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The best that could be said for Grant in June was that he remained undaunted despite having lost 55,000 men since May. But the sheer fact he was still marching forward was vitally important for Northern morale in light of the humiliating end to General Banks’s Red River campaign. Lincoln’s ability to shield his friend did not extend to outright disaster, and Banks’s replacement to lead the XIX Corps, Major General Edward Canby, was appointed even before the defeated Federals arrived back in New Orleans.

Banks retained his title of commander of the Department of the Gulf, but his role was purely administrative. General Canby began a complete reorganization of his army. Among the changes was the formation of a “marine brigade” under Colonel L.D.H. Currie, whose task was to guard the Mississippi River from guerrilla attacks.34 Dr. Charles Culverwell, however, chose to return to his family. May was the start of the sickly season, when swarms of mosquitoes rose like shimmering clouds out of the swamps. But the only assignment that would take him back to New York was escort duty for eleven soldiers who had become insane during the Red River campaign. Only seven survived the journey. Culverwell could cope no longer. Shortly afterward he resigned from the army and returned to England, never again to repeat the experiment of military life or indeed of being a doctor.29.6

The return of General Banks to New Orleans coincided with Edward Lyulph Stanley’s arrival in the city. The Englishman was told that Banks had been laboring hard to improve the condition of freed slaves, having established nine military schools to teach literacy to the black recruits and ninety-five regular schools for black children.36 But Stanley quickly realized that the white population were putting up a fierce resistance to Banks’s reforms. “The whites here have been accustomed to maltreat the negroes without any notice being taken of it,” he observed to his family on May 17.37 He went to a supposedly well-run plantation—the same one visited by William Howard Russell in 1861 and the Marquis of Hartington in 1862—and thought it exposed the myth of “the contented slave.” He was appalled by the dirty state of their hovels, by their despair, and by their fear of him as a white man. “I am quite satisfied that [the plantation] is being very badly managed in the interest of the negro,” he declared.38

Stanley doubted how much more Banks could achieve without the wholehearted support of his staff. One New Orleans resident admitted to Stanley that she preferred the certainty of Butler’s misrule to the arbitrary and capricious administration that now governed the lives of ordinary citizens. Banks had little control over his subordinates, she complained; rather than step in to curb abuses, “he was so undecided and would keep putting you off, and giving you no satisfactory answer.”39

Mary Sophia Hill, the former British schoolteacher who had become a Confederate nurse after her twin brother, Sam, enlisted in the army, was one of the victims of General Banks’s poor administration. She had left the South after the Battle of Gettysburg to visit relatives in Britain. But on her return to New Orleans in the spring of 1864, she had found herself under increasing scrutiny from Federal officials. “Imagine how my English blood boiled with indignation at being treated like a criminal,” she complained to her brother on May 20. “I will never forget it [sic] to the Yankees—never; not that it would be possible for me to hold them in greater contempt than I do at present.”40

Mary had attracted attention because she always seemed to have a letter or parcel to deliver to someone in the city. She received two visits from a stranger named Ellen Williams, who offered to convey any letters to the South since she was departing for Galveston. Ellen also tried to give her a note from Confederate general Dick Taylor addressed to a Mrs. Hill, which Mary refused to take: “I told her I was not Mrs. Hill and the letter was not for me.” But Mary injudiciously gave her three