task was easy for the energetic general.

Early in the year 1862, the capture of New Orleans was undertaken, and
General Butler was placed in command of the department of the Gulf, and
fifteen thousand troops entrusted to him. After innumerable delays, the
general with a part of his force arrived, March 20, 1862, at Ship
Island, near the delta of the Mississippi River, at which rendezvous the
rest of the troops had already been assembled. From this post the
reduction of New Orleans was executed.

On the morning of April 24, the fleet under command of Captain Farragut
succeeded in passing the forts, and a week later the transport
Mississippi with General Butler and his troops was alongside the levee
at New Orleans.

On December 16, 1862, General Butler formally surrendered the command of
the department of the Gulf to General Banks. What General Butler did at
New Orleans during the months he was in command in that city is a matter
of history, and has been ably chronicled by James Parton. He there
displayed those wonderful qualities of command which made him the most
hated, as well as the most respected, Northern man who ever visited the
South. He did more to subject the Southern people to the inevitable
consequence of the war than a division of a hundred thousand soldiers.
He even conquered that dread scourge, yellow fever, and demonstrated
that lawlessness even in New Orleans could be suppressed.

The new channel for the James River, known as the Dutch Gap, planned by
General Butler, and ridiculed by the press, but approved by the officers
of the United States Engineer Corps, remains to this day the
thoroughfare used by commerce.