Ask Lemmy

You should read about Louisiana (and especially New Orleans, then the largest city in the South) and how ridiculous the whole thing was. Basically, New Orleans didn’t want to secede but the state governor rigged the vote. So, the city surrendered without a shot fired. No casualties on either side. It was even admitted back into the Union and had congressional representation.

But the Union sent down a general from Massachusetts to run the city. He did some good things (like upgrade the sewer system) but women, especially, didn’t like the occupation and Union troops so he issued an edict:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

He basically called New Orleans women prostitutes. And it was a PR disaster so bad that even European newspapers condemned him in editorials. One British newspaper wrote:

If he had possessed any of the honourable feeling which is usually associated with a soldier's profession, he would not have made war on women. If he had even been endowed with the ordinary magnanimity of a Red Indian, his revenge would have been satiated before now. It required not only the nature of a savage, but of a very mean and pitiful kind of savage, to be induced by indignation at a woman's smile to inflict an imprisonment so degrading in its character as that which seems to constitute his favourite punishment, and accompanied by privations so cruel.... It is only a pity that so unadulterated a barbarian should have got hold of an Anglo-Saxon name.

He was popular with free black and poor white residents and not a bad administrator. But he was an incompetent general and politician so he was replaced and sent to take Texas, where he promptly lost.

New Orleans had no major economic or cultural ties to the Confederacy and lots of free black residents so it was just a bizarre occupation where women poured chamber pots on Union soldiers for treating them like whores and he got all pissed off. But he was also good at city management, I guess? I don’t know what to make of his legacy. He probably would have been an amazing mayor of a city in New England but instead got piss and shit thrown on him in a city that is still basically ungovernable.