NEW ORLEANS, THE CRESCENT CITY.
At a first glimpse, New Orleans of those days was anything but a
picturesque city. Built upon marshy flats, below the level of the river
and protected from inundation by the Levee, her antique and weathered
houses seemed to cower and cluster together as though in fear.
But for a long time, "The Crescent City" had been at the head of
commercial importance--and the desideratum of direct trade had been
more nearly filled by her enterprising merchants than all others in the
South. The very great majority of the wealthy population was either
Creole, or French; and their connection with European houses may
account in some measure for that fact. The coasting trade at the war
was heavy all along the Gulf shore; the trade with the islands a source
of large revenue, and there were lines and frequent private enterprises
across the ocean.
For many reasons, it was then believed New Orleans could never become a
great port. Foremost, the conformation of the Delta, at the mouth of
the river, prevented vessels drawing over fifteen feet--at most
favorable tides--from crossing either of the three bars; and the most
practical and scientific engineers, both of civil life and the army,
had long tried in vain to remedy the defect for longer than a few
weeks. Numerous causes have been assigned for the rapid reformation of
these bars; the chemical action of the salt upon the vegetable matter
in the river water; the rapid deposit of alluvium as the current
slackens; and a churning effect produced by the meeting of the channel
with the waves of the Gulf. They could not be successfully removed,
however, and were a great drawback to the trade of the city; which its
location at the mouth of the great water avenue of the whole West,
makes more advantageous than any other point in the South.
The river business in cotton, sugar and syrup was, at this time,
immense; and the agents of the planters--factor is the generic
term--made large fortunes in buying and selling at a merely nominal
rate of percentage. The southern planter of _ante-bellum_ days was
a man of ease and luxury, careless of business and free to excess with
money; and relations between him and his agent were entirely unique.
He had the same factor for years, drawing when he pleased for any
amount, keeping open books. When his crop came in, it was shipped to
the factor, the money retained--subject to draft--or invested. But it
was by no means rare, when reckoning day came, for the advance drafts
to have left the planter in debt his whole crop to the factor. In that
case it used to cost him a trip to Europe, or a summer at Saratoga
only; and he stayed on his plantation and did not cry over the spilt
milk, however loudly his ladies may have wailed for the missing
_creme-de-la-creme_ of Virginia springs.
The morning after arrival we at last saw "the house;" which, far from
being an imposing edifice, was a dingy, small office, just off the
Levee, with the dingier sign of "Long, Staple & Middling" over the
door. There were a few stalwart negroes basking in the sun about the
entrance, sleeping comfortably in the white glare, or showing glancing
ivories, in broad grins--each one keeping his shining cotton hook in
full view, like a badge of office. Within was a perfect steam of
business, and Staple _pere_ was studying a huge ledger through a pair
of heavy gold spectacles--popping orders like fire-crackers, at half a
dozen attentive clerks. Long, the senior partner, was in Virginia--and
Middling, the junior, was hardly more than an expert foreman of the
establishment.
"Happy, indeed, to meet you, sir!--93 of Red River lot, Mr. Edds--Heard
of you frequently--Terribly busy time these, sir, partner away--13,094
middlins, for diamond B at 16-1/3, Adams--. We dine at seven, you
remember Styles--Don't be in a hurry, sir!--1,642 A.B., page 684,
Carter--Good day--See you at seven."
And it was only over the perfect claret, at the emphasized hour, that
we discovered Mr. Staple to be a man of fine mind and extensive culture,
a hearty sympathizer in the rebellion--into which he would have
thrown his last dollar--and one of the most successful men on the
Levee. Long, his senior partner, was a western man of hard, keen
business sense, who had come to New Orleans fifty years before, a
barefooted deck-hand on an Ohio schooner. By shrewdness, dogged
industry and some little luck, he made "Long's" the best known and
richest house in the South-west, until in the crash of '37 it
threatened to topple down forever. Then Mr. Staple came forward with
his great credit and large amount of spare capital, saved the house and
went into it himself; while Middling, the former clerk of all work, was
promoted, for fidelity in the trying times, to a small partnership.
Like all the heavy cotton men of the South, Mr. Staple believed firmly
that cotton was king, and that the first steamer into a southern port
would bring a French and British minister.
"It's against our interest for the present to do so," he said,
confidently; "but my partner and I have advised all our planters to
hold their cotton instead of shipping it, that the market may not be
glutted when the foreign ships come in. And, yet, sir, it's coming down
now faster than ever. Everybody prefers, in the disorganized state of
things, to have ready money for cotton, that in three months' time must
be worth from twenty to thirty cents!"
"Hard to believe, sir, isn't it? Yet our planters, looking at things
from their own contracted standpoint, think the English and French
cabinets will defer recognition of our Government. As for 'the house,'
sir, it will put all it possesses into the belief that they can not
prove so blind!"
Like most of the wealthy men in New Orleans, Mr. Staple had a
charmingly located villa a mile from the lake and drove out every
evening, after business hours, to pass the night.
"Not that I fear the fever," he explained. "What strangers regard as
such certain death is to us scarce more than the agues of a North
Carolina flat. 'Yellow Jack' is a terrible scourge, indeed, to the
lower classes, and to those not acclimatized. The heavy deposits of
vegetable drift from the inundations leave the whole country for miles
coated four or five inches deep in creamy loam. This decomposes most
rapidly upon the approach of hot weather, and the action of the dews,
when they begin to fall upon it, causes the _miasmata_ to rise in dense
and poisonous mists. Now these, of course, are as bad in country--except
in very elevated localities--as in town; but they are only _dangerous_
in crowded sections, or to the enervated constitutions that could as
ill resist any other disease."
"You astonish me, indeed," I answered. "For I have always classed
yellow fever and cholera as twin destroyers. They must be, from such
seasons as you have every few years."
"So all strangers think. But to the resident, who from choice, or
business engagements, has passed one summer in the city, 'Jack' loses
his terrors. The symptoms are unmistakable. Slight nausea and pain in
the back, headache and a _soupcon_ of chill. The workingman feels
these. He can not spare the time or the doctor's bill, perhaps. He
poohs the matter--it will pass off--and goes to work. The delay and the
sun set the disease; and he is brought home at night--or staggers to
the nearest hospital--to die of the black vomit in thirty-six hours.
Hence, the great mortality.
"Now, I feel these pains, I at once recognize the fever, go right home,
bathe feet and back in hot water, take a strong aperient, put mustard
on my stomach and pile on the blankets. In an hour I am bathed in sweat
till maybe it drips through the mattress. I put on another blanket,
take a hot draught with an opiate, and go to sleep. It is not a
pleasant thing, with the thermometer at ninety degrees in the shade;
but when I wake in the morning, I have saved an attack of fever."
This regimen was constantly repeated to me. In the district crowded
with the poorer classes, who are dependent on their daily labor for
their daily bread, the fever stalks gaunt and noisome, marking his
victims and seldom in vain. All day long, and far into the night in bad
seasons, the low, dull rumble of the dead-cart echoed through the
narrow streets; and at the door of every squalid house was the plain
pine box that held what was left of some one of its loved inmates. Yet
through this carnival of death, steadily and fearlessly, the better
class of workers walk; not dreading the contagion and secure in their
harness of precaution.
To sleep in the infected atmosphere in sickly quarters was thought more
dangerous; but any business man considered himself safe, if he only
breathed the poisonous air in the daytime. The resident physicians, in
their recent treatment, feel the disease quite in their hands, when no
other foe than the fever is to be combated. Any preceding excess of
diet, drink or excitement is apt to aggravate it; but in ordinary
cases, where proper remedies are taken in season, nine out of ten
patients recover.
Otherwise, this ratio is just reversed; and in the working
classes--especially strangers--to take the fever, in bad years, is to
die. The utmost efforts of science, the most potent drugs--even the
beautiful and selfless devotion of the "Howard Association" and its
like--availed nothing in the wrestle with the grim destroyer, when he
had once fairly clutched his hold. And in the crowded quarters, where
the air was poison without the malaria, his footing was too sure for
mortal to prevail against him.
New Orleans was, at this time, divided into two distinct towns in one
corporation--the French and American. In the one, the French language
was spoken altogether for social and business purposes, and even in
the courts. The theaters were French, the cafes innocent of English,
and, as Hood says, the "very children speak it." Many persons grow
up in this quarter--or did in years back--who never, to their old
age, crossed to the American town or spoke one word of English. In
the society of the old town, one found a miniature--exact to the
photograph--of Paris. It was jealously exclusive, and even the most
petted beaux of the American quarter deemed it privilege to enter it. A
stranger must come with letters of the most urgent kind before he could
cross its threshold. All the etiquette and form of the _ancien regime_
obtained here--the furniture, the dress, the cookery, the dances were
all French.
In the American town the likeness to Mobile was very marked, in the
manners and style of the people. The young men of the French quarter
had sought this society more of late years, finding in it a freedom
from restraint, for which their associations with other Americans in
business gave them a taste. The character of the society was gay and
easy--and it was not hedged in so carefully as that of the old town.
Strangers were cordially--if not very carefully--welcomed into it; and
the barriers of reserve, that once protected it, were rapidly breaking
down before the inroads of progress and petroleum.
The great hotels--the "St. Charles," "St. Louis" and others--were
constantly filled with the families of planters from all points of the
river and its branches, and with travelers from the Atlantic border as
well. Many of these were people of cultivation and refinement; but
many, alas! the roughest of diamonds with a western freedom of
expression and solidity of outline, that is national but not agreeable.
In the season these people overflowed the hotels, where they had
constant hops with, occasionally, splendid balls and even masques. Many
of them were "objects of interest" to the young men about town, by
reason of papa's business, or Mademoiselle's proper bank account. So
the hotels--though not frequented by the ladies of the city at
all--became, each year, more and more thronged by the young men; and
consequently, each year, the outsiders gained a very gradual, but more
secure, footing near the home society and even began to force their way
into it.
It must be confessed that some damsels from Red River wore diamonds at
breakfast; and that young ladies from Ohio would drive tandem to the
lake! And then their laughs and jokes at a soiree would give a dowager
from Frenchtown an apoplexy!
_Que voulez vous?_ Pork is mighty! and cotton was king!
There was much difference of opinion as to the morals of the Crescent
City. For my own part, I do not think the men were more dissipated than
elsewhere, though infinitely more wedded to enjoyment and fun in every
form. There was the French idea prevalent that gambling was no harm;
and it was indulged to a degree certainly hurtful to many and ruinous
to some. From the climate and the great prevalence of light wines,
there was less drunkenness than in most southern towns; and if other
vices prevailed to any great extent--they were either gracefully
hidden, or so sanctioned by custom as to cause no remark, except by
straight-laced strangers.
Oh! the delicious memories of the city of old! The charming cordiality
to be found in no colder latitude, the cosy breakfasts that prefaced
days of real enjoyment--the midnight revels of the _bal masque_! And
then the carnival!--those wild weeks when the Lord of Misrule wields
his motley scepter--leading from one reckless frolic to another till
_Mardi Gras_ culminates in a giddy whirl of delirious fun on which,
at midnight, Lent drops a somber veil!
Sad changes the war has wrought since then!
The merry "Krewe of Comus" has been for a time replaced by the
conquering troops of the Union; the _salons_ where only the best and
brightest had collected have been sullied by a conquering soldiery; and
their leader has waged a vulgar warfare on the noble womanhood his
currish spirit could not gaze upon without a fruitless effort to
degrade.
Of the resident ladies, I can only say that to hear of a fast one--in
ordinary acceptation of that term--was, indeed, rare.
The young married woman monopolized more of the society and its beaux
than would be very agreeable to New York belles; but, if they borrowed
this custom from their French neighbors, I have not heard that they
also took the license of the Italian.
Public and open improprieties were at once frowned down, and people of
all grades and classes seemed to make their chief study good taste.
This is another French graft, on a stem naturally susceptible, of which
the consequences can be seen from the hair ribbon of the _bonne_ to the
decoration of the Cathedral.
The women of New Orleans, as a rule, dress with more taste--more
perfect adaptation of form and color to figure and complexion--than any
in America. On a dress night at the opera, at church, or at a ball, the
_toillettes_ are a perfect study in their exquisite fitness--their
admirable blending of simplicity and elegance. Nor is this confined to
the higher and more wealthy classes. The women of lower conditions are
admirably imitative; and on Sunday afternoons, where they crowd to hear
the public bands with husbands and children, all in their best, it is
the rarest thing to see a badly-trimmed bonnet or an ill-chosen
costume. The men, in those days, dressed altogether in the French
fashion; and were, consequently, the worst dressed in the world.
The most independent and obtrusively happy people one noticed in New
Orleans were the negroes. They have a sleek, shiny blackness here,
unknown to higher latitudes; and from its midst the great white
eyeballs and large, regular teeth flash with a singular brilliance.
Sunday is _their_ day peculiarly--and on the warm afternoons, they bask
up and down the thoroughfares in the gaudiest of orange and scarlet
bandannas. But their day is fast passing away; and in place of the
simple, happy creatures of a few years gone, we find the discontented
and besotted idler--squalid and dirty.
The cant of to-day--that the race problem, if left alone, will settle
itself--may have some possible proof in the distant future; but the few
who are ignorant enough to-day to believe the "negro question" already
settled may find that they are yet but on the threshold of the
"irrepressible conflict" between nature and necessity.
To the natural impressibility of the southron, the Louisianian adds the
enthusiasm of the Frenchman. At the first call of the governor for
troops, there had been readiest response; and here, as in Alabama, the
very first young men of the state left office and counting-room and
college to take up the musket. Two regiments of regulars, in the state
service, were raised to man the forts--"Jackson" and "St. Philip"--that
guarded the passes below the city. These were composed of the
stevedores and workingmen generally, and were officered by such young
men as the governor and council deemed best fitted. The Levee had been
scoured and a battalion of "Tigers" formed from the very lowest of the
thugs and plugs that infested it, for Major Bob Wheat, the well-known
filibuster.
Poor Wheat! His roving spirit still and his jocund voice now mute, he
sleeps soundly under the sighing trees of Hollywood--that populous
"city of the silent" at Richmond. It was his corps of which such wild
and ridiculous stories of bowie-knife prowess were told at the Bull Run
fight. They, together with the "Crescent Rifles," "Chasseurs-a-pied"
and "Zouaves," were now at Pensacola.
The "Rifles" was a crack corps, composed of some of the best young men
in New Orleans; and the whole corps of "Chasseurs" was of the same
material. They did yeomen's service in the four years, and the last one
saw very few left of what had long since ceased to be a separate
organization. But of all the gallant blood that was shed at the call of
the state, none was so widely known as the "Washington Artillery." The
best men of Louisiana had long upheld and officered this battalion as a
holiday pageant; and, when their merry meetings were so suddenly
changed to stern alarums, to their honor be it said, not one was
laggard.
In the reddest flashings of the fight, on the dreariest march through
heaviest snows, or in the cozy camp under the summer pines, the
_guidon_ of the "W.A." was a welcome sight to the soldier of the
South--always indicative of cheer and of duty willingly and thoroughly
done.
It was very unwillingly that I left New Orleans on a transport, with a
battalion of Chasseurs for Pensacola. Styles was to stay behind for the
present, and then go on some general's staff; so half the amusement of
my travel was gone. "The colonel" was _desole_.
"_Such_ a hotel as the St. Charles!" he exclaimed, with tears in his
voice--"such soups. Ah! my boy, after the war I'll come here to
live--yes, sir, to live! It's the only place to get a dinner. Egad,
sir, out of New Orleans _nobody_ cooks!"
I suggested comfort in the idea of red snapper at Pensacola.
"Red fish is good in itself. Egad, I think it _is_ good," replied the
colonel. "But eaten in camp, with a knife, sir--egad, with a knife--off
a tin plate! _Pah!_ You've never lived in camp." And in a hollow,
oracular whisper, he added: "Wait!"
And they were real models, the New Orleans hotels of those days, and
the colonel's commendations were but deserved. In _cuisine_, service
and wines, they far surpassed any on this continent; and for variety of
patrons they were unequaled anywhere.
Two distinct sets inhabited the larger ones, as antagonistic as oil and
water. The _habitues_, easy, critical to a degree, and particular to a
year about their wines, lived on comfortably and evenly, enjoying the
very best of the luxurious city, and never having a cause for
complaint. The up-river people flocked in at certain seasons by the
hundred. They crowded the lobbies, filled the spare bed-rooms, and eat
what was put before them, with but little knowledge save that it was
French. These were the business men, who came down for a new engagement
with a factor, or to rest after the summer on the plantation. One-half
of them were terribly busy; the other half having nothing to do after
the first day--they always stay a week--and assuming an air of high
criticism that was as funny to the knowing ones as expensive to them.
At our hotel, one evening, as favored guests, we found ourselves on an
exploring tour with mine host. It ended in the wine-room.
The mysteries of that vaulted chamber were seldom opened to the outer
world; and passing the _profanum vulgus_ in its first bins, we listened
with eager ears and watering mouths to recital of the pedigree and
history of the dwellers within.
Long rows of graceful necks, golden crowned and tall, peered over dust
and cobwebs of near a generation; bottles aldermanic and plethoric
seemed bursting with the hoarded fatness of the vine; clear, white
glass burned a glowing ruby with the Burgundy; and lean, jaundiced
bottles--carefully bedded like rows of invalids--told of rare and
priceless Hocks.
From arch to arch our garrulous _cicerone_ leads us, with a heightened
relish as we get deeper among his treasures and further away from the
daylight.
"There!" he exclaims at last with a great gulp of triumph. "There!
that's _Sherry_, the king of wines! Ninety years ago, the Conde Pesara
sent that wine in his own ships. Ninety years ago--and for twenty it
has lain in my cellar, never touched but by my own hand"--and he holds
up the candle to the shelf, inch deep in dust, while the light seems to
dart into the very heart of the amber fluid, and sparkle and laugh back
again from the fantastic drapery the spiders had festooned around the
bottles. "Yes, all the Pesaras are dead years gone; and only this blood
of the vine is left of them."
"But you _don't_ sell that wine!" gasps the colonel. "Egad! you don't
sell it to those--people--up stairs!"
"I did _once_"--and mine host sighs. "A great cotton man came
down. He was a king on the river--he wanted the best! Money was nothing
to him, so I whispered of this, and said twenty dollars the bottle!
And, Colonel, he didn't--_like it!_"
"Merciful heaven!" the colonel waxes wroth.
"So Francois there sent him a bottle of that _Xeres_ in the outer bin
yonder--we sell it to you for two dollars the bottle--and he said
_that_ was wine!"
But of the other family--who live in an American hurry and eat by
steam--was the goblin diner of whom a friend told me in accents of awe.
One day, at the St. Charles, a resident stopped him on the way to their
accustomed table:
"Have you seen these people eat?" he asked. "No? Then we'll stop and
look. This table is reserved for the up-river men who have little time
in the city and make the most of it. While they swallow soup, a nimble
waiter piles the nearest dishes around them, without regard to order or
quality. They eat fish, roast and fried, on the same plate, swallowing
six inches of knife blade at every bolt. Then they draw the nearest pie
to them, cut a great segment in it, make three huge arcs therein with
as many snaps of their teeth; seize a handful of nuts and raisins and
rush away, with jaws still working like a flouring-mill. Ten minutes is
their limit for dinner." My friend only smiled. The other adding:
"You doubt it? Here comes a fine specimen; hot, healthy and evidently
busy. See, he looks at his watch! I'll bet you a bottle of St. Peray he
'does' his dinner within the ten."
"Done"--and they sat opposite him, watch in hand.
And that wonderful Hoosier dined in seven minutes!