5 the unbridled reign of treason and the vices engendered by slavery. By your wi:e sanitary regulations you also kept the material atmosphere pure, and thus excluded pestilence. As a former resident of New Orleans, I know that to have accomplished this in a city so unhealthy, and where all previous efforts in that direction had failed, must be regarded as one of your noblest achievements. I have little doubt that among its beneficial results was the preservation of the lives of at least one- half of your command. Your troops were all unacclimated. The yellow fever prevailed at nearly all the neighboring ports oa the Gulf and in the West Indies, and, but for your vigorous quarantine and strict sanitary regulation within the city, would have become epidemic in New Orleans. In that event, your whole army would have been attacked by it —for none of the unacclimated escape—and it is known that at least fifty per cent of the cases prove fatal. By means like these you husbanded your small command and slender means in such a masterly manner that during eight months service you did not call upon the Government for a dollar, except for the pay of your soldiers; and you turned over to your successor two thousand more troops than you had received from your Government, with military lines embracing two-thirds of the population, and nearly that proportion of the territory of the State of Louisiana. The brief sketch I have thus given of your achievements in the Department of the Gulf might be indefinitely extended. But I have said enough to show that you have made a record of which any commander, however distinguished, might justly feel proud, and which the present and future generations will not fail to appreciate. We, sir, glory in the fact that our country and our institutions can, in an emergency, produce from private life ready-made, military commanders, statesmen and jurists of the highest type, and all combined in a single individual. In your late command you have been called upon to exercise the functions appertaining to each of these, and it must be conceded that you acquitted yourself admirably in all. As a commander, you did not prosecute war in the spirit of peace, but with the iron-handed rigor which its necessities demand and its usages justify, and which is an indispensable element of success. As a jurist and lawyer, you proved yourself a perfect master of every have safely inferred, from this clamor of its bitter enemies, that that policy was just and Wise. But, eir, the loyal people of the North were not ignorant of your acts or your policy. They saw that your capacious and fertile mind, your resolute will, your dauntless courage, and your earnest patriotism, rendered you master of the situation, and fitted you, above all other men, for the difficult position in which you were placed. They saw that you fully comprehended your duty as a military commander, as a legislator, as a judge, as an executive officer, and as a tamer of rebel madmen and mad women—for your sphere of duty embraced all these; and they saw that your firm will stood ever ready to execute what your judgment dictated and your conscience approved. In thus acting, you strengthened the cause of your Government, which is the cause of justice and right. But you at the same time weakened the cause of its enemies, which is the cause of oppression and wrong. For this they hate and revile you; for that we esteem and praise you. But, sir, you shocked the sensibilities of Se- cessia and all its partisans in the outer world by that terrible decree, called Order No. 28. That order, as I understand it, was simply intended to extend a salutary police arrangement, which had long existed in New Orleans, so as to bring within its jurisdiction and restraint the improper conduct of those aristocratic dames who gloried in heaping insults on the soldiers of the Union. It had the desired effect. It improved their manners and their modesty; for which, sir, I doubt not, they will in due time return you thanks instead of execrations, as now. The presence of our wives and daughters here to-night proves that the ladies of New York regard that far-famed order, both in its intention and effects, as proper and salutary. You gave lessons equally usefhl to the sterner sex. You taught them to respect the authority of the United States, and to fear its power. You treated as enemies of your country all who avowed themselves as such, and, in strict accordance with the usages of war and the laws of the United States, you confiscated their property and appropriated it to the support of their own poor, and in providing for the wants of your army. By these and kindred measures you purified the jnoral, social, and political atmosphere of a city in which each had been rendered most noxious by
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