Benjamin Butler: The Most Hated Man in New Orleans History

The Most Hated Man in New Orleans History

In May 1862, Union General Benjamin Butler occupied New Orleans, and for the next seven months he made himself the most despised man the city had ever known. They called him "Beast Butler." They called him "Spoons Butler." They put his face on the bottom of chamber pots. More than a century and a half later, his name still makes New Orleanians bristle. No one in the city's long history has been hated with quite the same intensity.

Butler was a Massachusetts lawyer and politician who had maneuvered himself into a military command despite having no real military talent. When the Union Navy captured New Orleans in April 1862—the largest city in the Confederacy, falling without much of a fight—Butler was installed as military governor. What followed was a masterclass in how to make an entire city despise you.

The most infamous act was General Order No. 28, issued in May 1862. The women of New Orleans had been making their contempt for the occupying soldiers viscerally clear—spitting on them in the streets, pouring the contents of chamber pots from balconies onto their heads, turning their backs and lifting their skirts. Butler's response was to declare that any woman who insulted a Union soldier would be treated as "a woman of the town plying her avocation"—essentially, as a prostitute.

The order worked. The harassment stopped almost immediately. But the outrage it generated was nuclear. The Confederacy declared Butler an outlaw. The British Parliament debated the order. Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation ordering that Butler be treated as a felon if captured. In New Orleans, Butler became the embodiment of Yankee tyranny.

The "Spoons" nickname came from allegations that Butler and his officers were stealing silverware and other valuables from New Orleans homes—charges that were probably at least partially true. Butler's brother profited handsomely from cotton trading during the occupation, and the general's own finances improved suspiciously during his time in the city.

But Butler's occupation wasn't all villainy. He implemented quarantine measures that virtually eliminated yellow fever—the disease that had killed thousands of New Orleanians in epidemic after epidemic. In a city where yellow fever was practically an annual event, Butler's public health measures saved more lives than most people wanted to admit. He also formed one of the first African American military regiments with Black officers, a progressive act that infuriated the white population even more than the chamber pot order.

He was recalled in December 1862 after seven months, having managed to alienate virtually everyone—Confederates, foreign diplomats, his own superiors, and even some of his troops. He went on to serve in Congress and as governor of Massachusetts, but New Orleans never forgot and never forgave.

Benjamin Butler is a reminder that history is messy. He was corrupt, heavy-handed, and deliberately provocative. He was also effective, innovative in public health, and progressive on race in ways that his era rarely was. New Orleans hated him then, and the ghost of that hatred lingers. But the city he occupied in 1862 was a city that enslaved human beings. Beast Butler had plenty of sins, but he was on the right side of the war.