DECEMBER 23, 1862:
Jefferson
Davis declares Union General Benjamin “Beast” Butler a felon for occupying
Southern cities, for insulting white ladies, for forcing unwilling white people
to work, and specifically for arming freed black men. Davis calls it "servile insurrection."
Butler was hardly a
“hail-fellow-well-met!” type---he had a history of dramatic severity for
sure---but most of his “felonies” had more to do with stringent Military
Governance or gratuitously giving offense, than committing war crimes.
The
Proclamation reads in part:
"BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES. A PROCLAMATION.
Now therefore, I
Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and in their
name do pronounce and declare the said Benjamin F. Butler to be a felon
deserving of capital punishment. I do order that he be…treated simply as a
public enemy of the Confederate States of America but as an outlaw and common
enemy of mankind, and that in the event of his capture… do cause him to be immediately
executed by hanging…The soldiers of the United States have been invited and
encouraged by general orders to insult and outrage the wives, the mothers and
the sisters of our citizens…Helpless women have been torn from their homes and
subjected to solitary confinement, some in fortresses and prisons and one
especially on an island of barren sand under a tropical sun; have been fed with
loathsome rations that had been condemned as unfit for soldiers, and have been
exposed to the vilest insults…The African slaves have not only been excited to
insurrection by every license and encouragement but numbers of them have
actually been armed for a servile war–a war in its nature far exceeding in
horrors the most merciless atrocities of the savages…all negro slaves captured
in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the
respective States to which they belong to be dealt with according to the laws
of said States."
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