Benjamin F. Butler passes forever from the stage of Louisiana. He knew those ‘entrances’ and those ‘exits’ which an ordinary actor might learn with ease; but that he never quite reached the lofty stature of him who plays the king is more than a verdict of the coulisses. Massachusetts, the great State that mothered him, was to place him later in her chair of honor; while learned Harvard, keener sighted than the populace, was to refuse him her degree.
Banks did not permit his army leisure for rest. Washington having expected certain results from his activity, he needed be quick. Reaching New Orleans on December 14, 1862, he announced on the 18th to Halleck that he had on the 16th ordered, without transhipping troops or stores, 10,000 men, with a battery of artillery, to proceed to Baton Rouge under command of Gen. Cuvier Grover. He knew that Baton Rouge was the first Confederate position on the lower Mississippi, and that eighteen miles above Baton Rouge was Port Hudson, ‘strongly fortified and held by a force of 10,000 or 15,000 men.’ Being a civilian soldier, Banks wore rose-colored glasses. He already was hoping, himself, to move against Port Hudson as soon as the troops in the city could be consolidated with the fleet. At this early stage Banks was clearly a convert to the power of floating batteries.
About the time that Banks was sailing from New York to New Orleans there had been considerable Confederate activity in the shifting about of commanders in Louisiana. Maj.-Gen. Franklin Gardner was ordered to make Port Hudson impregnable; General Ruggles was charged with the duty of pushing-forward its new works, these being by all accounts already formidable. Earl Van Dorn was still at Vicksburg although Pemberton, at Jackson, Miss., was soon to be within its walls. Sibley had already come down from Opelousas, with his newest headquarters for the time at New Iberia; Lieut.-Gen. E. Kirby Smith's
