On the pleasant, bird-chirping morning of 24 April 1862 alarm bells suddenly rang across the city of New Orleans, announcing the Old South was over and the New South had arrived quicker than a hummingbird’s eyeblink. Admiral David “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Farragut and his armada had broken through the last lines of defense below the city (the largest in the Confederacy at the time) and was only a few riverbends away. To say this city of 169,000 citizens, all fearing the same fate of ancient Carthage, was in immediate meltdown mode would be an understatement. The entire population, in an instant, was running in 169,000 different directions at once. The Confederate forces grabbed their steamships and skedaddled. The majority of city politicians collectively remembered a long-promised visit to poor, forgotten Auntie Martha deep in the hinterland wilds and departed as well. Meanwhile, a certain segment of the citizens left behind had decided–if the apocalypse had indeed arrived–they would make the best of it. Like an over-dramatized episode of “The Walking Dead”, riots erupted, looting was rampant, burning things down and settling old scores took precedence over the simple fact that all their old lives were forever changed, forever lost.
Major-General Benjamin F. Butler and his Union army took command of the city on May the 1st. And to say “Beast Butler” would soon become the most hated Yankee for generations to come would be an appropriate summation of his time there. For example, his General Order No. 28 declared that if any sweet, parasol-twirling Southern Belle so much as wrinkled her perky little nose at one of his boys, “she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation.” Arrested. Thrown in the calaboose. Fed a fuzzy-green baloney sandwich for breakfast. And then marched before the magistrate for her five-dollar fine. Outrage ensued! World condemnation! Why, even Jeff Davis proclaimed the Beast an outlaw and put a bounty on and for his head, just his head, still breathing or not! Butler didn’t care. He stole the silver spoons from the most opulent city mansions and then went on to run for president a few years later. So go and so went the spoils of war.
All told, between the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed, New Orleans was an occupied city for around sixteen years, ending with the Compromise of 1877. Sixteen…years…and to say by the time the last bluecoat boarded the last boat out of there that Gilded-Age New Orleans had developed an attitude problem would not be doing it justice. No, no, not by any means. In historical terms, after dealing with floods, fires, those pesky, annoying hurricanes, as well as the usual bouts of yellow fever and other diseases that routinely scourged the population, New Orleanians well knew they were a city that Care had long past forgotten. But this was different. The mindset of all was different. For now, having endured their years of Yankee “house arrest” and the onslaught of carpetbaggers and scalawags and every other charlatan looking to make a dime off their vanquished backs, survival by any means necessary was the new norm, corrupt, heavenly sent, or otherwise. Foremost, of course, by political means, by the maintenance of power and control. And while elsewhere, in cities general, politics was the usual dirty, in-the-gutter, you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours game of who can best fool the public and get their vote, in New Orleans this had become a survival-by-any-means-necessary art form. The New South had arrived.
Still, some things never change. Or as the English journalist Wells observes the city’s current mayoral election in my just-released historical mystery, The Brothers Shaughnessy: “So, New Orleans, you have an election coming, hardly a nod and wink away. Congratulations. This, as you meanwhile witness the same, ever-present, gruesome-and-tedious parade of murder by endless means, the bodies rising to the river’s surface like bloated silverfish or blending well within this or that pile of rotting street-trash; of course, the routine plethora of shootings, knife-tangos, fisticuffs, robberies, assaults, pickpockets, prostitution, and other such vice and mayhem flooding your city streets, deep night or broad daylight, it matters not; to say nothing of the wily safe-crackers and counterfeiters operating incognito, the while. And in all this I reference only the corrupt involvement and acts of your police and city officials. The hoodlum gangs, meanwhile roaming your shady avenues and wide boulevards, are another matter entirely; though, often as not, I surmise that you—the pitiful, exposed public—could little tell the difference between them. However, as your morning and evening rags so indoctrinate you without cease, you do have an election you must now perform. So, congratulations.”