only for a moment that the French flag fluttered over the _place
d’armes_, a bare three weeks. Then it descended its staff and the
American flag rose in its place. In the Casa Real, the seat of the
Spanish Cabildo, the ceremony of the cession of Louisiana to the United
States took place, the most important event, judged by results, that
has taken place in the history of the Republic, enlarging the United
States in domain by a territory three and a half times as great as its
original size, raising it in political sovereignty to parity with the
greatest European powers. The Spanish walls were demolished, but the
American domination made slow impression upon the _vieu carré_. It
has never really altered the type. There was, correctly speaking, no
American domination in the _vieu carré_ until the term ceased to be
used, when Louisiana was admitted as a State into the Union.
[Illustration: ST. FRIES CATHEDRAL.]
The memorable discussion in Congress over the admission of Louisiana
need be recalled here only to introduce the next important event in
her history,--the great and glorious victory of the Battle of New
Orleans on the 8th of January, 1815. That victory was the vindication
of Louisiana’s right to Statehood in the Union;--it was New Orleans’s
dower gift to the Nation’s history.
The American quarter, the new town, built by the flatboatmen outside
the wall of the old town, is still called the American quarter by
the old inhabitants. In architecture and physiognomy, in material
prosperity and educational progress, it rightfully and justly
represents the American domination. But for art, poetry, romance,
sentiment, and inspiration the denizens of the new city flee into the
old mother quarter as into a sanctuary, where in the quiet and gloom,
it may be, of the past, they find refuge from the glare and incessant
pursuit of activities of the present. It is the quarter that strangers
love. Upon any one of the fine days of a New Orleans winter, a score
or more of these visitors may be seen, strolling through the aisles of
the Cathedral, or the halls of the old Cabildo, or sitting in the sun
on the benches of Jackson Square watching the leisurely, picturesque
procession of passers-by, as the soft bells of the Cathedral mark the
no less leisurely procession of the hours.
“Orleans, Gentilly,
D’Artaguette, Marigny,
Bourbon! Bourbon!
Gayoso, Galvez, Bouligny,
Casacalvo, Derbigny,
Don Almonester’s bells intone;
For Bienville and for Serigny,
For d’Iberville, for d’Assigny
They make incessant moan.
Orleans, Gentilly
D’Artaguette, Marigny,
Bourbon! Bourbon!”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VICKSBURG
THE CITY ON THE WALNUT HILLS
BY H. F. SIMRALL
Vicksburg has no colonial traditions. The Walnut Hills on which it
stands, near the northern margin of that portion of Mississippi which
was successively under the sway of France, Great Britain and Spain,
could not be settled and improved until long after the region about
Natchez. The city is, in fact, of modern origin. The county of Warren
was not organized until 1809, and Vicksburg had no real existence until
it became in 1836, second after Warrenton, the county-seat.
To understand the late origin of the town, one should study the
colonial history of Mississippi. By the discovery and exploration of
the Mississippi in 1680-82, France claimed all the territory drained
by the river and its affluents from the source to the mouth, and
also all territory east and west drained by streams that entered the
Gulf of Mexico. The French colony was planted at Biloxi on the Gulf
coast, which was made the capital. Shortly afterwards the capital was
transferred to Mobile and finally located at New Orleans. Settlements
spread slowly along the shores of the Gulf and up the Mississippi
River, penetrating but a short distance inland on account of the
contiguity of hostile Indians.
During the eighteen years of British control that followed the French
and Indian War, an impulse was given to emigration from Great Britain,
and from the older colonies some settlers came who desired to avoid
participation in the Revolutionary War. In 1779-80 Spain drove Great
Britain out of the territory west of the Mississippi, acquired by the
treaty which closed the French and Indian War, and held and controlled
the same for fifteen or more years, with the colonial seat of authority
at Natchez. By the treaty of peace with Great Britain at the close of
the Revolutionary War, the Mississippi River on the west and the 31st
parallel on the south were declared the boundaries of the United States.
[Illustration: MEETING OF GENERALS GRANT AND PEMBERTON AT THE “STONE
HOUSE” INSIDE THE REBEL WORKS ON THE MORNING OF JULY 4, 1863.
(FROM AN ACTUAL SKETCH MADE ON THE SPOT BY ONE OF THE SPECIAL ARTISTS
OF “FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER,” NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF
MAJOR GEORGE HAVEN PUTNAM.)]
During the Spanish possession and control of the lower Mississippi
River, serious protests and diplomatic representations had been made
to Spain against the onerous exactions and tributes which she imposed
on commerce from the upper valley and imports through New Orleans. To
haul the tobacco, wheat, corn, pork and other bulky products of the
region across the mountains over dirt roads to Baltimore, the nearest
seaport and market, was hardly possible. The Mississippi River was
the quick and easy highway to New Orleans and tide-water. Spain was
under treaty obligation to allow free navigation of the Mississippi,
and to deal liberally at New Orleans with commerce from the upper
valley, but she shamefully set at nought her obligations, until, in
sheer exasperation, the people of Kentucky and Tennessee were on the
point of fitting out a military force with which to open the river to
free navigation and commerce and to drive Spain from New Orleans. The
Federal Government rose to the emergency, and Spain, obliged to choose
between war or cession, concluded in 1795 a treaty of cession, by which
she surrendered the territory in question and agreed to retire within
six months after ratification of the treaty.
Georgia, claiming that her colonial limits by the charter of 1735
extended by parallel lines westward to the Mississippi River, in
1785 organized in southwest Mississippi a county called Bourbon, and
appointed justices of the peace, who, however, never attempted to
exercise their functions. In 1795, the year the treaty was made with
Spain, Georgia sold to four of the speculation land companies enormous
acreages of land in what is now Alabama and Mississippi.
The first relief, permanent and secure, from all the discouragements
to emigration was furnished when the Congress of the United States, in
1798, organized a territorial government for Mississippi and applied to
it all the benefits, advantages and privileges of the Ordinance of 1787
for the government of the territory northwest of the river Ohio, except
the clause of the sixth article, which prohibited slavery. Georgia in
turn promptly yielded up her territorial and political claims to the
United States for pecuniary and other considerations.
From the date of organized authority, population rapidly poured in. The
Bayou, Pearl and the Big Black ceased to be the outer confines of the
new settlers. They spread rapidly over all the lands which the Indians
had ceded. As settlements were carried east of the Walnut Hills a town
at that point became a necessity for trade. A town was laid off on
the plantations of William Vick and John Lane into blocks or squares
by parallel streets north and south, east and west. The building of
a town on the bluff at the southern extremity of the delta and of
easy access to the uplands eastward was a natural response to the
needs of commerce. Its growth and development have kept pace with the
increase of agricultural production of the region tributary to it. The
Vicksburg of to-day is specially adapted to the manufacture of cotton,
lumber and metals into finished goods. Raw material is abundant and
available. Transportation by water and rail to home and foreign markets
is adequate to meet the largest demands. When the Isthmian Canal shall
have been constructed, the ports on the Gulf will be nearer the Orient
than the ports on the Atlantic, and unusual impulse will be given to
manufactures and agriculture.
Large plants for the utilization of cotton seed are in full operation
at Vicksburg; match and furniture factories are actively at work.
Other enterprises are slowly building up, and the natural and economic
advantages of the city for manufactures are becoming more apparent.
The public buildings of Vicksburg--Court-House, Post Office, churches,
schoolhouses, and hotels--are typical and creditable. The Court-House,
situated on one of the highest eminences, towers above the surrounding
buildings and is pleasing to the eye from every point of view. The
tradition is that it was planned and designed by a slave belonging to
the contractor who built it. The United States building is handsome
and commodious. The city abounds in churches. It is provided with an
excellent system of waterworks and electric street-railway service. The
system recently adopted of free education for both races has from time
to time been so enlarged as to its curriculum of studies and improved
as to its methods, that it has superseded private schools, except an
educational establishment for both sexes under the control of the Roman
Catholic Church.
Vicksburg has been the home of several of the State’s ablest men, who
have proved large factors in making history. S. S. Prentiss was an
orator of national reputation and an eminent lawyer. Others worthy of
mention are: Judge W. L. Sharkey, one of the most learned jurists of
the Southwest; Governor John J. Guion; Governor McNutt; Walter Brooks;
United States Senator George Yerger; a great lawyer, Joseph Holt, in
later life Attorney-General of the United States. Jefferson Davis,
President of the Confederate States, Senator in Congress and a gallant
and distinguished soldier, lived the greater part of his life in Warren
County, a few miles south of the city.
We now come to that period in the history of Vicksburg, when, during
the Civil War, for a time the even current of commercial and business
life gave place to a series of events, perhaps the most notable and
far-reaching in influence on the shifting fortunes and results of the
great conflict. The bluffs at Vicksburg are of pre-eminent importance
as a strategic point to the complete control of the great river
which almost divides the continent from south to north, penetrates
the upper valley nearly to the great chain of lakes, and with its
affluents affords about fifteen thousand miles of navigation. No object
contributing to the final issue of the war could have presented itself
to the great leaders on both sides of the conflict as of more urgent
need than the possession and control of the Mississippi. In 1862,
movements were begun against the fortifications which the Confederates
had placed on the Cumberland and Tennessee and the upper Mississippi.
So important and urgent did this appear as a necessary means to a
speedy and successful close of the war that operations were begun very
early to drive the Confederates from the river, and were conducted
both from above and from its mouth. The close of the year 1862 found
the Federal naval and military forces dominating the river from the
north as far south as Vicksburg, and from the south as far north as
Port Hudson. A campaign, supported by the fleet, was undertaken on
the east side of the river. The Federal forces moved from the Yazoo
River along the banks of the Chickasaw Bayou with a view of gaining a
foothold on the bluffs above the city. A battle, stubbornly contested,
was fought, and resulted in the defeat and repulse of the Union forces.
It demonstrated the impracticability of capturing the city by attacking
the army entrenched on the bluffs.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GENERAL U. S. GRANT.]
The following year a much larger army was convoyed down the river by a
fleet of gunboats, and landed at Milliken’s bend, sixteen or seventeen
miles above the city, on the west bank of the river. A tentative and
unsuccessful effort was made by General Grant to divert the river
across the peninsula by cutting a canal, so as to pass his vessels of
war and transports below out of reach of the batteries on the bluffs.
Meantime a furious and incessant cannonade was kept up between the
gunboats and shore batteries. Finally a large part of his fleet, under
cover of the darkness of night, succeeded in passing the batteries,
with the loss of one vessel and serious damage to others. This movement
on the water, followed by the marching of the army down the west bank,
unmistakably indicated to General Pemberton, Confederate commandant,
the plan and purpose of the campaign. He promptly withdrew the most
of his army from the breastworks, crossed the Big Black River, and so
disposed his men as to retard or arrest altogether the march of General
Grant. General Pemberton’s plan was to form a junction with General
Johnston, who was on his way to take part in the defence of Vicksburg.
General Grant succeeded in interposing his army between Johnston and
Pemberton, gave battle to Johnston at Jackson, and obliged him to fall
back northward to Canton. Heavy and obstinate battles were fought at
Baker’s Creek, Champion Hills and at Big Black. Pemberton, failing
to unite forces with Johnston, deemed it prudent to recross the Big
Black, return and re-occupy his trenches round the city. General Grant
followed and closely invested the Confederate works, placing his army
behind breastworks and in trenches. Two or three gallant assaults made
on the Confederate works were met with determined courage and repulsed
with great loss of life. The control of the river by the gunboats,
above and below, made the reception of reinforcements or supplies from
the west or from any source by water, impossible. The land forces
spread around the fortifications cut off succor from the south and
east, so that it became a mere question of time, before starvation
would compel a surrender without more waste of life in hazardous and
bloody assaults. When Pemberton marched to the Big Black, the supply
of food in the city was low; on his return his army was placed on
short rations. Constant service on the fortifications, inadequate food
supply and midsummer heat developed a great deal of sickness, so that
when the surrender was made on the 4th of July, after a siege of forty
days, provisions were about exhausted, and one third or more of the
garrison were on the sick-list, unfit for military duty. It is perhaps
not out of place to say that in no campaign of the Civil War was there
higher courage or greater devotion to soldierly duty displayed than
here, by both participants. The events of the siege derive their true
significance from the circumstance that they constituted the fatal
blow which broke the Confederate power and hastened the war to its end.
[Illustration: SIEGE OF VICKSBURG.]
The National Cemetery on the bluffs, just north of the corporate
limits of the city, is, taken all in all, perhaps the most
attractive patriotic cemetery in the South. The visitor to the city
always seeks it first. Nature has given to it sublimity; art and
landscape-engineering have imparted all the freshness and loveliness
that flower and shrub and tree can give. Here rest sixteen thousand
soldiers who lost their lives in the service of their country in and
around Vicksburg. Such care and veneration for those who fell under
the national flag while a grateful tribute to valor and heroism serve
at the same time to keep ever fresh and active sentiments of martial
valor and a warmer pride in all that adds glory to the country and
illustrates its military prowess.
Nothing could more strongly and nobly testify to the fact that all
the issues and controversies which culminated in a long and bloody
war have been closed and settled and relegated to the past than the
measures now in process of execution to convert the trenches and
bastions around the city of Vicksburg into a park beautified by all
that landscape-engineering and art can do to make the place attractive.
That which appeals to-day with so much force to the sensibilities of
Americans is not so much the mere transformation of the rugged hills,
as that the place so wonderfully transformed is and will ever be a
perpetual witness that sectional discords and strifes have disappeared
from our national life, and that henceforth the great family of States
and Territories, with their seventy or eighty millions of people, are
members and citizens of a common country, protected by the same flag,
the emblem of sovereignty to all.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
KNOXVILLE
THE METROPOLIS OF EASTERN TENNESSEE
BY JOSHUA W. CALDWELL
The beginnings of Knoxville were Scotch-Irish. Its founder was James
White, a Scotch-Irishman from North Carolina. Its first place of
worship was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Church, wherein the faith of
the Covenant was preached without mitigation, to the edification and
uplifting of the community. The dominant element of its population
until after the Civil War was Presbyterian, and it is still strong.
The first effort of the white men to possess themselves of any part of
Tennessee was in 1756, when old Fort Loudon was erected about thirty
miles west of where Knoxville now stands. Fort Loudon did not long
resist the Cherokees. Its short story is one of the most romantic and
one of the most tragic in the early history of the Southwest.
[Illustration: JOHN SEVIER, FIRST GOVERNOR OF TENNESSEE.]
Twelve years later, the first permanent settlement in Tennessee was
made upon the waters of the Watauga in the northeast corner of the
State. This little community became, soon afterwards, the Watauga
Association, a practically independent government, with a written
constitution; indisputably the first of the kind that was formed on
this continent, by men of American birth, and inspired by American
sentiment. Its leaders were James Robertson, afterwards the founder of
Nashville, a typical Scotch-Irish pioneer; John Sevier, afterwards the
first Governor of Tennessee, a man of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Huguenot
descent, and of extraordinary abilities, who became a resident of
Knoxville; and John Carter, presumably descended from the noted
Virginia family of that name, many of whose descendants are citizens of
Knoxville.
About the year 1787, the settlements having extended gradually down
the Holston, we find James White living upon the site of Knoxville and
owning, then or later, much of the land now covered by the city. If
traditionary statements are to be trusted, a part at least of the first
house erected by James White is still standing, its original sturdy and
loopholed logs protected and preserved by a sheathing of boards. The
name first given the settlement was “White’s Fort.”
In 1790, North Carolina having ceded her possessions west of the
Alleghanies to the United States, the “Territory of the United States
South of the River Ohio” was created, and President Washington named
as its Governor his friend William Blount, of North Carolina. In 1791,
Governor Blount decided to make White’s Fort, which was by that time
called Knoxville in honor of General Henry Knox, the capital of the
territory, and the town site was surveyed in part and laid off into
lots by its owner, James White, in that year.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BLOUNT, GOVERNOR OF SOUTHWEST TERRITORY.]
The location is on the north bank of the Holston, four miles south of
the junction of the French Broad and Holston rivers, giving to the
last stream the name to which it is entitled, without regard to many
temporary, ineffective and indefensible changes of river nomenclature
in East Tennessee by legislation. Between two creeks, once clear and
vigorous, but now defiled and depleted by many civilized uses, rises
a plateau of about two hundred and fifty acres, of diversified but
comparatively level surface. Where this elevation slopes to the river
on the southeast, the town made its beginning, and climbed slowly up
the hill until it reached the highest point overlooking the river,
which was crowned with a blockhouse known as the barracks, where a
scanty garrison of regulars was intended to protect the settlers and
to overawe the Cherokees. The barracks boasted at least one great gun,
which was fired morning and evening with punctuality and impressiveness.
The coming of Governor Blount was the beginning of the greatness of
Knoxville. Blount was a notable man. He had been a silent but respected
and not uninfluential member of the convention that framed the Federal
Constitution. He was the friend of Washington, and his lineage was
most ancient and most honorable, reaching back to the time of William
the Conqueror, in whose train, and among the beneficiaries of whose
bounty, was one of his ancestors. The family had been settled long,
in opulent circumstances and in social and political prominence, in
North Carolina. The Governor was a man of education, of fine presence,
of graceful and winning manners and of unfailing, if dignified,
urbanity. He was unquestionably the first gentleman as well as the
chief magistrate of the “Territory of the United States South of the
River Ohio,” although neither honorable lineages nor good manners
were wanting there. In addition to all this his Excellency was most
fortunate in his wife. The praises of the lovely and accomplished Mary
Grainger Blount were in the mouths of all men, and even of many women
in those days. It was a memorable occasion when the Governor brought
his gracious lady from North Carolina to Knoxville, and placed her at
the head of his court, which was conducted with no little circumstance
and dignity.
It is said that he imported, likewise, weather-boarding, wherewith he
encased the logs of a great house which he had constructed as a home
for his wife, and that no sooner had this attractive and expensive
transformation been accomplished, than the front yard was converted
into a flower garden, the first of its kind in the town, and certainly
one of the most admired anywhere.
In July, 1791, Governor Blount made at Knoxville a treaty with the
Cherokees. Nearly fifteen hundred Indians were present, including
forty-one chiefs. The Governor had caused to be erected in a
conspicuous place on a hillside overlooking the river a large
tent, wherein he remained withdrawn until all the expected company
had assembled. Then the doors of the tent were thrown open and
he stood forth, arrayed in splendor, and surrounded by the chief
civil and military notables of the territory. The resplendency of
his Excellency’s dress-sword, laced coat and cocked hat are much
commented on by historians. Second in splendor of raiment and dignity
of deportment to the Governor only, was James Armstrong, known as
“Trooper,” formerly a dragoon in his Britannic Majesty’s service, and
versed in the ways of courts. The _Annalist_ of Tennessee characterizes
him, for this occasion, as “_arbiter elegantiarum_.” The Governor stood
upon a platform, and one by one in due order the Cherokee chiefs were
presented by Mr. Armstrong, while the assembled warriors gazed in awe
upon the imposing ceremony. A treaty was solemnly entered into, and was
speedily broken by both whites and Indians.