e best he could for the
humblest soldier in his army. His further military career I can only
briefly sketch. He planned two fierce and calamitous assaults upon
Port Hudson; errors no doubt, but Grant and Lee at the moment were
making just such errors. The Red River campaign was a disastrous
failure, but Banks had every handicap which a general could suffer:
an insufficient force, a demand from the Administration that he
should attend to a civil reordering when only fighting was in place,
subordinates insolent and disobedient. And finally nature herself took
arms against him, for the Red River fell when, by all precedents, it
should have risen. It was an enterprise which his judgment utterly
disapproved, the difficulties of which he faced with good resolution.
It ended his career, for though once at a later time he went to
Congress, he ever afterwards stood a discredited figure, dying, as I
have heard, poor and broken-hearted in obscurity. His State has tried
to render him a late justice by setting him up in bronze on Beacon
Hill. It was done through opposition and the statue is sneered at more
often than admired. He was an able man I believe and meant well, and
I for one find it pathetic that the lines of my old commander did not
fall more pleasantly.

Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure. On
the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange
city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing
sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up. As I
ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed
it with a crash and retired within. Through a crevice in the blinds
he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his
bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest. His rule
at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and
dreaming of what the future had in store for him. His burly frame was
relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast
of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table. I studied him
at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose. In those
days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said
in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule
of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod
over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity
and executive f