A General's Pass for Captain William Green

About this item

The story on the paper

This is a travel pass, and in the Civil War a pass could be nearly as powerful as a pistol. Railroads and steamboats in occupied Louisiana moved under military control, and no officer traveled without one of these slips of paper signed at department headquarters. Captain William Green's pass covered trips to Baton Rouge, a river town Union forces had taken in 1862, and anywhere else he might "wish to go on board any Government Transport on his way."

The signature at the bottom belongs to Nathaniel P. Banks of Waltham, Massachusetts, one of the most improbable generals of the war. Banks had been a bobbin boy in the Waltham cotton mills, then a lawyer, a ten-term congressman, Speaker of the U.S. House, and Governor of Massachusetts before President Lincoln made him Major General of volunteers in 1862. From December 1862 until 1864 he commanded the Department of the Gulf from New Orleans, running the occupied state, organizing Louisiana's first wartime elections, and pushing up the Red River.

The date on the pass ends in an ink blot that has eaten through the final digit. Since Banks held the New Orleans command only from late 1862 into 1864, the pass must fall somewhere in that window. The "M. G." beneath his name, for Major General, is intact enough to tell us it is his own hand, not a clerk's.

The people named in it

Type

Military pass

Date

New Orleans, October 21, 186[?]

Place

New Orleans, Louisiana