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R SYMPOSIUM
2014 WRC Symposium
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Queen Anne Ballroom, Hotel Monteleone, 214 Royal St.
by their elite status and an accompanying sense of invincibility, spread their opinion of the Union troops across the country and even the Atlantic. According to symposium speaker Jacqueline Glass Campbell, an associate professor at Francis Marion University, many high-society women took every opportunity to ridicule and insult Union soldiers and officers. Frustrated, Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the commander of the occupying forces from April through December of 1862, issued an order declaring that any woman participating in this behavior would be treated as a “woman of the town [a prostitute] plying her avocation.”
“By October of 1862 Butler was the most intensely hated man in the entire Confederacy, not least as a result of his ‘Woman Order,”’ Campbell says. “It was so controversial that even the British government declared that history held no example ‘of so infamous an act.’”
Campbell’s presentation will also look at the political ramifications of Butler’s order. At the time, European recognition of an independent Confederacy was a real possibility, and the repercussions of Butler’s actions extended beyond the nation’s capital, affecting international diplomacy. Campbell also argues that Butler’s response to the women actually gives them more credibility from a historical perspective.
“He actually paid them the respect of recognizing their actions as serious enough to warrant a controversial act,” Campbell says.
Join The Collection this January as Campbell and Lang, along with other Civil War experts from THNOC and around the country, provide a nuanced picture of the wartime experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the nation at large.
—Lauren Noel
Featured Topics and Speakers
The Wild Side of the Civil War in Louisiana:
Considering the Flora and Fauna Kelby Ouchley, biologist/author
A Perfect Season of Stagnation: Union Soldiers and the Military Occupation of New Orleans
Andrew Lang, postdoctoral teaching fellow, Rice University
Republic in Peril: Lincoln and the Diplomacy of the Civil War Howard Jones, university research professor in history, University of Alabama
Seeing the Elephant: Photography and the American Civil War Jeff Rosenheim, curator in charge, Department of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art
“A Unique but Dangerous Entanglement”: Benjamin Butler and Confederate Women in Occupied New Orleans,
May—December 1862
Jacqueline Glass Campbell, associate professor, Francis Marion University
Interpreting the Civil War: Museums and Battlefields Patricia Ricci, director, Confederate Memorial Hall Museum
Michael Fraering, curator, Port Hudson State Historic Site
To register and!or see a full schedule of events, call
(504) 523-4662 or visit www.hnoc.org/programs/symposia.html.
Early registration ends January 3.
The Collections nineteenth annual Williams Research Center Symposium has been made possible with support from these sponsors:
ClearBridge
Advisors
A LEGG MASON COMPANY
Investment Counsel Since 1911
LAPORTE Bywater Woodworks, Inc.
CPAs & BUSINESS ADVISORS
E
PREMIUM
PARKING
Solaris Garage
The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 11