of a civilized order.

In 1864 there were two hundred and fifty odd deserters, thieves, and vagabonds condemned by the military court to hard labor for a great many months at Fort Norfolk, which was down the river some distance from the city of Norfolk. On visiting them I found they had nothing on earth to do but to gamble all night and sleep all day, and they made hard labor of that. I set them to work in the streets of Norfolk, in the Massachusetts House of Correction uniform with scarlet cap, so that they could not desert, and gave orders that they should be required to clean the city after the manner of New Orleans, and that they should thus work off ten days in every thirty of their sentences.