Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, 1862–1863 95
far north as Baton Rouge to “punish with the last severity every guerrilla attack
and burn the property of every guerrilla found murdering your soldiers.” 15
With the nearest Confederate army several days’ march from the area of Union
occupation and irregular warfare just beginning, federal authorities devoted a great
deal of time to civil affairs. Much of this attention involved the international commerce
that was New Orleans’ lifeblood, especially the cotton trade, but part had to
do with relations between white slaveholders and their black labor force. Sometimes
the two spheres seemed to overlap, as when the consul who represented the
commercial interests of Prussia and Hamburg in New Orleans asked for help in
retrieving two of his slaves, who had escaped to Camp Parapet just west of the
city. Phelps had opened the camp to escaped slaves since the earliest days of the
occupation. 16
Butler had asserted on the day he landed that “property, of whatever kind, will
be held inviolate.” He now found his force of some ten thousand men occupying “a
tract of country larger than some States of the Union,” as he explained to Secretary
of War Stanton, and he wanted to avoid disturbing the “planters, farmers, mechanics,
and small traders [who] have been passive rather than active in the rebellion.”
After receiving complaints about Phelps and Camp Parapet, Butler ordered him to
drive out “all unemployed persons, black and white.” To do so would put escaped
slaves in danger of capture by their former masters. 17
Fortunately for Camp Parapet’s black residents, a flood threatened and the
army needed their labor to avert a disaster. General Butler’s chief of engineers, 1st
Lt. Godfrey Weitzel, inspected the levees upriver from New Orleans on 23 May.
He found “water running over at some points, and at a great many others . . . nearly
level with the top.” Any further rise, or a heavy wind, could cause a breach. Camp
Parapet would be “completely untenable,” New Orleans would be inundated “and
upon the receding of the water . . . so unhealthy, as to endanger our occupation of
it.” Weitzel recommended that Butler should use one hundred laborers, presumably
white, and “all the negroes now at Camp Parapet,” to shore up the levees. 18
While the residents of Camp Parapet struggled against the rising river, new
arrivals swelled their numbers. During the first six months of Union occupation,
some twenty thousand black refugees converged on New Orleans and drew Army
rations. “My commissary is issuing rations to the amount of nearly double the
amount required by the troops. This to the blacks,” Butler told Army Chief of Staff
Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck on 1 September. A planter on Bayou La Fourche, west
of New Orleans, called the exodus “a perfect stampede.” General Phelps saw the
men among them as potential recruits for the Union Army. At the end of July, he
submitted requisitions for clothing, equipment, and ordnance to outfit “three regi-
15 OR, ser. 1, 15: 25 (“punish”), 447 (“most fully”), 450–57.
16 Benjamin F. Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During
the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols. ([Norwood, Mass: Plimpton Press], 1917), 1: 564–65 (hereafter
cited as Butler Correspondence).
17 OR, ser. 1, 6: 707, 719 (“property”); 15: 439 (“a tract of country”), 440 (“planters, farmers”),
443 (“all unemployed”).
18 1st Lt G. Weitzel to Maj G. C. Strong, 23 May 1862 (no. 319), Entry 1756, Dept of the Gulf,
Letters Received (LR), pt. 1, Geographical Divs and Depts, Record Group (RG) 393, U.S. Army
Continental Cmds, National Archives (NA).