nt. "We must also
pay a deserved compliment to the companies of free colored men, all
very well drilled and comfortably uniformed. Most of these companies,
quite unaided by the administration, have supplied themselves with
arms without regard to cost or trouble."[93] On the same day, one of
these colored companies was presented with a flag, and every evidence
of public approbation was manifested.

These men of color in New Orleans were the only organized body of
Negro soldiery on the Confederate side during the Civil War. They were
accepted as part of the State militia forming three regiments and two
batteries of artillery. In the report of the Select Commission on the
New Orleans Riots, Charles W. Gibbons testified that when the war
broke out, the Confederacy called on all free people to do something
for the seceding States, and if they did not a committee was appointed
to look after them, to rob, kill, and despoil their property. Gibbons
himself was advised by a policeman to enlist on the Confederate side
or be lynched. This accounts for the seeming disloyalty of these free
men of color.[94] The first victories of the South made their leaders
overconfident thereafter and the colored troops were dismissed.

When Unionists finally got control of New Orleans they found it a city
of problems. Wherever there was a Union fort, slaves, the famous
"contrabands of war," made their appearance, and in a few months
General Butler, then in command, found himself face to face with one
of the most serious situations ever known in the history of a State.
Obviously, the only thing to do was to free all of the slaves, but
with Gen. Hunter's experience in South Carolina to warn him, and with
Lincoln's caution, Butler was forced to fight the problem alone. He
did the best he could under the circumstances with this mass of black
and helpless humanity. The whipping posts were abolished; the star
cars--early Jim Crow street cars--were done away with. Those slaves
who had been treated with extreme cruelty by their masters were
emancipated, and by enforcing the laws of England and France, which
provided that no citizen of either country should own slaves, many
more were freed. But the problem increased, the camps filled with
runaway slaves, the feeling grew more intense, and the situation more
desperate every day. Gen. Butler asked repeatedly for aid and
reenforcement from the North. Vicksburg was growing stronger, Port
Hudson above the cit