punishment upon the city than it had already received. There was a brutal
scene at the hotel, where a drunken sergeant, with a pair of tailor's shears,
insisted on cutting the buttons from the uniform of an elegant gray-headed old
brigadier, who had just come in from Johnston's army; but he bore himself
modestly and very handsomely through it. His staff was composed of
fine-looking, stalwart fellows, evidently gentlemen, who appeared intensely
mortified at such treatment. They had no clothes except their rebel uniforms,
and had, as yet, had no time to procure others, but they avoided disturbances
and submitted to what they might, with some propriety, and with the general
approval of our officers, *have resented."

The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by
the native whites. General Grant, indeed, urged that only white troops be used
to garrison the interior. But the Negro soldier, impudent by reason of his new
freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun, was more than Southern temper could
tranquilly bear, and race conflicts were frequent. A New Orleans newspaper
thus states the Southern point of view: "Our citizens who had been accustomed
to meet and treat the Negroes only as respectful servants, were mortified,
pained, and shocked to encounter them . . . wearing Federal uniforms and
bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets . . . . They are jostled from the
sidewalks by dusky guards, marching four abreast. They were halted, in rude
and sullen tones, by Negro sentinels."

The task of the Federal forces was not easy. The garrisons were not large
enough nor numerous enough to keep order in the absence of civil government.
The commanders in the South asked in vain for cavalry to police the rural
districts. Much of the disorder, violence, and incendiarism attributed at the
time to lawless soldiers appeared later to be due to discharged soldiers and
others pretending to be soldiers in order to carry out schemes of robbery. The
whites complained vigorously of the garrisons, and petitions were sent to