The general, for once, seemed deprived of his power to judge with promptness. "He remained for some time," says an eyewitness, "apparently lost in abstraction. I shall never forget the singular expression on his face.

"I had been accustomed to see him in a storm of passion at any instance of oppression or flagrant injustice; but on this occasion he was too deeply affected to obtain relief in the usual way.

"His whole air was one of dejection, almost listlessness; his indignation too intense, and his anger too stern, to find expression even in his countenance.

"Never have I seen that peculiar look but on three or four occasions similar to the one I am narrating, when I knew he was pondering upon the baleful curse that had cast its withering blight upon all around, until the manhood and humanity were crushed out of the people, and outrages such as the above were looked upon with complacency, and the perpetrators treated as respected and worthy citizens,-and that he was realizing the great truth, that, however man might endeavor to guide this war to the advantage of a favorite idea or sagacious policy, the Almighty was directing it surely and steadily for the purification of our country from this greatest of national sins.

"After sitting in the mood which I have described, the general again turned to the prisoner, and said, in a quiet, subdued tone of voice:

"Mr. Landry, I dare not trust myself to decide to-day what punishment would be meet for your offense, for I am in that state of mind that I fear I might exceed the strict demands of justice. I shall, therefore, place you under guard for the present, until I conclude upon your sentence.'"*

The next morning, came troops of Landry's friends to tell the general what an honorable, what a "high-toned," what an amiable gentleman Mr. Landry was, and how highly he was respected by all who knew him. They said that he had had his losses; the war had half ruined him; his friends had observed that he had been irritable of late, poor man; and no doubt, he had struck his daughter harder than he intended. His wife and his other children came

*Atlantic Monthly, July, 1863.

to plead for him. A legal gentleman appeared, also, to do what was possible for him in the way of argument.

General Butler decided the case thus: Landry should give his daughter her freedom, and settle upon her a thousand dollars. Being in mortal terror of Fort Jackson, he gladly complied with these terms. The poor girl went forth that day a free woman, and a trustee was appointed to administer her little fortune and see that no farther harm befell her.

It was a light penalty for such a crime. I wish the general had treated the case à la Wellington-rung for three poles and a rope, and had the wretch hanged, that Sunday morning, in the nearest public square. God and man would have applauded the deed, and there would have been no more woman-whipping in New Orleans while the flag of the United States floated over the Custom-House.

I close this chapter of horrors. Each of these anecdotes illustrates one phase of the accursed thing, and all of them tend to show what has been already remarked, that the worst consequences of slavery fall upon the white race. It is better to be murdered than to be a murderer. It is better to be the victim of cruelty than to be capable of inflicting it. Mrs. Kemble judges rightly, when she says, in her recent noble and well-timed work, that it were far preferable to be a slave upon a Georgian rice plantation than to be the lord of one, with all that weight of crime upon the soul which slavery necessitates, and to become so completely depraved as to be able to contemplate so much suffering and iniquity with stolid indifference.

These scenes sank deeply into the hunker mind. General Butler, as he himself remarks, is not a man of the cast of character which we call humanitarian. A person of very great executive force never is, for nature does not bestow all her good gifts upon any individual. To his own circle of friends he would be more than generous; he makes their cause his own; he is faithful to them unto death, and after death. He was not satisfied to get for Major Strong a commission as brigadier-general, nor satisfied to come two hundred miles to attend his funeral; but he took care of his fame also, writing with his own hand the history of his career for the press, and correcting errors and supplying omissions in the eulogies penned by others. Still, he is not, in the modern sense of

man.

the term, a "philanthropist." He loves men more than he loves But a woman's bleeding back, the master's brutal insensibility, the absolute destruction in the character of slave-owners of all that redeems human nature, such as sense of truth, pity for the helpless, regard for the sanctities of domestic life; the flighty inferiority of their minds, their stupid improvidence, their incurable wrong-headedness and wrong-heartedness, their childish vanity and shameful ignorance, their boastful emptiness and contempt for all people and nations more enlightened than themselves; these things appealed to him, these things he marked and inwardly digested. Impatient as he had previously been at the slow progress of the war, he now became more reconciled to it, because he saw that every month of its continuance made the doom of slavery more certain and more speedy. He was now perfectly aware that the United States could never realize General Washington's modest aspiration, that it might become "a respectable nation," much less a great and glorious one, nor even a nation homogeneous enough to be truly powerful, until slavery had ceased to exist in every part of it.

Those who lived on intimate relations with the general, remarked his growing abhorrence of slavery. During the first weeks of the occupation of the city, he was occasionally capable, in the hurry of indorsing a peck of letters, of spelling negro with two g's. Not so in the later months. Not so when he had seen the torn and bleed ing and blackened backs of fair and delicate women. Not so when he had reviewed his noble colored regiments. Not so when he had learned that the negroes of the South were among the heavendestined means of restoring the integrity, the power, and the splendor of his country. Not so when he had learned how the oppression of the negroes had extinguished in the white race almost every trait of character which redeems and sanctifies human nature.

"God Almighty himself is doing it," he would say, when talking on this subject. "No man's hand can stay it. It is no other than the omnipotent God who has taken this mode of destroying slavery. We are but the instruments in his hands. We could not prevent it if we would. And let us strive as we might, the judicial blindness of the rebels would do the work of God without our aid, and in spite of all our endeavors against it."

AMEN!

CHAPTER XXX.

MILITARY OPERATIONS.

GENERAL MCCLELLAN's orders to the commander of the department of the gulf directed him, first, and before all other objects to hold New Orleans. To that everything was to be sacrificed. Next, he was to seize and hold all the approaches to the city, above and below, on the east and on the west, which included the seizure of all the railroads and railroad property in the vicinity. He was farther directed to co-operate with the navy in an attack upon Mobile, and, if possible, to threaten Pensacola and Galveston. General McClellan added that it was the design of the government to send re-enforcements sufficient for the accomplishment of all these purposes, as well as more detailed instructions. Circumstances prevented the sending of re-enforcements, as we have seen. Nor were particular orders respecting military movements forwarded, except that the attack upon Mobile should be postponed until the completion of some of the monitors. Whatever General Butler accomplished in his department was done by the force he brought with him, and the regiments which he raised in New Orleans.

All the objects of the expedition named in the orders of the commander-in-chief were accomplished except two. One of these was the reduction of Mobile, which was countermanded. The other was the opening of the Mississippi, above Baton Rouge, which was attempted, but found impossible without a very large increase of force. Let us dispose of that matter first.

Attempt to Open the Mississippi.

The troops were no sooner posted around the city than General Butler began to prepare an expedition to ascend the river, to occupy Baton Rouge, and reconnoiter Vicksburg, which was then looming up as the most formidable obstacle which the enemy had yet interposed to the free navigation of the Mississippi. Port Hudson had not then been fortified. Later in the year General Butler had the pain and mortification of seeing the batteries of Port Hudson rising and strengthening daily, he powerless to prevent it. He

gave early warning respecting this new position to the government. Two monitors and five thousand men, he said, could take the place in October, 1862, which a whole fleet and a large army might not be able to reduce six months later. The requisite force could not be sent in time, and it cost many thousands of precious lives to invest it in the summer of 1863. The peninsular losses paralyzed the powers of the government at the points most remote from the scene of those tremendous disasters, and nowhere was their baleful influence more manifest than in the southwest.

To procure river steamboats for transporting the troops was the first difficulty. The rebels had wisely burned all the steamboats at the levee of the city, except one or two small ones. It was known, however, that many boats had been hidden away in the bayous of the Delta; and hence the steamboat hunting to which allusion has before been made. Parties of troops went peering and floundering through the wooded swamps of the adjacent country in search of these hidden vessels. The gun-boats of the navy cruised for the same purpose along the borders of the lakes, and pushed up the tortuous streams that empty into them. Several steamers were obtained in this way, which the unwilling or timid mechanics of New Orleans were compelled to repair.

The most noted of these steamboat hunts was one achieved by Colonel Kinsman, the general's volunteer aid, serving then without pay or rank. Certain information was obtained that two of the largest steamboats belonging to New Orleans had been taken across Lake Pontchartrain, and stowed away somewhere in one of its tributary rivers. The naval vessels had sought for them in vain for several days. It occurred to the Yankee intelligence of Colonel Kinsman that the boats must have been taken higher up one of those streams than a gun-boat could navigate, and that the way to find them was to penetrate the country northward for several miles, and then sweep around the lake from one river to another, near the head of possible steamboat navigation. He won from the general a reluctant consent to this perilous enterprise. A steamboat landed him and a hundred men on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. They marched northward through a dense forest, for two or three days; then turned to the east, exploring all the streams, aided only by the compass and an occasional friendly negro. No traces of steamboats were discovered. The heat was intense in