Note 92 — Part II
Reading edition
The most definite picture, and the best possible of the state of the persons of color in Louisiana, is to be found in Parton's "Butler in New Orleans." History will never agree about Gen. Butler. He is alternately execrated by the South, sneered at by the North, written down by his contemporary officers, and canonized by the abolitionists. If he did nothing else worthy of record, at least he gave the splendid militia composed of the free men of color a chance to prove their loyalty to the union by entering the Civil War as fighters.
We are indebted to him for the pictures he draws of the slave population of Louisiana; of the wealth and beauty of the free men and women of color. Their population was 18,647. "The best blood of the South flows in the veins of these free people of color," he writes, "and a great deal of it, for the darkest of some of them were about the complexion of Daniel Webster." Parton, "General Butler in New Orleans," p. 517.