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profoundly shaped by the battles he was too young to fight. His father, Edward, emigrated from Ireland in 1845; his mother, Josephine Cross, a Lafourche Parish native, died when Murphy was three years old. Edward was a loving but oft-absent father: he entrusted Murphy’s education to family friends, enlisted in Company B of the Louisiana Guard in
1861,	and died the following August at the Battle of Cedar Run in Virginia. “Let the remembrance of the glorious cause in which he fell take away in part the bitterness of the pang which you will feel in parting from him,” wrote a female cousin to the 12-year-old orphan, “and let your aim in life be to grow up as honored and respected as he was.”
Remember the cause he did. An ambitious businessman—he would eventually serve as president of the Louisiana Sugar and Rice Exchange for more than 20 years—Murphy cemented his postwar social position through membership in the Crescent City White League. In mid-September 1874 he joined other members of the league in the Battle of Liberty Place, a violent protest against Reconstruction rule. “If I had
U.xcle Abe. “Hello! Ben, is that you? Glad to sec you!”
Bitler. ‘‘Ye*, Uncle Abk. Got through with that T^ew Orleans Job. Cleaned them out and sc-rubbed them up! Any more scrubbing to gh't out f’
Above: Published less than a month after President Lincoln pulled Butler off the job in New Orleans, this Harper’s Weekly cartoon from January 1863 depicts the general in a none-too-flattering light as a menial laborer. (THNOC, gift of Clay Watson, 1979.108)
Above Right: Scene in New Orleans—The 26th Mass. Vol., Col. Farr, Practising [sic] Street Firing in Carondelet Street; between 1862 and 1865; print; THNOC, 1974.25.9.4
not participated,” Murphy wrote his wife, “I should have considered myself forever an outcast from our city. Now I have the honor and am proud to say that even though we do not redeem the State, I at least assisted in the noble effort.” Occupation, redemption, reconstruction—charged words to this day, all too often freighted with racial and sectional antagonism. Physical traces of the Civil War and Reconstruction, such as memorials or landmarks, are relatively sparse in New Orleans. The nation as a whole, meanwhile, remains, at times, divided by ideology, race, and class. These divisions have always been starkly visible in New Orleans.
But visible, too, is a vision for the future grounded in—and strengthened by—the struggles of the past. It’s a vision of racial, cultural, and spiritual commingling. Occupy New Orleans! invites visitors to listen carefully to voices from the past, the better to refine their own vision for a just future.
—Jessica Dorman
This photoprint reproduction, Hanging Mumford in Front of the U.S. Mint (between 1950 and 1973), depicts the execution of William B. Mumford, hanged in 1862for tearing down an American flag in defiance of the Union occupation. (THNOC, 1974.25.9.178)
The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 5