On May 15, 1862, Major General Benjamin F Butler issued General Order No. 28 in New Orleans that Confederate women abusing Union soldiers be treated as whores. A short excerpt:
"But his most notorious edict concerned the rebellious ladies of New Orleans who were flagrantly and ingeniously insulting the “Yankee invaders.” One Union soldier witnessed a female who would “contemptuously lift up her skirt, glare at the soldier,” then walk away. Women spat on soldiers as they walked down the street. Even the highest in command was vulnerable. While walking with one of his subordinates in the French Quarter, Admiral Farragut was doused when a woman emptied her chamber pot as they passed beneath her balcony.
To curb this behavior, Butler issued his infamous General Orders No. 28, known to historians as the “Woman Order.” Any woman affronting Union soldiers would be arrested as a prostitute, an order Butler deemed would “execute itself.”
He was right.
“Since that order,” he wrote a Northern colleague, “no man or woman has insulted a soldier of mine in New Orleans.” Southerners, however, denounced the order as “an open invitation to ravage women of all ranks.”
Butler tolerated no loyalty to the Confederacy, and he was particularly committed to punishing any who would aid and comfort the enemy. When he uncovered a plot by Mayor Monroe and some of his staff to smuggle Confederate parolees out of the city, Butler sent them to be held at Fort Jackson...
...Yet when informed that the wife of a well-known and revered Southern officer was gravely ill and might soon perish, Butler wrote a note offering safe passage if the officer desired to visit her. The favor was unusual, given that sick woman was the wife of New Orleans native General P.G.T. Beauregard, the man responsible for the first shots fired in the war."