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ECHOES OF WAR, PORTENTS OF PEACE
New exhibition revisits the occupation of New Orleans
New Orleans, the largest and most prosperous city in the antebellum Deep South, spent most of the Civil War in fetters. Occupied by Union troops in late April 1862, the city emerged from the conflict with its infrastructure intact but its psyche fractured. Occupy New Orleans! Voices from the Civil War taps the experiences of ordinary men and women—Northerners and Southerners alike—to tell the story of the war years. Exhibition visitors will discover that these 19th-century voices sound remarkably modern, for debates over the meaning and cost of occupation continue to this day.
Occupy New Orleans! opens with the naval battle of April 24-25, 1862,
that preceded the city’s surrender. The fall of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, downriver from New Orleans, cleared the way for the arrival of occupying forces commanded by Major General Benjamin F. Butler, who arrived in the city on May 1. Display items range from the monumental—painter Mauritz Frederik De Haas’s panoramic view of Farragut’s Fleet Passing the Forts
below New Orleans—to an intimate series of sketches by William Waud, artist-correspondent for the popular periodical Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper. To illuminate the experience of occupation, the exhibition culls first-person perspectives of wartime New Orleans’s citizens and visitors. Many of these voices emerge from the pages ofTHNOC manuscript
Above: The New Orleans Market—Soldiers Exchanging Rations for Fruit, Etc. (from Harper’s Weekly,); January 24, 1863; print; by Theodore Russell Davis, illustrator, and Gretchen Lansford, watercolorist; THNOC, 1974.25.9.25
Cover: Massachusetts native Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, shown in this 1860s hand-colored lithograph by E. B. and E. C. Kelbgg, succeeded Benjamin F. Butler as commander of the Department of the Gulf in December 1862. (THNOC, 1982.6)
2 Volume XXX, Number 4 — Fall 2013