CHAPTER LVI.

THE CRESCENT CITY.

On the morning of January 1st, 1866, I arrived at New Orleans.

It was midwinter; but the mild sunny weather that followed the first chill days of rain, made me fancy it May. The gardens of the city were verdant with tropical plants. White roses in full bloom climbed upon trellises or the verandas of houses. Oleander trees, bananas with their broad drooping leaves six feet long, and Japan plums that ripen in February, grew side by side in the open air. There were orange-trees whose golden fruit could be picked from the balconies which they half concealed. Magnolias, gray-oaks and live-oaks, some heavily hung with moss that swung in the breeze like waving hair, shaded the yards and streets. I found the roadsides of the suburbs green with grass, and the vegetable gardens checkered and striped with delicately contrasting rows of lettuce, cabbages, carrots, beets, onions, and peas in blossom.

The French quarter of the city impresses you as a foreign town transplanted to the banks of the Mississippi. Many of the houses are very ancient, with low, moss-covered roofs projecting over the first story, like slouched hat-brims over quaint old faces. The more modern houses are often very elegant, and not less picturesque. The names of the streets are Pagan, foreign, and strange. The gods and muses of mythology, the saints of the Church, the Christian virtues, and modern heroes, are all here. You have streets of “Good Children,” of “Piety,” of “Apollo,” of “St. Paul,” of “Euterpe,” and all their relations. The shop-signs are in French, or in French and English. The people you meet have a foreign air and speak a foreign tongue. Their complexions range through all hues, from the dark Creole to the ebon African. The anomalous third class of Louisiana—the respectable free colored people of French-African descent—are largely represented. Dressed in silks, accompanied by their servants, and speaking good French,—for many of them are well educated,—the ladies and children of this class enter the street cars, which they enliven with the Parisian vivacity of their conversation.

The mingling of foreign and American elements has given to New Orleans a great variety of styles of architecture; and the whole city has a light, picturesque, and agreeable appearance. It is built upon an almost level strip of land bordering upon the left bank of the river, and falling back from the levee with an imperceptible slope to the cypress and alligator swamps in the rear. The houses have no cellars. I noticed that the surface drainage of the city flowed _back_ from the river into the Bayou St. John, a navigable inlet of Lake Ponchartrain. The old city front lay upon a curve of the Mississippi, which gave it a crescent shape: hence its poetic _soubriquet_. The modern city has a river front seven miles in extent, bent like the letter S.

The broad levee, lined with wharves on one side and belted by busy streets on the other, crowded with merchandise, and thronged with merchants, boatmen, and laborers, presents always a lively and entertaining spectacle. Steam and sailing crafts of every description, arriving, departing, loading, unloading, and fringing the city with their long array of smoke-pipes and masts, give you some idea of the commerce of New Orleans.

Here is the great cotton market of the world. In looking over the cotton statistics of the past thirty years, I found that nearly one half the crop of the United States had passed through this port. In 1855–1856 (the mercantile cotton year beginning September 1st and ending August 31st) 1,795,023 bales were shipped from New Orleans,—986,622 to Great Britain (chiefly to Liverpool); 214,814 to France (chiefly to Havre); 162,657 to the North of Europe; 178,812 to the South of Europe, Mexico, &c.; and 222,100 coastwise,—151,469 going to Boston and 51,340 to New York. In 1859–1860, 2,214,296 bales were exported, 1,426,966 to Great Britain, 313,291 to France, and 208,634 coastwise,—131,648 going to Boston, 62,936 to New York, and 5,717 to Providence. This, it will be remembered, was the great cotton year, the crop amounting to near 5,000,000 bales.

One is interested to learn how much cotton left this port during the war. In 1860–1861, 1,915,852 bales were shipped, nearly all before hostilities began; in 1861–1862, 27,627 bales; in 1862–1863, 23,750; in 1863–1864, 128,130; in 1864–1865, 192,351. The total receipts during this last year were 271,015 bales. From September 1st, 1865, to January 1st, 1866, the receipts were 375,000 bales; and cotton was still coming. The warehouses on the lower tributaries of the Mississippi were said to be full of it, waiting for high water to send it down. There had been far more concealed in the country than was supposed: it made its appearance where least looked for; and such was the supply that experienced traders believed that prices would thenceforth be steadily on the decline.

A first-class Liverpool steamer is calculated to take out 3000 500-pound bales, the freight on which is 7–8ths of a penny per pound,—not quite two cents. The freight to New York and Boston is 1 1–4th cents by steamers, and 7–8ths of a cent by sailing-vessels.

I put up at the St. Charles, famous before the war as a hotel, and during the war as the head-quarters of General Butler. It is a conspicuous edifice, with white-pillared porticos, and a spacious Rotunda, thronged nightly with a crowd which strikes a stranger with astonishment. It is a sort of social evening exchange, where merchants, planters, travellers, river-men, army men, (principally Rebels,) manufacturing and jobbing agents, showmen, overseers, idlers, sharpers, gamblers, foreigners, Yankees, Southern men, the well dressed and the prosperous, the rough and the seedy, congregate together, some leaning against the pillars, and a few sitting about the stoves, which are almost hidden from sight by the concourse of people standing or moving about in the great central space. Numbers of citizens regularly spend their evenings here, as at a club-room. One, an old plantation overseer of the better class, told me that for years he had not missed going to the Rotunda a single night, except when absent from the city. The character he gave the crowd was not complimentary.

“They are all trying to get money without earning it. Each is doing his best to shave the rest. If they ever make anything, I don’t know it. I’ve been here two thousand nights, and never made a cent yet.”

I inquired what brought him here.

“For company; to kill time. I never was married, and never had a home. When I was young, the girls said I smelt like a wet dog; that’s because I was poor. Since I’ve got rich, I’m too old to get married.”

What he was thinking of now was a fortune to be made out of labor-saving machinery to be used on the plantations: “I wish I could get hold of a half-crazy feller, to fix up a cotton planter, cotton-picker, cane-cutter, and a thing to hill up some.”

He talked cynically of the planters. “They’re a helpless set. They’re all confused. They don’t know what they’re going to do. They never did know much else but to get drunk. If a man has a plantation to rent or sell, he can’t tell anything about it; you can’t get any proposition out of him.”

He complained that Northern capital lodged in the cotton belt; but little of it getting through to the sugar country. He did not know any lands let to Northern men. “They hav’n’t got sugar on the brain; it’s cotton they’re all crazy after.”

He used to oversee for fifteen hundred dollars a year: he was now offered five thousand. He was a well-dressed, rather intelligent, capable man; and I noticed that the planters treated him with respect. But his manner toward them was cool and independent: he could not forget old times. “I never was thought anything of by these men, till I got rich. Then they began to say ‘Dick P—— is a mighty clever feller;’ and by-and-by it got to be ‘Mr. P——.’ Now they all come to me, because I know about business, and they don’t know a thing.”

Like everybody else, he had much to say of the niggers. “A heap of the planters wants ’em all killed off. But I believe in the nigger. He’ll work, if they’ll only let him alone. They fool him, and tell him such lies, he’s no confidence. I’ve worked free niggers and white men, and always found the niggers worked the best. But no nigger, nor anybody else, will work like a slave works with the whip behind him. You can’t make ’em. I was brought up to work alongside o’ niggers, and soon as I got out of it, nothing, no money, could induce me to work so again.”

Speaking of other overseers, he said: “I admit I was about as tight on the nigger as a man ought to be. If I’d been a slave, I shouldn’t have wanted to work under a master that was tighter than I was. But I wa’n’t a priming to some. You see that red-faced feller with his right hand behind him, talking with two men? He’s an overseer. I know of his killing two niggers, and torturing another so that he died in a few days.” (I omit the shocking details of the punishment said to have been applied.) “The other night he came here to kill me because I told about him. He pulled out his pistol, and says he, ‘Dick P——, did you tell so-and-so I killed three niggers on Clark’s plantation?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I said so, and can prove it; and if there’s any shooting to be done, I can shoot as fast as you can.’ After that he bullied around here some, then went off, and I hav’n’t heard anything about shooting since.”

Among the earliest acquaintances I made at New Orleans was General Phil. Sheridan, perhaps the most brilliant and popular fighting man of the war. I found him in command of the Military Division of the Gulf, comprising the States of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. In Florida he had at that time seven thousand troops; in Louisiana, nine thousand; and in Texas, twenty thousand, embracing ten thousand colored troops at Corpus Christi and on the Rio Grande, watching the French movements.

It was Sheridan’s opinion that the Rebellion would never be ended until Maximilian was driven from Mexico. Such a government on our borders cherished the seeds of ambition and discontent in the minds of the late Confederates. Many were emigrating to Mexico, and there was danger of their uniting either with the Liberals or the Imperialists, and forming a government inimical to the United States. To prevent such a possibility, he had used military and diplomatic strategy. Three thousand Rebels having collected in Monterey, he induced the Liberals to arrest and disarm them. Then in order that they should not be received by the Imperialists, he made hostile demonstrations, sending a pontoon train to Brownsville, and six thousand cavalry to San Antonio, establishing military posts, and making extensive inquiries for forage. Under such circumstances, Maximilian did not feel inclined to welcome the Rebel refugees. It is even probable that, had our government at that time required the withdrawal of the French from Mexico, the demand, emphasized by these and similar demonstrations, would have been complied with. Maximilian is very weak in his position. Nineteen twentieths of the people are opposed to him. There is no regular, legitimate taxation for the support of his government, but he levies contributions upon merchants for a small part of the funds he requires, and draws upon France for the rest. His “government” consists merely of an armed occupation of the country; with long lines of communication between military posts, which could be easily cut off and captured one after another by a comparatively small force.

The Southern country, in the General’s opinion, was fast becoming “Northernized.” It was very poor, and going to be poorer. The planters had no enterprise, no recuperative energy: they were entirely dependent upon Northern capital and Northern spirit. He thought the freedmen’s affairs required no legislation, but that the State should leave them to be regulated by the natural law of supply and demand.

Phil. Sheridan is a man of small stature, compactly and somewhat massively built, with great toughness of constitutional fibre, and an alert countenance, expressive of remarkable energy and force. I inquired if he experienced no reaction after the long strain upon his mental and bodily powers occasioned by the war.

“Only a pleasant one,” he replied. “During my Western campaigns, when I was continually in the saddle, I weighed but a hundred and fifteen pounds. My flesh was hard as iron. Now my weight is a hundred and forty-five.”

He went over with me to the City Hall, to which the Executive department of the State had been removed, and introduced me to Governor Wells, a plain, elderly man, affable, and loyal in his speech. I remember his saying that the action of the President, in pardoning Governor Humphreys, of Mississippi, after he had been elected by the people on account of his services in the Confederate cause, was doing great harm throughout the South, encouraging Rebels and discouraging Union men. “Everything is being conceded to traitors,” said he, “before they have been made to feel the Federal power.” He spoke of the strong Rebel element in the Legislature which he was combating; and gave me copies of two veto messages which he had returned to it with bills that were passed for the especial benefit of traitors. The new serf code, similar to that of Mississippi, engineered through the Legislature by a member of the late Confederate Congress, he had also disapproved. After this, I was surprised to hear from other sources how faithfully he had been carrying out the very policy which he professed to condemn,—even going beyond the President, in removing from office Union men appointed by Governor Hahn and appointing Secessionists and Rebels in their place; and advocating the Southern doctrine that the Government must pay for the slaves it had emancipated. Such discrepancies between deeds and professions require no comment. Governor Wells is not the only one, nor the highest, among public officers, who, wishing to reconcile the irreconcilable, and to stand well before the country whilst they were strengthening the hands and gaining the favor of its enemies, have suffered their loyal protestations to be put to some confusion by acts of doubtful patriotism.

At the Governor’s room I had the good fortune to meet the Mayor of the city, Mr. Hugh Kennedy, whom I afterwards called upon by appointment. By birth a Scotchman, he had been thirty years a citizen of New Orleans, and, from the beginning of the Secession troubles, had shown himself a stanch patriot. He was appointed to the mayoralty by President Lincoln; General Banks removed him, but he was afterwards reinstated.

I found him an almost enthusiastic believer in the future greatness of New Orleans. “It is certain,” he said, “to double its population in ten years. Its prosperity dates from the day of the abolition of slavery. Men who formerly lived upon the proceeds of slave-labor are now stimulated to enterprise. A dozen industrial occupations will spring up where there was one before. Manufactures are already taking a start. We have two new cotton-mills just gone into operation. The effect upon the whole country will be similar. Formerly planters went or sent to New York and Boston and laid in their supplies; for this reason there were no villages in the South. But now that men work for wages, which they will wish to spend near home, villages will everywhere spring up.”

Living, in New Orleans, he said, was very cheap. The fertile soil produces, with little labor, an abundance of vegetables the year round. Cattle are brought from the extensive prairies of the State, and from the vast pastures of Texas: and contractors had engaged to supply the charitable institutions of the city with the rumps and rounds of beef at six cents a pound.

The street railroads promised to yield a considerable revenue to the city. The original company paid only $130,000 for the privilege of laying down its rails, and an exclusive right to the track for twenty-five years. But two new roads had been started, one of which had stipulated to pay to the city government eleven and a half per cent. of its gross proceeds, and the other twenty-two and a half per cent. “In two or three years an annual income from that source will not be less than $200,000.”

From Mr. Kennedy I learned that free people of color owned property in New Orleans to the amount of $15,000,000.

He was delighted with the working of the free-labor system. “I thought it an indication of progress when the white laborers and negroes on the levees the other day made a strike for higher wages. They were receiving two dollars and a half and three dollars a day, and they struck for five and seven dollars. They marched up the levee in a long procession, white and black together. I gave orders that they should not be interfered with as long as they interfered with nobody else; but when they undertook by force to prevent other laborers from working, the police promptly put a stop to their proceedings.”