New Orleans, May 1862
Kizzie Toucoutou, like all the other women of New Orleans, was outraged.
General Benjamin F. Butler, the Yankee-appointed Governor of New Orleans, had announced himself and his new appointment forcefully. Firstly, by hanging a local man for desecrating the Union flag. The General had then set about confiscating the property of those citizens who refused to swear allegiance to that foreign flag, as Kizzie and New Orleanians at large regarded it.
Now, with General Order No 28, he had moved against Southern women.
As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subjected to repeated insults from the women calling themselves ladies of New Orleans, it is ordered that hereafter when any female by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town, plying her avocation.
General Benjamin Butler
For Kizzie it was a move too far.
Butler indeed was a Beast, the name well merited. To call her and the other loyal women of the South ‘women of the town plying their avocation’, could only come from the lips of a man whose country had ‘no gentlemen – just beasts in uniform,’ she wrote to Oxy.
Kizzie was not going to take it lying down. To have Butler or his low seed, name her as a street woman. She would bide her time.
Word quickly spread through the French Quarter of an enterprising potter who was now selling chamberpots complete with General Butler’s portrait on the base of the bowl. Trade was brisk for the new chamberpots, and Kizzie had to queue along with other women eager to ‘baptise the Beast into a good Christian gentleman!’
Amusement ran high as, unknown to General Butler, Kizzie and the women were more loyal to the Confederate cause than even he suspected. The ever pragmatic Southern ladies were contributing to the front-line effort in more ways than by taking up their needles. The urine with which they would baptise Butler was also used as a raw ingredient from which to distil nitre for the manufacture of Confederate gunpowder.
‘We piss on the Yankees in every way now!’ a laughing woman in front of Kizzie, who had just collected her chamberpot, said with glee.
Kizzie’s intent went further than that.