stroke of the pen; and, as such, an ingenious people are not likely to
lose sight of the uses of a revolution in developing peculiar principles
to their own advantage, repudiation of debts to the North has been
proclaimed and acted on. One gentleman has found it convenient to inform
Major Anderson that he does not intend to meet certain bills which he
had given the Major for some slaves. Another declares he won’t pay
anybody at all, as he has discovered it is immoral and contrary to the
laws of nations to do so. A third feels himself bound to obey the
commands of the Governor of his State, who has ordered that debts due to
the North shall not be liquidated. As a _naive_ specimen of the way in
which the whole case is treated, take this article and the
correspondence of “one of the most prominent mercantile houses of New
Orleans:”
SOUTHERN DEBTS TO THE NORTH.
“_The Cincinnati Gazette_ copies the following paragraph from _The
New York Evening Post_:
“‘BAD FAITH.--The bad faith of the Southern merchants in their
transactions with their Northern correspondents is becoming more
evident daily. We have heard of several recent cases where parties
in this city, retired from active business, have, nevertheless,
stepped forward to protect the credit of their Southern friends.
They are now coolly informed that they cannot be reimbursed for
these advances until the war is over. We know of a retired merchant
who in this way has lost $100,000.’--and adds:
“‘The same here. Men who have done most for the South are the chief
sufferers. Debts are coolly repudiated by the Southern merchants,
who have heretofore enjoyed a first-class reputation. Men who have
grown rich upon the trade furnished by the West are among the first
to pocket the money of their correspondents, asking, with all the
impudence and assurance of a highwayman, “What are you going to do
about it?” There is honor among thieves, it is said, but there is
not a spark of honor among these repudiating merchants. People who
have aided and trusted them to the last moment are the greatest
losers. There is a future, however. This war will be over, and the
Southern merchants will desire a resumption of their connections
with the West. As the repudiators--such as Goodrich & Co. of New
Orleans--will be spurned, there will be a grand opening for honest
men.
“‘There are many honorable exceptions in the South, but dishonesty
is the rule. The latter is but the development of latent rascality.
The rebellion has afforded a pretext merely for the swindling
operations. The parties previously acted honestly, only because
that was the best policy. The sifting process that may now be
conducted will be of advantage to Northern merchants in the future.
The present losses will be fully made up by subsequent gains.’
“We have been requested to copy the following reply to this tirade
from one of our most prominent mercantile houses, Messrs. Goodrich
& Co.:
“‘NEW ORLEANS, May 24, 1861.
“‘CINCINNATI GAZETTE.--We were handed, through a friend of ours,
your issue of the 18th inst., and attention directed to an article
contained therein, in which you are pleased to particularize us out
of a large number of highly respectable merchants of this and other
Southern cities as repudiators, swindlers, and other epithets,
better suited to the mouths of the Wilson Regiment of New York than
from a once respectable sheet, but now has sunk so low in the
depths of niggerdom, that it would take all the soap in Porkopolis
and the Ohio River to cleanse it from its foul pollution.
“‘We are greatly indebted to you for using our name in the above
article, as we deem it the best card you could publish for us, and
may add greatly to our business relations in the Confederate
States, which will enable us in the end to pay our indebtedness to
those who propose cutting our throats, destroying our property,
stealing our negroes, and starving our wives and children, to pay
such men in times of war. You may term it rascality, but we beg
leave to call it patriotism.
“‘Giving the sinews of war to your enemies have ever been
considered as treason.--Kent.
“‘Now for ‘repudiating.’ We have never, nor do we ever expect to
repudiate any debt owing by our firm. But this much we will say,
never will we pay a debt due by us to a man, or any company of men,
who is a known Black Republican, and marching in battle array to
invade our homes and firesides, until every such person shall be
driven back, and their polluted footsteps shall, now on our once
happy soil, be entirely obliterated.
“‘We have been in business in this city for twenty years, have
passed through every crisis with our names untarnished or credit
impaired, and would at present sacrifice all we have made, were it
necessary, to sustain our credit in the Confederacy, but care
nothing for the opinions of such as are open and avowed enemies. We
are sufficiently known in this city not to require the indorsement
of _The Cincinnati Gazette_, or any such sheet, for a character.
“‘The day is coming, and not far distant, when there will be an
awful reckoning, and we are willing and determined to stand by our
Confederate flag, sink or swim, and would like to meet some of _The
Gazette’s_ editors _vis-à-vis_ on the field of blood, and see who
would be the first to flinch.
“‘Our senior partner has already contributed one darkey this year
to your population, and she is anxious to return, but we have a few
more left which you can have, provided you will come and take them
yourselves.
“‘We have said more than we intended, and hope you will give this a
place in your paper.
GOODRICH & Co.’”
There is some little soreness felt here about the use of the word
“repudiation,” and it will do the hearts of some people good, and will
carry comfort to the ghost of the Rev. Sydney Smith, if it can hear the
tidings, to know I have been assured, over and over again, by eminent
mercantile people and statesmen, that there is “a general desire” on the
part of the repudiating States to pay their bonds, and that no doubt, at
some future period, not very clearly ascertainable or plainly indicated,
that general desire will cause some active steps to be taken to satisfy
its intensity, of a character very unexpected, and very gratifying to
those interested. The tariff of the Southern Confederation has just been
promulgated, and I send herewith a copy of the rates. Simultaneously,
however, with this document, the United States steam frigates Brooklyn
and Niagara have made their appearance off the Pas-à-l’Outre, and the
Mississippi is closed, and with it the port of New Orleans. The
steam-tugs refuse to tow out vessels for fear of capture, and British
ships are in jeopardy.
* * * * *
MAY 25.--A visit to the camp at Tangipao, about fifty miles from New
Orleans, gave an occasion for obtaining a clearer view of the internal
military condition of those forces of which one reads much, and sees so
little, than any other way. Major-General Lewis of the State Militia,
and staff, and General Labuzan, a Creole officer, attended by Major
Ranney, President of the New-Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern
Railway, and by many officers in uniform, started with that purpose at
4:30 this evening in a rail-carriage, carefully and comfortably fitted
for their reception. The militia of Louisiana has not been called out
for many years, and its officers have no military experience, and the
men have no drill or discipline.
Emerging from the swampy suburbs, we soon pass between white clover
pastures, which we are told invariably salivate the herds of small but
plump cattle browsing upon them. Soon cornfields “in tassel,” alternate
with long narrow rows of growing sugar-cane, which, though scarcely a
fourth of the height of the maize, will soon over-shadow it; and the
cane-stalks grow up so densely together that nothing larger than a
rattle-snake can pass between them.
From Kennersville, an ancient sugar plantation cut up into “town lots,”
our first halt, ten miles out, we shoot through a cypress swamp, the
primitive forest of this region, and note a greater affluence of Spanish
moss than in the woods of Georgia or Carolina. There it hung, like a
hermit’s beard, from the pensile branch. Here, to one who should
venture to thread the snake and alligator haunted mazes of the jungle,
its matted profusion must resemble clusters of stalactites pendent from
the roof of some vast cavern; for the gloom of an endless night appears
to pervade the deeper recesses, at the entrance of which stand, like
outlying skeleton pickets, the unfelled and leafless patriarchs of the
clearing, that for a breadth of perhaps fifty yards on either side seems
to have furnished the road with its sleepers.
The gray swamp yields to an open savannah, beyond which, upon the left,
a straggling line of sparse trees skirts the left bank of the
Mississippi, and soon after the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain
appears within gunshot of our right, only separated from the road by one
hundred yards or more of rush-covered prairie, which seems but a feeble
barrier against the caprices of so extensive a sheet of water subject to
the influences of wind and tide. In fact, ruined shanties and outhouses,
fields laid waste, and prostrate fences remain evidences of the ravages
of the “Wash” which a year ago inundated and rendered the railroad
impassable save for boats. The down trains first notice of the disaster
was the presence of a two-story frame building, which the waves had
transported to the road, and its passengers, detained a couple of days
in what now strikes us as a most grateful combination of timber-skirted
meadow and lake scenery, were rendered insensible to its beauties by the
torments of hungry mosquitoes. Had its engineers given the road but
eighteen inches more elevation its patrons would have been spared this
suffering, and its stock-holders might have rejoiced in a dividend. Many
of the settlers have abandoned their improvements. Others, chiefly what
are here called Dutchmen, have resumed their tillage with unabated zeal,
and large fields of cabbages, one of them embracing not less than sixty
acres, testify to their energy.
Again through miles of cypress swamps the train passes on to what is
called the “trembling prairie,” where the sleepers are laid upon a
tressel-work of heavier logs, so that the rails are raised by “cribs” of
timber nearly a yard above the morass. Three species of rail, one of
them as large as a curlew, and the summer duck, seem the chief occupants
of the marsh, but white cranes and brown bitterns take the alarm, and
falcons and long-tailed “blackbirds” sail in the distance.
Toward sunset a halt took place upon the long bridge that divides Lake
Maurepas, a picturesque sheet of water which blends with the horizon on
our left, from Pass Maunshae, an arm of Lake Pontchartrain, which
disappears in the forest on our right. Half a dozen wherries and a small
fishing-smack are moored in front of a rickety cabin, crowded by the
jungle to the margin of the cove. It is the first token of a settlement
that has occurred for miles, and when we have sufficiently admired the
scene, rendered picturesque in the sunset by the dense copse, the water
and the bright colors of the boats at rest upon it, a commotion at the
head of the train arises from the unexpected arrival upon the “switch”
of a long string of cars filled with half a regiment of Volunteers, who
had been enlisted for twelve months’ service, and now refused to be
mustered in for the war, as required by the recent enactment of the
Montgomery Congress. The new comers are at length safely lodged on the
“turn off,” and our train continues its journey. As we pass the row of
cars, most of them freight wagons, we are hailed with shouts and yells
in every key by the disbanded Volunteers, who seem a youngish,
poorly-clad, and undersized lot, though noisy as a street mob.
After Maunshae, the road begins to creep up toward _terra firma_, and
before nightfall there was a change from cypresses and swamp laurels to
pines and beeches, and we inhale the purer atmosphere of dry land, with
an occasional whiff of resinous fragrance, that dispels the
fever-tainted suggestions of the swamp below. There we only breathed to
live. Here we seem to live to breathe. The rise of the road is a grade
of but a foot to the mile, and yet at the camp an elevation of not more
than eighty feet in as many miles suffices to establish all the climatic
difference between the malarious marshes and a much higher mountain
region.
But during our journey the hampers have not been neglected. The younger
members of the party astonish the night-owls with patriotic songs,
chiefly French, and the French chiefly with the “Marseillaise,” which,
however inappropriate as the slogan of the Confederate States, they
persist in quavering, forgetful, perhaps, that not three-quarters of a
century ago Toussaiant l’Ouverture caught the words and air from his
masters, and awoke the lugubrious notes of the insurrection.
Towards nine P. M., the special car rests in the woods, and is flanked
on one side by the tents and watch-fires of a small encampment, chiefly
of navvy and cotton-handling Milesian volunteers, called “the Tigers,”
from their prehensile powers and predatory habits. A guard is stationed
around the car; a couple of Ethiopians who have attended us from town
are left to answer the query, _quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ and we
make our way to the hotel, which looms up in the moonlight in a
two-storied dignity. Here, alas! there have been no preparations made to
sleep or feed us. The scapegoat “nobody” announced our coming. Some of
the guests are club men, used to the small hours, who engage a room, a
table, half a dozen chairs, and a brace of bottles to serve as
candlesticks. They have brought stearine and pasteboards with them, and
are soon deep in the finesses of “Euchre.” We quietly stroll back to the
car, our only hope of shelter. At the entrance we are challenged by a
sentry, apparently ignorant that he has a percussion cap on his brown
rifle, which he levels at us cocked. From this unpleasant vision of an
armed and reckless Tiger rampant we are relieved by one of the dusky
squires, who assures the sentinel that we are “all right,” and proceeds
to turn over a seat and arrange what might be called a sedan-chair bed,
in which we prepare to make a night of it. Our party is soon joined by
others in quest of repose, and in half an hour breathings, some of them
so deep as to seem subterranean, indicate that all have attained their
object--like Manfred’s--forgetfulness.
An early breakfast of rashers and eggs was prepared at the _table
d’hôte_, which we were told would be replenished half-hourly until noon,
when a respite of an hour was allowed to the “help” in which to make
ready a dinner, to be served in the same progression.
Through a shady dingle a winding path led to the camp, and, after
trudging a pleasant half mile, a bridge of boards, resting on a couple
of trees laid across a pool, was passed, and, above a slight embankment,
tents and soldiers are revealed upon a “clearing” of some thirty acres
in the midst of a pine forest. Turning to the left, we reach a double
row of tents, only distinguished from the rest by their “fly roofs” and
boarded floors, and, in the centre, halt opposite to one which a poster
of capitals on a planed deal marks as “Head-quarters.” Major-General
Tracy commands the camp. The white tents crouching close to the shade of
the pines, the parade alive with groups and colors as various as those
of Joseph’s coat, arms stacked here and there, and occasionally the
march of a double file in green, or in mazarine blue, up an alley from
the interior of the wood, to be dismissed in the open camp, resembles a
militia muster, or a holiday experiment at soldiering, rather than the
dark shadow of forthcoming battle. The cordon of sentinels suffer no
Volunteer to leave the precincts of the camp, even to bathe, without a
pass or the word. There are neither wagons nor ambulances, and the men
are rolling in barrels of bacon and bread and shouldering bags of
pulse--good picnic practice and campaigning gymnastics in fair weather.
The arms of these Volunteers are the old United States smooth-bore
musket, altered from flint to percussion, with bayonet--a heavy and
obsolete copy of Brown Bess in bright barrels. All are in creditable
order. Most of them have never been used, even to fire a parade volley,
for powder is scarce in the Confederated States, and must not be wasted.
Except in their material, the shoes of the troops are as varied as their
clothing. None have as yet been served out, and each still wears the
boots, the brogans, the patent leathers, or the Oxford ties in which he
enlisted. The tents have mostly no other floor than the earth, and that
rarely swept; while blankets, boxes, and utensils are stowed in corners
with a disregard of symmetry that would drive a martinet mad. Camp
stools are rare and tables invisible, save here and there in an
officer’s tent. Still the men look well, and, we are told, would
doubtless present a more cheerful appearance, but for some little
demoralization occasioned by discontent at the repeated changes in the
organic structure of the regiments, arising from misapprehensions
between the State and Federal authorities, as well as from some
favoritism toward certain officers, effected by political wire-pulling
in the governing councils. The system of electing officers by ballot has
made the camp as thoroughly a political arena as the poll districts in
New Orleans before an election, and thus many heroes, seemingly
ambitious of epaulettes, are in reality only “laying pipes” for the
attainment of civil power or distinction after the war.
The volunteers we met at Maunshae the previous evening had been enlisted
by the State to serve for twelve months, and had refused to extend their
engagement for the war--a condition now made precedent at Montgomery to
their being mustered into the army of the Confederate States. Another
company, a majority of whom persist in the same refusal, were disbanded
while we were patrolling the camp, and an officer told one of the party
he had suffered a loss of six hundred volunteers by this disintegrating
process within the last twenty-four hours. Some of these country
companies were skilled in the use of the rifle, and most of them had
made pecuniary sacrifices in the way of time, journeys, and equipments.
Our informant deplored this reduction of volunteers, as tending to
engender dissaffection in the parishes to which they will return, and
comfort when known to the Abolitionists of the North. He added that the
war will not perhaps last a twelvemonth, and if unhappily prolonged
beyond that period, the probabilities are in favor of the short-term
recruits willingly consenting to a reënlistment.
The encampment of the “Perrit Guards” was worthy of a visit. Here was a
company of _professional gamblers_, one hundred and twelve strong,
recruited for the war in a moment of banter by one of the patriarchs of
the fraternity, who, upon hearing at the St. Charles Hotel one evening,
that the vanity or the patriotism of a citizen, not famed for
liberality, had endowed with $1,000 a company which was to bear his
name, exclaimed that “he would give $1,500 to any one who should be fool
enough to form a company and call it after him.” In less than an hour
after the utterance of this caprice, Mr. Perrit was waited upon by
fifty-six “professionals,” who had enrolled their names as the “Perrit
Guards,” and unhesitatingly produced from his wallet the sum so
sportively pledged. The Guards are uniformed in Mazarin blue flannel
with red facings, and the captain, a youngish-looking fellow, with a
hawk’s eye, who has seen service with Scott in Mexico and Walker in
Nicaragua, informed us that there is not a pair of shoes in the company
that cost less than six dollars, and that no money has been spared to
perfect their other appointments. A sack of ice and half a dozen silver
goblets enforced his invitation “to take a drink at his quarters,” and
we were served by an African in uniform, who afterward offered us cigars
received by the last Havana steamer. Looking at the sable attendant, one
of the party observes that if these “experts of fortune win the present
fight, it will be a case of _couleur gagne_.”
It would be difficult to find in the same number of men taken at hazard
greater diversities of age, stature, and physiognomy; but in keenness of
eye and imperturbility of demeanor they exhibit a family likeness, and
there is not an unintelligent face in the company. The gamblers, or, as
they are termed, the “sports,” of the United States have an air of
higher breeding and education than the dice-throwers and card-turners of
Ascot or Newmarket--nay, they may be considered the Anglo-Saxon equals,
minus the title, of those _âmes damnées_ of the continental nobility who
are styled Greeks by their Parisian victims. They are the Pariahs of
American civilization, who are, nevertheless, in daily and familiar
intercourse with their patrons, and not restricted, as in England, to a
betting-ring toleration by the higher orders. The Guards are the model
company of Camp Moore, and I should have felt disposed to admire the
spirit of gallantry with which they have volunteered in this war as a
purification by fire of their maculated lives, were it not hinted that
the “Oglethorpe Guards,” and more than one other company of volunteers,
are youths of large private fortunes, and that in the Secession, as in
the Mexican War, these patriots will doubtless pursue their old calling
with as much profit as they may their new one with valor.
From the Lower Camp we wind through tents, which diminish in neatness
and cleanliness as we advance deeper, to the Upper Division, which is
styled “Camp Tracy,” a newer formation, whose brooms have been employed
with corresponding success. The adjutant’s report for the day sums up
one thousand and seventy-three rank and file, and but two on the sick
list. On a platform, a desk beneath the shade of the grove holds a Bible
and Prayer-book, that await the arrival at ten o’clock of the Methodist
preacher, who is to perform Divine service. The green uniforms of the
“Hibernian Guards,” and the gray and light blue dress of other
companies, appertain to a better appointed sort of men than the Lower
Division.
There may be two thousand men in Camp Moore--not more, and yet every
authority gives us a different figure. The lowest estimate acknowledged
for the two camps is three thousand five hundred men, and _The Picayune_
and other New Orleans papers still speak in glowing terms of the five
thousand heroes assembled in Tangipao. Although the muster there
presents a tolerable show of ball-stoppers, it would require months of
discipline to enable them to pass for soldiers even at the North; and
besides that General Tracy has never had other experience than in
militia duty, there is not, I think, a single West Point officer in his
whole command. The only hope of shaping such raw material to the
purposes of war, would naturally be by the admixture of a proper
allowance of military experience, and until those possessing it shall be
awarded to Camp Moore, we must sigh over the delusion which pictures its
denizens to the good people of New Orleans as “fellows ready for the
fray.”
While the hampers are being ransacked an express locomotive arrives from
town with despatches for General Tracy, who exclaims when reading them,
“Always too late!” from which expression it is inferred that orders have
been received to accept the just-disbanded volunteers. The locomotive
was hitched to the car and drew it back to the city. Our car was built
in Massachusetts, the engine in Philadelphia, and the magnifier of its
lamp in Cincinnati. What will the South do for such articles in future?
* * * * *