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"No one can appreciate more fully than myself the holy, self-sacrificing labors of the sisters of charity. To them our soldiers are daily indebted for the kindest offices. Sisters of all mankind, they know no nation, no kindred, neither war nor peace. Their all-pervading charity is like the boundless love of 'Him who died for all,' whose servants they are, and whose pure teachings their love illustrates.

"I repeat the expression of my grief, that any harm should have befallen your society of sisters; and I cheerfully repair it, as far as I may, in the manner you suggest, by filling the order you have sent to the city for provisions and medicines.

"Your sisters in the city will also farther testify to you, that my officers and soldiers have never failed to do to them all in their power to aid them in their usefulness, and to lighten the burden of their labors.

"With sentiments of the highest respect, believe me, your friend, "BENJAMIN F. BUTLER.

"SANTA MARIA CLARA,

"Superior and Sister of Charity."

The relief afforded by Order No. 55, liberal as it was, did but alleviate the distresses of the poor. The whole land was stricken. The frequent marching of armed bodies swept the country of the scanty produce of a soil deserted by the ablest of its proprietors. In the city, life was just endurable; beyond the Union lines, most of the people were hungry, half naked, and without medicine.

"The condition of the people here," wrote General Butler to General Halleck, September 1st, "is a very alarming one. They literally come down to starvation. Not only in the city, but in the country; planters who, in peaceful times, would have spent the summer at Saratoga, are now on their plantations, essentially without food. Hundreds weekly, by stealth, are coming across the lake to the city, reporting starvation on the lake shore. I am distributing, in various ways, about fifty thousand dollars per month in food, and more is needed. This is to the whites. My commissary is issuing rations to the amount of nearly double the amount required by the troops. This is to the blacks.

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They are now coming in by hundreds-say thousands-almost daily. Many of the plantations are deserted along the "coast," which, in this country's phrase, means the river, from the city to Natchez. Crops of sugar-cane are left standing, to waste, which would make millions of dollars worth of sugar.”

Such were some of the fruits of this most disastrous and most

beneficent of all wars. Such were some of the difficulties with which the commander of the Department of the Gulf had to contend during the whole period of his administration. Clothed with powers more than imperial, such were some of the uses to which those powers were devoted.

The government sustained Order No. 55. In December, the money derived from it having been exhausted, the measure was repeated.

"NEW ORLEANS, December 9, 1862.

"Under General Order No. 55, current series, from these head-quarters, an assessment was made upon certain parties who had aided the rebellion, 'to be appropriated to the relief of the starving poor of New Orleans.'

"The calls upon the fund raised under that order have been frequent and urgent, and it is now exhausted.

"But the poor of this city have the same, or increased necessities for relief as then, and their calls must be heard; and it is both fit and proper that the parties responsible for the present state of affairs should have the burden of their support.

"Therefore, the parties named in Schedules A and B, of General Order No. 55, as hereunto annexed, are assessed in like sums, and for the same purpose, and will make payment to D. C. G. Field, financial clerk, at his office, at these head-quarters, on or before Monday, December 15, 1862."

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE WOMAN ORDER.

Ir concerns the people of the United States to know that secession, regarded as a spiritual malady, is incurable. Every one knows this who, by serving on "the frontiers of the rebellion," has been brought in contact with its leaders. General Rosecrans knows it. General Grant knows it. General Burnside knows it. General Butler knows it. True, a large number of Southern men who have been touched with the epidemic, have recovered or are recovering. But the hundred and fifty thousand men who own the

slaves of the South, who own the best of the lands, who have always controlled its politics and swayed its drawing-rooms, in whom the disease is hereditary or original, whom it possesses and pervades, like the leprosy or the scrofula, or, rather, like the falseness of the Stuarts and the imbecility of the Bourbons-these men will remain, as long as they draw the breath of life, enemies of all the good meaning which is summed up in the words, United States. It is from studying the characters of these people that we moderns may learn why it was that the great Cromwell and his heroes called the adherents of the mean and cruel Stuarts by the name of "Malignants." They may be rendered innoxious by destroying their power, i. e., by abolishing slavery, which is their power; but, as to converting them from the error of their minds, that is not possible.

General Butler was aware of this from the beginning of the rebellion, and his experience in New Orleans was daily confirmation of his belief. Hence, his attitude toward the ruling class was warlike, and he strove in all ways to isolate that class, and bring the majority of the people to see who it was that had brought all this needless ruin upon their state; and thus to array the majority against the few. Throwing the whole weight of his power against the oligarchy, he endeavored to save and conciliate the people, whom it was the secret design of the leaders to degrade and disfranchise. He was in New Orleans as a general wielding the power of his government, and as a democrat representing its principles.

The first month of his administration was signalized by several warlike acts and utterances, aimed at the Spirit of Secession; some of which excited a clamor throughout the whole secession world, on both continents, echoes of which are still occasionally heard. The following requires no explanation:

"NEW ORLEANS, May 13, 1862. "It having come to the knowledge of the commanding general that Friday next is proposed to be observed as a day of fasting and prayer, in obedience to some supposed proclamation of one Jefferson Davis, in the several churches of this city, it is ordered that no such observance be had.

“Churches and religious houses are to be kept open as in time of profound peace,' but no religious exercises are to be had upon the supposed authority above mentioned."

This was General Order No. 27. The one next issued, the famous Order No. 28, which relates to the conduct of some of the women of New Orleans, can not be dismissed quite so summarily.

One might have expected to find among the women of the South many abolitionists of the most “radical” description. As upon the white race the blighting curse of slavery chiefly falls, so the women of that race suffer the consequences of the system which are the most degrading and the most painful. It leads their husbands astray, debauches their brothers and their sons, enervates and coarsens their daughters. The wastefulness of the institution, its bungling stupidity, the heavy and needless burdens it imposes upon housekeepers, would come home, we should think, to the minds of all women not wholly incapable of reflection. I am able to state, that here and there, in the South, even in the cotton states, there are ladies who feel all the enormity, and comprehend the immense stupidity of slavery. I have heard them avow their abhorrence of it. One in particular, I remember, on the borders of South Carolina itself, a mother, glancing covertly at her languid son, and saying in the low tone of despair:

"You cannot tell me anything about slavery. We women know what it is, if the men do not."

But it is the law of nature that the men and women of a community shall be morally equal. If all the women were made, by miracle, perfectly good, and all the men perfectly bad, in one generation the moral equality would be restored-the men vastly improved, the women reduced to the average of human worth. Consequently, we find the women of the South as much corrupted by slavery as the men, and not less zealous than the men in this insolent attempt to rend their country in pieces. In truth, they are more zealous, since women are naturally more vehement and enthusiastic than men. The women of New Orleans, too, all had husbands, sons, brothers, lovers or friends, in the Confederate army. To blame the women of a community for adhering, with their whole souls, to a cause for which their husbands, brothers, sons and lovers are fighting, would be to arraign the laws of nature. But then there is a choice of methods by which that adherence may be manifested.

When General Butler was passing through Baltimore, on his way to New Orleans, he observed the mode in which the Union

soldiers stationed there were accustomed to behave when passing by ladies who wore the secession flag on their bosoms. The ladies, on approaching a soldier, would suddenly throw aside their cloaks or shawls to display the badge of treason. The soldier would retort by lifting the tail of his coat, to show the rebel flag doing duty, apparently, as a large patch on the seat of his trousers. The general noted the circumstance well. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, a more decent way could be contrived to shame the heroines of secession out of their silly tricks.

The women of New Orleans by no means confined themselves to the display of minute rebel flags on their persons. They were insolently and vulgarly demonstrative. They would leave the sidewalk, on the approach of Union officers, and walk around them into the middle of the street, with up-turned noses and insulting words. On passing privates, they would make a great ostentation of drawing away their dresses, as if from the touch of pollution. Secession colors were conspicuously worn upon the bonnets. If a Union officer entered a street car, all the ladies in it would frequently leave the vehicle, with every expression of disgust; even in church the same spirit was exhibited-ladies leaving the pews entered by a Union officer. The female teachers of the public schools kept their pupils singing rebel songs, and advised the girls to make manifest their contempt for the soldiers of the Union. Parties of ladies upon the balconies of houses, would turn their backs when soldiers were passing by; while one of them would run in to the piano, and thump out the Bonny Blue Flag, with the energy that lovely woman knows how to throw into a performance of that kind. One woman, a very fine lady, too, swept away her skirts, on one occasion, with so much violence as to lose her balance, and she fell into the gutter. The two officers whose proximity had excited her ire, approached to offer their assistance. She spurned them from her, saying, that she would rather lie in the gutter than be helped out by Yankees. She afterward related the circumstance to a Union officer, and owned that she had in reality felt grateful to the officers for their politeness, and added that Order No. 28 served the women right. The climax of these absurdities was reached when a beast of a woman spat in the faces of two officers, who were walking peacefully along the street.

It was this last event which determined General Butler to take