m it was directed
may have been some outlying party.

Cahill's seniority entitled him to the command after Williams fell,
yet during the remainder of the battle Dudley seems to have commanded
the troops actually engaged. Shortly after the close of the action
Cahill assumed the command and sent word to Butler of the state of
affairs.

The Confederates were still to be seen upon the field of battle.
Their force was naturally enough over-estimated. Another attack
was expected during the afternoon, and reinforcements were urgently
called for. Butler had none to give without putting New Orleans
itself in peril. However, during the evening he determined to
release from arrest a number of officers who had been deprived of
their swords by Williams at various times, and for various causes,
mainly growing out of the confused and as yet rather unsettled
policy of the government in reference to the treatment of the
negroes, and to send all these officers to Baton Rouge. Among them
were Colonel Paine of the 4th Wisconsin and Colonel Clark of the
6th Michigan. Since the 11th of June Paine had been in arrest; an
arrest of a character peculiar and perhaps unprecedented in the
history of armies. Whenever danger was to be faced, or unusual
duty to be performed, he might wear his sword and command his men,
but the moment the duty or the danger was at an end he must go back
into arrest. Paine, who was an extremely conscientious officer,
as well as a man of high character and firmness of purpose, had
from the first taken strong ground against the use of any portion
of his force in aid of the claims of the master to the service of
the slave. Williams, strict in his idea of obedience due his
superiors, not less than in his notions of obedience due to him by
his own inferiors in rank, stood upon his construction of the law
and the orders of the War Department, as they then existed; hence
in the natural course of events inevitably arose more than one
irreconcilable difference of opinion. Paine was now ordered to go
at once to Baton Rouge and take command. He was told by Butler to
burn the town and the capitol. The library, the paintings, the
statuary, and the relics were to be spared, as well as the charitable
institutions of the town. The books, the paintings, and the statue
of Washington, he was to send to New Orleans; he was then to evacuate
Baton Rouge and retire with his whole force to New Orleans.

At midnight on the 6th