how essential it was that the soldiers, who would soon be obliged to defend the city, should be spared as far as possible from unusual fatigue-duty, and inclosed a peremptory order for the performance of the work by the negroes.  By the same messenger he also sent a confidential letter, which I wrote at his dictation, in which, in terms of the warmest friendship and honest appreciation of General Phelps’s exalted courage, sincere patriotism, and other noble qualities, he begged him not to place himself in an attitude of hostility to his commanding officer.  A more delicate, generous, or considerate letter I never read; but it was of no avail.  General Phelps persisted in his refusal to obey, and tendered his resignation.  What did General Butler do?

He would have been justified in the arrest and court-martial of General Phelps, and few men could resist so good an opportunity to assert their authority; but he knew that General Phelps had been for years the victim of the Slave Power, until his mind had become so absorbed in detestation of the institution that he was conscientiously and inexorably opposed to the slightest step that could even remotely be construed as assisting in its support.  Moreover, General Butler’s esteem for General Phelps was deep and sincere; and those who know the General well will readily understand how repugnant to his nature is the abrupt change from warm friendship to open hostility.

But to recur to my question,—­What did General Butler do?  He simply forwarded General Phelps’s resignation to Washington, with the earnest request that the Government would proclaim some policy in regard to the contrabands, and shortly after, learning that the story of an intended attack on the city at that time was a canard, allowed the matter to drop.  When, a little later, the enrolment of negroes in the United States’ service was in order, where were they so promptly enlisted and equipped as in the grand old “Department of the Gulf”?

Reading the other day the retaliatory resolutions of the Rebel Congress recalled to my mind the terrible earnestness with which the General declared in New Orleans, “For every one of my black soldiers who may be murdered by their captors, two Rebel soldiers shall hang.”  And I know he meant it.

* * * * *

The London “Times” has said that General Butler is a “monster of cruelty,” devoid of every sentiment of benevolence or tenderness, and the cry has been taken up and echoed by the press of Continental Europe.  Perhaps he is; but the thirty-four thousand poor people of New Orleans whom he fed every day refuse to believe it.  I could wish that some of these libellers of his humanity had been in New Orleans to see the character of the crowd that thronged his office from morning till night.  There were persons of almost every condition and color,—­the great majority being poor and wretched men and women, who brought their every grief and trouble to lay at