Capture of New Orleans

• 1. Introduction

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  The Capture of New Orleans, fought from the 25th of April to the 1st of May 1862, decided the fate of the Confederacy's largest and most prosperous city in a matter of days. What made it a genuine shock was not just the speed of the Union advance, but the direction. Confederate generals had prepared for an attack from the north. Instead, Flag Officer David G. Farragut came up from the Gulf of Mexico, fighting past two fortified positions that were supposed to be impregnable.

  New Orleans was not simply a Southern city. It was founded by the French, governed for a time by Spain, and home at the outbreak of the Civil War to French-speaking Creoles, refugees from the Haitian Revolution, free and enslaved Black residents, and waves of Irish and German immigrants. It was also, by 1860, one of the greatest ports in the world, with trade worth 500 million dollars passing through its docks and 33 different steamship lines calling there. The city's population of an estimated 168,675 made it larger than the next four largest Southern cities combined.

  What happened after Farragut's guns fell silent is the stranger story. A Union general named Benjamin Butler would occupy the city with 5,000 soldiers and govern it in ways that outraged the British House of Lords, inspired Confederate President Jefferson Davis to order his execution if captured, and ultimately kept the city both orderly and alive.

• 2. A City Unlike the South

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  New Orleans owed its exceptional character to geography and history working together in unusual ways. Founded by the French and later held by Spain, the city developed a Catholic, cosmopolitan culture distinct from the Protestant-dominated British colonies that formed most of the American South. Its population was diverse by any measure of the era.

  The Mississippi River made the city's wealth possible. Before the steamboat, keelboat men would carry cargo downriver, then break their boats apart for lumber in New Orleans and walk home to Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, or Illinois. The steamboat changed that calculation entirely. With enough power to move against the Mississippi's strong current, it turned New Orleans into a two-way trading hub connecting the Gulf Coast to the entire interior river network of the Upper South and Midwest.

  Two inventions above all others amplified that position. The cotton gin arrived in 1793, and its effect on the value of the crop moving through New Orleans was enormous. By the time of the Civil War, the combination of the cotton gin, steamboat traffic, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had turned cotton into the dominant product passing through the city's port. The price of prime field hands rose by 21 percent in 1848 alone, and the domestic slave trade grew steadily through the 1850s as a result. The electrical telegraph reached New Orleans in 1848, and the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad connected the city to Canton, Mississippi, a distance of over 200 miles, tying the port ever more tightly to the continent behind it.

• 3. The Road to Secession

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  Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 did more than repel a British invasion during the War of 1812. It launched Jackson's political career and eventually produced a reshaping of American democracy. Along with Martin Van Buren, Jackson founded the Democratic Party and a political movement known as Jacksonian democracy, which left a deep mark on New Orleans and the American Southwest.

  One tangible result was Fort Jackson, a star fort built to support Fort St. Philip and bar the Mississippi Delta from invasion. That fort, named after Jackson himself, would later become one of the two positions Farragut had to fight past to reach New Orleans.

  The political rivalry between the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs intensified over decades, eventually producing the Republican Party, founded specifically to counter the spread of slavery into territories acquired through Jacksonian expansion. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 as the Republican candidate, the secession crisis followed almost immediately. Governor Thomas Overton Moore of Louisiana moved quickly. He ordered the Louisiana militia to seize the Federal arsenal at Baton Rouge and the Federal forts guarding the approaches to New Orleans, including Fort Jackson, Fort St. Philip, Fort Pike, the New Orleans Barracks, and Fort Macomb. Those military orders were issued on the 8th of January 1861, even before the secession convention had voted. The convention itself, representing only 5 percent of Louisiana's citizens, voted the state out of the Union 113 to 17.

• 4. Farragut's Passage

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  Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan called for splitting the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River. Capturing New Orleans was among the first necessary steps. In mid-January 1862, Flag Officer David G. Farragut took his West Gulf Blockading Squadron toward the mouth of the river with exactly that mission.

  Between Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, two masonry forts positioned roughly 70 miles downriver from New Orleans, Farragut faced the main Confederate defensive line. Historian Allan Nevins described its weaknesses plainly: Confederate leaders had made a tardy, ill-coordinated effort to muster at the river barrier, hampered by poverty, disorganization, lack of skilled engineers, friction between state authorities and Richmond, and want of foresight.

  From the 18th to the 28th of April, Farragut bombarded the forts and then fought his way through them in the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, getting thirteen ships upriver on the 24th of April. What remained to defend the city itself was thin: roughly three thousand militiamen armed with shotguns, facing a Union fleet that sat elevated above the streets of New Orleans behind the swollen river. With high water outside the levees, Union ships could fire directly down into the city's buildings below. Major General Mansfield Lovell, commanding Confederate Department 1 in Louisiana, grasped the situation immediately. He loaded his troops and supplies aboard the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad and sent them to Camp Moore, 78 miles north. All artillery and munitions were routed to Vicksburg. His final message to Richmond read: "The enemy has passed the forts. It is too late to send any guns here; they had better go to Vicksburg."

• 5. Defiance and Surrender

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  At 2:00 p.m. on the 25th of April, Farragut sent Captain Bailey, First Division Commander, ashore to accept the city's surrender. Armed mobs met the Union officers at city hall. General Lovell and Mayor Monroe both refused to surrender. William B. Mumford pulled down a Union flag that marines had raised over the former United States Mint, and the crowd destroyed it.

  Farragut chose not to shell the city. He moved upriver to subdue fortifications north of New Orleans instead, and on the 29th of April he returned with 250 marines to remove the Louisiana State flag from City Hall. By the 2nd of May, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward declared the city "recovered" and announced that mail was allowed to pass.

  Butler's reckoning with Mumford would come later. On the 7th of June, Butler executed Mumford for the flag incident, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis responded in December 1862 with General Order 111, denouncing Butler as a felon deserving capital punishment who, if captured, should be held for execution. That confrontation captured the spirit of an occupation that had barely begun. The man arriving to govern the Confederacy's largest city, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, came with 5,000 soldiers, a talent for political maneuvering, a reputation for controversy, and almost no military experience worth mentioning.

• 6. Butler's Rule

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  Benjamin Butler entered New Orleans on the 1st of May 1862 facing a city of an estimated 150,000 residents, in his own words "all hostile, bitter, defiant, explosive, standing literally in a magazine, a spark only needed for destruction." His total military command numbered 15,000 troops, and he received no reinforcements during the seven months he governed, from May to December 1862.

  His General Order No. 28, issued on the 15th of May, became the most infamous act of his tenure. After two weeks of occupation during which women subjected Union soldiers to physical avoidance, verbal abuse, and worse, Butler ordered that any woman who insulted a Union officer or soldier "shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." The order was quoted in full at the British House of Lords, which called it "one of the grossest, most brutal, and most unmanly insults to every woman in New Orleans." The Earl of Carnarvon said the imprisonment of women constituted "a more intolerable tyranny than any civilized country in our day has been subjected to." The Saturday Review compared Butler to "a very mean and pitiful kind of savage." He became known abroad and at home as "The Beast."

  His other controversies were numerous. He seized 800,000 dollars deposited in the office of the Dutch consul and imprisoned the French champagne producer Charles Heidsieck. He earned the nickname "Spoons" for allegedly taking silverware from Southern homes where he stayed. Merchants sold chamber pots with his face painted on the bottom. Yet the occupation produced genuine results. Butler's sanitation policies extended the city's sewer system, set up pumps, and helped prevent the summer yellow fever epidemic that many expected, possibly saving thousands of lives. He exported 17,000 bales of cotton to the northeast and revived international trade. He raised the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd infantry regiments from existing free Black militia units by September 27 and November, respectively, forming the Corps D'Afrique, which numbered 3,122 soldiers and officers and was unusual in having Black officers leading it.

• 7. Slavery Undone by Occupation

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  Before Butler arrived in New Orleans, he had already struck the institution of slavery a strategic blow while commanding Fort Monroe on the Virginia Peninsula. His "contraband of war" policy declared that enslaved people who had been used for Confederate military labor could be kept within Union lines rather than returned under the Fugitive Slave Law. Congress later made the policy official.

  Once Butler occupied New Orleans, word spread rapidly through enslaved communities across Confederate territory that Union forces were not enforcing the fugitive slave laws. Enslaved people fled toward Union lines in large numbers. The Confederacy, realizing its labor force would defect at the first opportunity, stopped deploying enslaved workers near Union positions, losing both the labor and the strategic advantage it had counted on to offset the larger Union army.

  The Jefferson Davis plantations at Davis Bend, Mississippi, 20 miles downriver from Vicksburg, illustrated what followed. After Davis's older brother Joseph fled in May 1862, the workers who remained revolted, took possession of the property, revealed the locations of valuables to Union forces, and armed themselves with guns and newspapers. They fought to prevent any Confederate attempt to recapture the area. On Louisiana plantations, planters wrote directly to Butler and to Generals Shepley and Butler asking for protection from enslaved people they feared were on the verge of revolt. A rebellion within the broader rebellion was eroding Confederate authority across Louisiana from the moment Butler's troops arrived, and Butler recognized it as an indispensable political tool for his occupation.

• 8. End of the Occupation

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  The Confederate counterattack came on the 5th of August in the form of a naval and army assault on Baton Rouge, led by Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge, in what became the Battle of Baton Rouge. Confederate forces were driven out of the city. Neither side held the ground afterward, but the battle's most significant outcome was what did not happen: no popular uprising in support of the Confederacy, no broad momentum for retaking New Orleans. Chester G. Hearn attributed Butler's political hold on the poorer classes directly: "The huge, illiterate majority, the poorer classes of blacks and whites, would have starved had Butler not fed and employed them, and thousands may have died had his sanitation policies not cleansed the city of disease."

  By December, the political math in Washington had shifted. Democratic victories in Illinois and Ohio on the 4th of November alarmed the Lincoln administration far more than Butler's provocations in New Orleans. Secretary of State William H. Seward, one of Butler's political opponents, championed a new strategy: an invasion of Texas, promoted as favorable to a pro-Union community of German-American cotton farmers there. The man chosen to lead it, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks, arrived on the 14th of December 1862, and informed Butler personally that his command was over.

  Banks undertook the siege of Port Hudson and then launched the Red River Campaign in pursuit of Texan cotton. That expedition proved to be a costly failure, producing more destruction and looting than Butler's entire tenure. Farragut's assessment of Butler's administration remained blunt and unambiguous: "They may say what they please about General Butler, but he was the right man in the right place in New Orleans."