The Battle of the Handkerchiefs

THE BATTLE OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS Leonard V. Ruber shortly before noon on a bright day in February, 1863, a huge crowd, predominantly women, began to gather at the New Orleans Levee. About 400 paroled Confederate prisoners of war who were to be exchanged upriver were sailing on the steamer Empire Parish under a flag of truce, and the crowd had come to see them off. Long before the hour of departure, the Levee was a jumble of people arriving on foot and in carts, wagons, and carriages. A reporter for Leslies Illustrated Weekly Neiospaper estimated the crowd at between 10,000 and 15,000,J "a large portion of them females wearing secesh badges and many openly waving little rebel flags."2 As the grayclad Confederates assembled for the march to the steamboat, cheering and a great waving of parasols and handkerchiefs greeted them. Ten months earlier, New Orleans had fallen to the Union fleet after Flag Officer David G. Farragut had run his ships past Forts Jackson and St. Philip on the Missisippi below the city. The occupation of the proud metropolis of the South so early in the war had stunned its people. Amid great patriotic excitement, the city had sent its sons to fight for the Confederacy . Many families were then completely out of contact with the menfolk at the front. And then there had been "Beast" Butler! Major General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, in charge of the occupation, had done nothing to endear himself to the populace of New Orleans. The citizenry considered him a ruthless tyrant who nursed a grudge against the South, especially its slaveholders and aristocrats. His every action seemed to reveal an obsession that New Orleans bepunished for seceding from the Union. Indeed, Ben Butler lost little time in trying to stamp out every vestige of Southern sentiment in New Orleans. Leonard V. Huber, a New Orleans collector and historian, is the co-author of The Great Mail (1949) and Lousiana Purchase (1953), as well as author of Advertisements of Lower Mississippi River Steamboats, 1812-1920 (1960). 1 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Mar. 21, 1863. 2 Harper's Weekly, Mar. 21, 1863. 48 Harper's Weekly, Mar. 21, 1863 A Mr. Hamilton of Harper's sketched this view of the incident in New Orleans when Confederate prisoners filed aboard the Empire Parish. Crowds of women stormed onto the decks of the nearby Laurel Hill and, aided by a large gathering on shore, quickly created a crisis for the Federal troops. Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Mar. 21, 1863 An unsympathetic artist for Leslie's drew two sketches of "The Battle of the Handkerchiefs." On the left are pictured happy and partially inebriated Confederate prisoners, who seemed to revel in their predicament . On the right, a Southern "lady" is shown routing one of the Federal guards. During the seven and one-half months that Butler headed the Department of the Gulf, he kept the city practically under martial law, seized private property, forced newspapers to suspend publication, and banished clergymen who refused to pray for the President of the United States. Citizens who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Union were listed as "Registered Enemies of the United States" and subjected to deportation and the confiscation of their property.3 A strange struggle between Butler and the citizens of New Orleans quickly developed. The New Orleaneans, an outspoken lot, despised Butler and all for which he stood, and they went to great pains to show by word and action how they felt. The women, in particular, infuriated the General byfeigning nausea at the approach of Federal officers, or by walking in the street to avoid passing under a United States flag hanging over the sidewalk. Butler claimed that a woman spat in the face of one of his officers on his way to church services and that "one of the ladies of New Orleans" emptied a vessel of dirty water on no less a personage than Flag Officer Farragut as he walked along one of the principal streets.4 Butler retaliated by issuing his notorious "Woman Order"—General Order No. 28, dated May 15, 1862—which directed that his...