Coleman also discusses the situation in two Union states, specifically in St. Louis, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Those were both cities that were under tighter control than most cities in the Union because both were slave states with considerable secessionist sentiment.
Coleman relates this sequence of events in occupied New Orleans. Gen. Benjamin Butler was head of the occupation authority there:
Confederate women in New Orleans, not caring for the Union’s military intrusion into their private lives, met the occupation of their city i open protest of their occupiers. Women emptied chamber pots [i.e., urine and feces] on the heads of Union soldiers, pointedly lifted their dresses, obviously displayed Confederate iconography and flags, threw jeers and taunts as soldiers passed, and blatantly sang rebel songs. Benjamin F. Butler, who was in charge of the Union army’s occupying forces, initially responded to these provocations by issuing his infamous Women’s Order, which stated that Union soldiers were to treat any woman who “insult[ed] or show[ed] contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States” as a “woman of the town plying her avocation.” Whereas women might have previously assumed they could rely on their gender to exempt them from punishment, Butler’s Women’s Order raised the stakes by taking their defiance seriously and instructing Union officers to engage with Confederate women not as women, exactly, but as hostile adversaries. [my emphasis]Coleman describes this as an instance of women's agency in opposing the Union occupation. And that's important to understand. Southern women could be just as sincere traitors against the United States in defense of slavery as their husbands, fathers, brothers, and other male fellow traitors. Southern white women weren't allowed to vote any more than other American women, and they were generally severely disadvantaged in family law and inheritance.
But Southern society was also an "honor society," as the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has described at length in his work. And that meant the men postured as the heroic gentlemen in Sir Walter Scott's romantic novels, which were very popular in the South. Mark Twain mockingly blamed Scott for causing the Civil War.
So there is an element here of the tawdry phoniness of the self-portrayal of gallant Southern gentlemen. At least some of the New Orleans cavaliers must have thought it was much safer to hide behind the women's skirts and let them expose themselves in such public displays of resistance, thinking that the Yankee occupiers would go easier on them. And that occupation authority actions against female protesters would elicit more outrage at the damnyankees.
Butler's Women’s Order turned the symbolism back on the honorable Southern gentlemen hiding behind "their" women by taking the women's agency in the matter seriously. By threatening to charge them with prostitution, Butler showed he wouldn't recognize the "Southern honor" pretense in that situation.
Just to keep things in perspective: No occupation force or even a small-town police force would tolerate people of any age or gender dumping pots of s**t on their heads! In the US in 2020, people doing that would likely be charged with assaulting a police officer. The Women's Order was letting them off easy.
Confederate sympathizers in New Orleans called the general in charge "Beast Butler." He expected the honorable Southern ladies and gentlemen of New Orleans to act like human beings, and they thought he was being the beast.
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