[CHAP. XVI.

supplies of starving men who can be profitably employed to this end. A little of the labor and effort spent upon the streets and public squares which was uselessly and inanely wasted upon idle fortifications, like that about the United States mint, will place the city in a condition to insure the health of its inhabitants. It will not do to to shift the responsibility from yourselves to the street commissioners, from them to the contractors, and them to the sub-contractors through all the grades of civic idleness and neglect of duty.

Three days since I called the attention of Mr. Mayor to this subject, and nothing has been done.

Respectfully,

BENJ. F. BUTLER,

Major-General, Commanding.

GENERAL ORDERS,
HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF, Numbers 24.
New Orleans, May 10, 1862.

Acting Brigadier General George F. Shepley, Colonel Twelfth Maine Volunteers, is hereby appointed military commandant of New Orleans.

All officers on duty in this city or in Algiers, except officers of the division staff, will report to him.

By command of Major-General Butler:

GEO. C. STRONG,

Assistant Adjutant-General.

GENERAL ORDERS,
HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF, Numbers 25.
New Orleans, May 9, 1862.

The deplorable state of destitution and hunger of the mechanics and working classes of this city has been brought to the knowledge of the commanding general. He has yielded to every suggestion made by the city government, and ordered every method of furnishing food to the people of New Orleans that government desired. No relief by those officials has yet been afforded. This hunger does not pinch the wealthy and influential, the leaders of the rebellion, who have gotten up this war, and are now endeavoring to prosecute it without regard to the starving poor, the workingman, his wife and child. Unmindful of their suffering fellow-citizens at home, they have caused or suffered provisions to be carried out of the city for Confederate service since the occupation by the United States forces.

Lafayette Square, their home of affluence, was made the depot of stores and munitions of war for the rebel armies, and not of provisions for their poor neighbors. Striking with the vile, the gambler, the idler, and the ruffian, they have destroyed the sugar and cotton which might have been exchanged for food for the industrious and good, and regrated the price of that which is left by discrediting the very currency they had furnished while they eloped with the specie; as well that stolen from Orleans, thus leaving them to ruin and starvation. Fugitives from justice many of them, and others their associates, staying because too puerile and insignificant to be objects of punishments by the clement Government of the United States. They have betrayed their country; they have been false to every trust; they have shown themselves inca-