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2. Great Pride in the Business
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2 GREAT PRIDE IN THE BUSINESS Federal troops under the command of Benjamin F. Butler occupied New Orleans on May 1, 1862. Butler faced numerous problems in the occupied city. Food was in short supply, and the Crescent City's notorious lack of sanitation raised the specter of disease and fever as the hot summer months approached. None of these problems was more pressing, however, than that posed by the hundreds of slaves who fled into Union lines. Abandoning plantations, they straggled daily into the city, men, women, and children—thousands of mouths to feed.1 Some of the black refugees attached themselves to Union regiments, who put them to work doing chores the men in blue disliked doing for themselves. The 12th Connecticut Infantry, for example, had forty black women who washed clothes and waited on the officers in addition to seventy men who cleaned and repaired the regiment's barracks in the Custom House.2 Not all of the Union commanders were content to employ refugees as cheap labor. Brigadier General John W. Phejps, an ardent and crusty aboli1 . Winters, Civil War in Louisiana, 143-45. 2. John William De Forest, A Volunteer's Adventures: A Union Captain's Record of the Civil War, ed. James H. Croushore (New Haven, 1946), 26-27. 12 2 G R E A T P R I D E I N T H E B U S I N E S S tionist from Vermont, decided to increase the strength of his detachment by arming some of the fugitive slaves who had congregated around hisbivouac at Camp Parapet near Carrollton a few miles upriver from New Orleans.3 On July 30, Phelps asked Butler for "arms, accoutrements, clothing, camp and garrison equipage, &c., for three regimentsof Africans, which I propose to raise for the defense of this point."4 Although Butler had used fugitive slaves, "contrabands" as he called them, to repair levees, widen drainage ditches, and strengthen fortifications, he had resisted appeals from Northern abplitionists to enlist them as soldiers in the Union army.5 There were two reasons for his hesitance. First,Washington disapproved. Lincoln was afraid that arming fugitive slaves would push the border states of Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky to side with the South. In fact, Lincoln had already forced David Hunter in South Carolina to disband the unofficial black regiment he had raised there.6 Asecond reason was Butler's own opinion regardingthe aptitude of blacksformilitary service. Blacks were "horrified of firearms," Butler had written Secretaryof War Edwin M. Stanton three weeks after arrivingin New Orleans. It would be "ludicrous in the extreme" to put weapons in their hands, he had asserted. "I am inclined to the opinion that John Brownwas right in his idea ofarming the negro with a pike or spear instead of a musket, if they are to be armed at all."7 There would be no weapons or uniforms for Phelps to give the contrabands. Use them instead to cut down all the trees between Camp Parapet and Lake Pontchartrain, Butler told the abolitionist.8 Phelps was livid when he receivedButler's response to his request. "I must 3. A Union soldier wrote his mother from Ship Island that "General Phelps is very much liked here by the men and hated professionallyby the officers. He is a rough old bugger[,] seems to think just as much of a private as an officer" (John Guild to his mother, March 15, 1862, in John H. Guild Letters,LALMVC). 4. Phelps to Butler,July 30,1862, OR, Vol. XV, pp. 534-35; Wilson,Black Phalanx, 183. 5. OR, Vol. XV, p. 440; Messner, "Federal Army and Blacks," 6-46; Salmon P. Chase to Butler, July 31, 1862, in Benjamin Franklin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During a Period of the Civil War, ed. Jessie Ames Marshall (5 vols.; Norwood, Mass., 1917), II, 131-34. 6. Howard C. Westwood, Black Troops, White Commanders, and Freedmen During the Civil War (Carbondale,111., 1992), 64-65. 7. Butler to Stanton, May 25, 1862, OR, Vol. XV, p. 441. 8. Phelps refers to Butler's order in his letter to R. S. Davis (Butler's AAG), July 31,1862, OR, Vol. XV, p. 535. 13 [18.212.102.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:22 GMT) T H E L O U I S I A N A N A T I V E G U A R D S state that while I am...