Wood County Reporter

Farewell Address of Gen. Butler,

General Butler, just before his departure, issued the following eloquent address to the people of New Orleans:

Citizens of New Orleans:—It may not be inappropriate, as it is not inopportune in occasion, that there should be addressed to you a few words at parting, by one whose name is to be hereafter indissolubly connected with your city.

I shall speak in no bitterness, because I am not conscious of a single personal animosity. Commanding the Army of the Gulf, I found you captured, but not surrendered; conquered, but not orderly; relieved from the presence of an army, but incapable of taking care of yourselves. So far from it, you had called upon a foreign legion to protect you from yourselves. I restored order, punished crime, opened commerce, brought provisions to your starving people, reformed your currency, and gave you quiet protection, such as you had not enjoyed for many years.

While doing this, my soldiers were subjected to obloquy, reproach and insult. And now, speaking to you, who know the truth, I here declare that whoever has quietly remained about his business, affording neither aid nor comfort to the enemies of the United States, has never been interfered with by the soldiers of the United States.

The men who had assumed to govern you and to defend your city in arms having fled, some of your women flouted at the presence of those who came to protect them. By a simple order—No. 28—I called upon every soldier of this army to treat the women of New Orleans as gentlemen should deal with the sex, with such effect that I now call upon the just minded ladies of New Orleans to say whether they have ever enjoyed so complete protection and calm quiet for themselves and their families as since the advent of the United States troops.

The enemies of the country, unrepentant and implacable, I have treated with merited severity. I hold that rebellion is treason, and that treason persisted in is death, and any punishment short of that due a traitor, gives so much clear gain to him from the clemency of the government.—Upon this thesis have I administered the authority of the United States, because of which I am not unconscious of complaint. I do not feel that I have erred in too much harshness, for that harshness has ever been exhibited to disloyal enemies of my country and not to loyal friends. To be sure I might have regaled you with the amenities of British civilization and yet been within the supposed rules of civilized warfare. You might have been smoked to death in caverns, as were the Covenanters in Scotland by the command of a general of the royal house of England; or roasted like the inhabitants of Algiers during the French campaign: your wives and daughters might have been given over to the ravisher as were the unfortunate dames of Spain in the Peninsula war; or you might have been scalped and tomahawked as our mothers were at Wyoming by savage allies of Great Britain in our own revolution; your property could have been turned over to indiscriminate "loot" like the palace of the Emperor of China; works of art which adorned your buildings might have been sent away like the paintings of the Vatican; your sons might have been blown from the mouths of cannon like the Sepoys at Delhi; and yet all this would have been within the rules of civilized warfare as practiced by the most polished and the most hypocritical nations of Europe. For such acts the records of the doings of some of the inhabitants of your city towards the friends of the Union, before my coming, were a different (?) provocative and justification.

But I have not so conducted. On the contrary, the worst punishment inflicted, except for criminal acts punishable by every law, has been banishment with labor to a barren island, where I encamped my own soldiers before marching here.

It is true I have levied upon the wealthy rebel and paid out nearly half a million of dollars to feed forty thousand of the starving poor of all nations assembled here, made so by this war.

I saw that this rebellion was a war of the aristocrats against the middling man; of the rich against the poor; a war of the landowner against the laborer; that it was a struggle for the retention of power in the hands of the few against the many; and I found no conclusion to it save in the subjugation of the few and the disenthralment of the many. I therefore felt no hesitation in taking the substance of the wealthy, who had caused the war, to feed the innocent poor who had suffered by the war. And I shall now leave you with the proud consciousness that I carry with me the blessings of the humble and loyal under the roof of the cottage and in the cabin of the slave, and so am quite content to incur the sneers of the salon or the curses of the rich.

I found you trembling at the terrors of servile insurrection. All danger of this I have prevented by so treating the slave that he had no cause to rebel.

I found the dungeon, the chain and the lash your only means of enforcing obedience in your servants. I leave them peaceful, laborious, controlled by the laws of kindness and justice.

I have demonstrated that the pestilence can be kept from your borders.

I have added a million of dollars to your wealth in the form of new land from the batture of the Mississippi.

I have cleansed and improved your streets, canals and public squares, and opened new avenues to unoccupied land.

I have given you freedom of elections, greater than you ever enjoyed before.

I have caused justice to be administered so impartially, that your own advocates have unanimously complimented the judges of my appointment.

You have seen, therefore, the benefit of the laws and justice of the Government against which you have rebelled.

Why, then, will you not all return to your allegiance to that Government—not with lip service, but with the heart?

I conjure you, if you desire ever to see renewed prosperity, giving business to your streets and wharves—if you hope to see your city become again the mart of the western world, fed by its rivers for more than three thousand miles, draining the commerce of a country greater than the mind of man hath ever conceived—return to your allegiance.

If you desire to leave to your children the inheritance you received of your fathers—a stable constitutional government— if you desire that they should in the future be a portion of the greatest empire the sun ever shone upon—return to your allegiance.

There is but one thing that stands in the way.

There is but one thing that at this hour stands between you and the government, and that is slavery.

The institution, cursed of God which has taken its last refuge here, in His providence will be rooted out as the tares from the wheat, although the wheat be torn up with it.

I have given much thought to this subject.

I came among you, by teachings, by habit of mind, by political position, by social affinity, inclined to sustain your domestic laws, if by possibility they might be with safety to the Union.

Months of experience and of observation have forced the conviction that the existence of slavery is incompatible with the safety either of yourselves or of the Union. As the system has gradually grown to its present huge dimensions, it were best if it could be gradually removed: but it is better, far better, that it should be taken out at once, than it should longer vitiate the social, political and family relations of your country. I am speaking with no philanthropic views as regards the slave, but simply of the effect of slavery on the master. See for yourselves.

Look around you and say whether this saddening, deadening influence has not all but destroyed the very framework of your society.

I am speaking the farewell words of one who has shown his devotion to his country, at the peril of his life and fortune, who in these words can have neither hope nor interest, save the good of those whom he addresses; and let me here repeat, with all the solemnity of an appeal to Heaven to bear me witness, that such are the views forced upon me by experience.

Come, then, to the unconditional support of the government. Take into your own hands your own institutions, remodel them according to the laws of nations and of God, and thus attain that great prosperity assured to you by geographical position, only a portion of which was heretofore yours.

Benj. F. Butler.