Never Call Retreat (12 page)

fantry lived in huge town houses, "where they use the plate, drink the wine cellars dry, and in various ways spoil the Egyptians." Most of them were looting and plundering without restraint, believing that General Butler expected it of them. The visiting staff officer found it a relief to go aboard Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut's flagship,
Hartford,
where everything was clean, orderly, and austere, and he wrote: "Oh, for a country where quarter-deck government is in the ascendant."
¹

Of quarter-deck government New Orleans had seen not a trace, and early in January General Banks wrote to General Halleck that the "immense military government" that he had taken over was so busy running the city, collecting taxes, imposing fines and regulating a cunningly devised trade in contraband goods that it had no time to fight the war. The contraband trade he found appalling because it was so crooked, and he wrote that no military operations could be carried on with this mess in the rear. He had been in office only a few days when a citizen came to him with a contract, cleared by the Confederate authorities, for the exchange of Secessionist cotton for Unionist salt, and unblushingly offered Banks $100,000 if he would approve the deal.
²
This, it appeared, was standing operating procedure. The staff officer who had sighed for quarter-deck government noted that Banks "begins to accept the certainty of the fall of the Republic," and to his wife Banks wrote frankly:

"I never despaired of my country until I came here. The strongest government in the world could not bear up under such responsibility and wrong. Everybody connected with the government has been employed in stealing other people's property. Sugar, silver plate, horses, carriages, everything they could lay hands on. There has been open trade with the enemy. No attention has been given to military affairs. . . . We can never succeed, under such direction—our people must give up stealing or give up the country, one or the other."
³

This of course was one of the things General Banks had been sent to New Orleans to correct. His charter of authority was uncomfortably broad. He was to straighten out the weird tangle Butler had created; he was to extend the area of Federal authority so that cotton grown inside the Union lines could reach New Orleans legitimately and not by graft; he was to take care of the hordes of fugitive slaves who kept presenting themselves; and, most important of all, he was to lead an army up the Mississippi, making contact with General Grant, taking that officer and his army under his own command and seeing to it that the river was opened to Union commerce from its headwaters to the Gulf. His military skills were limited—he had suffered much grief at the hands of Stonewall Jackson in Virginia, eight months earlier—but he was a good patriot, with an honest man's capacity for shock at the sight of blatant corruption, and he would do his best. He published the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation for the information of Louisiana, sent 10,000 men upstream to take a firm hold on Baton Rouge, and got down to work.
⁴

The work he had to do was too much for any one man to handle. Along with everything else, he was supposed to bring about the reconstruction of Louisiana as a loyal state in the Union, and hardly anyone in Louisiana wanted to be reconstructed. Part of the fault was Butler's: he had offered nothing but oppression tempered by venality, and so Banks would be both conciliatory and upright. But the trouble went deeper. As far as anyone in Louisiana could see the Confederacy right now looked like a winner, and anyway the war had got past the point where conciliation was possible. The indigestible fact was that Mr. Lincoln had proclaimed freedom for the slaves, and although the flexibility of his proclamation gave General Banks a certain amount of elbow room it was still true that to consent to reunion meant to accept emancipation. This was unacceptable, because of an irrational factor that was almost as strong in the North as in the South; the race that had enslaved the Negro did not in its heart believe that it was possible to live beside the Negro if he lost his chains.

Jefferson Davis, as humane a man as ever lived, had said that emancipation must mean extermination of slaves, and S. L. M. Barlow's Washington tipster, T. J. Barnett, warning at the end of December that the government meant business about emancipation, added as a matter of course that "scenes of horror whose bare imagining chills the heart and congeals the blood" would be bound to follow.
⁵
Abraham Lincoln himself felt a touch of this fear, and he still hoped that the freed Negroes might be sent to some colony far from the United States. The least common denominator here was the belief that the races could not get along as equals. White America had to believe that the Negro was inferior and in need of restraint, because otherwise the whole idea of slavery was morally wrong from the beginning and the Northerner who tacitly consented to it was as guilty as the Southerner who lived with it.

This had especial weight in Louisiana. Before Banks' arrival Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel, leading Union troops in a campaign along the bayous west of New Orleans, protested vigorously when Butler sent him a couple of colored regiments. Since these regiments arrived, said Weitzel, symptoms of a slave insurrection were appearing everywhere. The countryside was in terror, he could not post detachments to keep people safe without breaking up his whole brigade, the moral effect was deplorable, and "I cannot command these Negro regiments." Weitzel was not pro-slavery; he was just a professional who felt that the very idea of turning Negroes into soldiers was outrageous. (He had no way to know that he himself would be the first Union general to lead an army into Richmond and that half of his army then would be composed of Negroes.)

Another soldier who foresaw violence was Brigadier General J. W. Phelps, a regular from Vermont who commanded Camp Parapet, upriver from New Orleans. Early in the summer Phelps told Butler that the fugitive slaves in Louisiana were tough and unruly men who might make real trouble, and he felt that the only remedy was to put them in the army and discipline them. He explained: "Many of the slaves here have been sold away from the border states as a punishment, being too refractory to be dealt with there." These slaves, he went on, wanted justice rather than revenge, but the bad treatment they had had "promises more terror to the retribution when it comes."

Phelps had touched a sore point. By grim tradition, the troublemaking slave farther north was always sold down the river as a last resort; and this gulf coast cotton belt
was
down the river, the end of the line, the ultimate destination for the Negro who refused to be meek and obedient. There was possibly a special reason for men here to be nervous about what might happen if the Negro were made free.

Ben Butler was finally to be the abolitionists' hero, but he was oddly reluctant to use Negro troops. He tried to calm

Weitzel by saying that it was war itself, and not Negro regiments, that spread fear across the plantations, and he rebuked Phelps so sternly that the man finally resigned and went back to Vermont, complaining that Butler wanted to do nothing with the Negroes but make camp laborers out of them. Butier had written to Stanton earlier that the fugitive slaves were usually the worst men on the plantation, not the best, and he said he did not want or need Negro troops, adding that in any case "I believe that this war will be ended before any body of Negroes could be organized, armed and drilled so as to be efficient." Now Butler was gone, and Banks was learning that the problem was unexpectedly intricate.
⁶

He began simply enough by introducing decency and restraint into Federal rule. He got the lieutenants and other ranks out of those town houses, and he reported presently that he had "reduced officers and soldiers in this city to the accommodations provided by the Army regulations." He canceled an existing directive which provided for the closing of any church wherein prayers for the President of the United States were not offered, and he ended the free-and-easy system of bribery, writing to his wife: "I thank God every day that I have no thirst for money—when I see how great the wrongs are to the country committed by the men who are seeking it. I feel that I would as soon be covered with loathsome disease as to share with them their desires & their profits."
⁷
Then he undertook to end the stagnation of local business by reviving agriculture and trade in the occupied area, feeling that people would accept Federal authority more readily if it meant prosperity.

Here the case was difficult. There were cotton and sugar plantations that produced nothing because the slaves had all run away. Banks wanted to get the planters back in business, but if they were to produce they had to have gangs of laborers and the laborers refused to co-operate. Banks had publicly explained that the war was bound to mean the end of slavery, even though the Emancipation Proclamation did exempt occupied Louisiana, but these abandoned plantations would never start raising crops again unless the Federal government lent a hand; and on January 29 Banks issued a regulation to govern the subject.

The gist of this was that slaves who had left their "employment" must nevertheless work for a living and that the occupation authorities would see to it that they did. A Sequestration Committee of army officers was appointed to devise a yearly system of paid labor for the idle plantations. When the program was accepted by the planters, "all the conditions of continuous and faithful service, respectful deportment, correct discipline and perfect subordination shall be enforced on the part of the Negroes by the officers of the government." A member of the Commission wrote that as he understood this a planter would compensate his workers by setting aside one-twentieth of his crop for their benefit; once he agreed to this the army would make sure that he got his laborers. Banks assured the Commissioners that he would not use force and would depend entirely on moral suasion to make the slaves return to their masters; but he rejected a clause stipulating that the whole deal would rest on the consent of the slaves, and it was undeniably true that moral suasion exerted by a government which controlled all of the food and had all of the bayonets could look remarkably like outright compulsion, especially when the government talked stiffly about correct discipline and perfect subordination. The planters displayed enthusiasm for the operation, and the system went into effect; not quite slavery in the old style, but not exactly freedom either. Banks considered it a proper first step in the transition from slave to free labor.
⁸

At the very least it was designed to conciliate Secessionist planters, even though it would evoke bitter complaint from the radical Republicans up north; and the general now was ready to approach the purely military part of his assignment. Like all of his other tasks, this one turned out to be larger than he had originally supposed.

In his entire department Banks had approximately 36,000 men, of whom about 31,000 could be listed as present for duty, equipped, which was how the army described men who could be used in combat. Most of these were only partly trained and had never made a campaign or fought in a battle, and many of them had been enlisted for nine-month terms. There were numerous places that had to be garrisoned, starting with New Orleans itself, and General Banks found that when all of these were taken care of he would have a field army of between 12,000 and 14,000 men. This was the force with which he was supposed to go up the Mississippi and join hands with General Grant.

That after all was the central part of his assignment. It was an attractive assignment, because Banks' commission as major general dated a long way back and he would outrank any Federal general he met; and he had a War Department directive specifically telling him to assume command over Grant, or any other Federal commander in the Valley, as soon as he made contact. The trouble was that Grant's army was somewhere on the far side of Vicksburg, more than 150 miles from Baton Rouge in an air line, much farther by the winding course of the river. Between Grant and Banks was General John Pemberton, with a Confederate army of unknown strength, and when Banks started up the river he got no more than twenty-five miles from Baton Rouge before he ran into the southern anchor of Pemberton's Mississippi River defensive line—a formidable set of trenches and gun pits on high ground overlooking the river at a place called Port Hudson. Port Hudson was held by some 11,000 men, ably commanded by Major General Franklin Gardner, and Banks quickly concluded that he was not strong enough to take the place. One way or another he would have to go around it.
⁹

Not far above Port Hudson the Red River came in from the northwest to join the Mississippi. It drained a rich agricultural country, it was the highway for most of the supplies the Confederacy got from the trans-Mississippi, and if the Federals possessed it they could impose a severe handicap on Pemberton. By going west of the Mississippi and using two rambling waterways, the Atchafalaya and the Teche, Banks could get up to the Red River without going near Port Hudson. He would have to be careful, because the Confederates had troops in west Louisiana and also in Mobile, and unless he guarded his rear carefully these might squeeze in behind him and pinch him off from his base.
¹⁰
Still, to take Port Hudson seemed impossible, and Banks settled at last for a drive toward the Red River.

It may have been his best choice. But the Red River was a man-trap, a road that led off to the northwest, off to nowhere. A Federal army moving up this river would keep getting farther and farther away from Grant, Pemberton, and the Mississippi; much worse, it would be moving straight into one of the richest cotton-producing areas on earth.

Cotton was all-corrupting, no matter how honest a soldier might be; Banks had been around New Orleans long enough to see what it could do. But he knew that in theory at least cotton could get to the market without bribery, as a New Englander he understood the importance of cotton, and after the move got under way he wrote Halleck a long letter about the high attractions of this Red River country.