The Best Specimen of a Tyrant: The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane Hospital

7. “The First Negro Hospital”

S E V E N The First Negro Hospital At midnight on August 6, Halbert Paine walked ashore a liberated man. He spent the night inspecting the perimeter, a series of rifle pits spread in a semicircle through the eastern edge of town. Over the following days he raced to construct new and stronger positions around the arsenal grounds. He sent infantry companies into the countryside to recruit black field hands—and their wives, if they were willing to dig. No house servants need apply.1 For Paine this was a labor of love. The tyrant was dead. At last he was free to make a name for himself. “Oh what dreams of fame and glory danced before my eyes between the 7th and 20th days of this month!” he confessed to his wife. “I should surely have won a very high position amongst the generals of our army.”2 Apparently Fred Boardman was not so paranoid after all. The fantasies of the gaunt, bespectacled visionary Halbert Paine were much like his own. He reorganized the barracks and hospital buildings, emptied the penitentiary, and sent the prisoners to New Orleans, where many were soon outfitted in Union blue. He also ordered the wounded and sick evacuated to New Orleans. When Van Norstrand learned that patients from his hospital had been left to the mercy of hard-hearted civilians, he stormed to the levee and kicked civilian passengers onto the sun-blasted deck, moved his patients into the shady interior, and posted a guard over the ice bucket. Even so, according to a doctor on the receiving end, many of the sick “were enveloped in their winding 90฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant sheets before they reached New Orleans.”3 Paine refused an order from General Butler to burn the city. Dozens of houses and several arsenal buildings (including Van Norstrand ’s “perfect” hospital) did need to be destroyed to create clear fields of fire.4 But Paine held out against leveling public institutions like the statehouse and the asylum or damaging the commercial and residential districts beyond what was necessary for the defense of their position. Butler relented, and thus did Paine add another feather to his cap.5 With his conscience as his guide he had once again prevailed against a formidable superior. Paine was itching for a fight, but he had to settle for a duel of words with a former vice president. A letter arrived under a flag of truce. Major General John C. Breckinridge, C.S.A., was irate. He charged that Union forces were violating the rules of war by destroying private property, arming slaves, and forcing white citizens to load coal onto Union boats. Cease and desist, Breckinridge threatened, or he would “raise the black flag and neither give nor ask quarter.”6 Paine worked up a response and read it to Van Norstrand. The destruction of property was military necessity, he told Breckinridge, and therefore not a violation of the rules.7 Furthermore, forces under his command would not sink to the level of Breckinridge’s troops regardless of atrocities already committed against Union soldiers by the other side. Then he plunged his own sword: “I shall never raise that black flag which all civilized nations abhor. But I shall try to maintain the flag which you have so often promised to defend.”8 But the prize Paine craved for all his hard work—a showdown on the battlefield—was not to be. Late in the month Butler ordered him to bring his forces south to defend New Orleans. Meanwhile, Breckinridge marched north to Port Hudson and put his soldiers to work converting the surrounding bluffs into a hornet’s nest of artillery and rifle pits, a little brother to Vicksburg upriver. Paine was proud of his treatment of the blacks who worked for him. “At Vicksburg Genl Williams left 500 crying on the bank of the river,” he wrote his wife later from Carrollton. “But when I left [Baton Rouge] I brought away every man, woman and child that wished to come and they are all now well taken care of, well fed, well covered in tents and happy. God only knows what sincere satisfaction it gives me to see the poor wretches so happy.”9 He kept a young man named William Bird as a personal servant. The light-skinned Bird, Paine wrote, was the son “of a...