New Orleans had grown to be a city of 170,000 people. Its commerce was
enormous. It was the great entrepôt of the continent's sugar and cotton
industries.
Day by day I stood on the wharves, watching the steamers unload and
load, gazing over the busy mass of humanity back of which was labor,
black and white, slave and free! The great Mississippi, broad and foul,
waking from its sleep in the lowlands above, gathering speed here,
feeling the call of the sea, begins to move with increased life. Across
from the city are lowlands, sugar refineries, smoke stacks. The negroes
call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf
officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips
from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble
over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life
of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along
Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. I catch
the whiff of flowers. Gulls fly over the muddy water.
I think of Douglas far away in Russia, of all my life in its early days,
now growing so misty. I am more than thirty-seven; and sometimes I feel
weary. I grieve for Dorothy. She has wound herself with tenderness
around my heart. But less and less can she share life with me.
I go to the Place d'Armes to see the equestrian statue of Jackson which
has been erected here since my last visit. It is now called Jackson
Square. The St. Louis Cathedral has been largely rebuilt. I wander
through the Cabildo again, visit the old cemeteries, read the names of
the dead. The scent of strange blossoms affects me poignantly. I stroll
through the parks, and I visit the life in the French quarter.
Dorothy can drive with me at times, but not for long. Our boy distresses
her; and a governess keeps him away much of the time. There are memories
all about me. La Fayette has been here. He was in this very Cabildo. The
old hero of New Orleans, who blessed Dorothy and me, walked these
streets. Now he is long gone. Clay is gone, Webster, Calhoun. The
country is at a pause. Hawthorne's friend is President. And Douglas is
in St. Petersburg, riding a horse grotesquely, and bringing his western
ways into the very presence of the Czar.
Sometimes I wonder if Zoe is not alive, if some kind of consummate trick
was not played on me. Fortescue did not kill her. He did not seem to me
like a man who would commit murder. Why would any one murder Zoe? Might
she not have been sold for her loveliness to some man desiring a
mistress? No! Zoe would write to me if she were living. Yet I went
everywhere in New Orleans searching for Zoe.
Often I visited the St. Louis hotel, for there young quadroons and
octoroons on sale, tastefully dressed, were inspected by men with all
the critical and amorous interest with which a roué would look upon the
object of his desire. Their eyes were gazed into, their hair stroked,
their limbs caressed and outlined, their busts stared at and touched.
Men went mad over these beauties.
A story went the rounds that a young man in Virginia fell in love with
an octoroon slave while on a visit to a country house. The girl had gone
to her mistress for protection, and received it, against the man's
advances. But he had returned, saying that he could not live without the
girl. The mistress had sold her to him for $1500. Did Zoe meet that
fate, and not violence?
So I searched the cafes, the places of amusement, the bagnios for Zoe.
And into every octoroon's face in which I saw a resemblance to Zoe I
peered, hoping that it would be she. For with Dorothy so much ill, and
with no one in the world of my own but Dorothy and our boy, I had hours
of profound loneliness. In New Orleans this winter I was more lonely
than I had ever been in my life. I no longer had to strive, I had money
enough. And all the while my real estate investments in Chicago doubled
and trebled while I traveled.
There were many French in New Orleans; there was reverence there and
memory for Bonaparte. There was gladness and exultation now that Louis
Napoleon had accomplished a coup d'état and established a throne upon
the ruins of the republic. His soldiers were in the Crimea, fighting as
desperately as if great wealth or fame could be won by their valor and
death. But it was all for the glory of the French throne! A French
monarchy again, after the struggles of Mirabeau, after the agony of
Marat, and after the rise of republican principles which Douglas had
hailed with delight! If these things could be done with honor and
applause, did Douglas deserve the hostility which was rising up against
him? Was America so immaculately free that Douglas' subordination of the
negro to the welfare of the republic at large should be so severely
dealt with?
On the bulletin boards in great headlines, the progress of the Crimean
War was heralded. The French soldiers were winning imperishable glory.
The Light Brigade had died for God and the glory of England in the
charge at Balaklava. Cavour had sent the Sardinians to help France and
England against the Russians; these were soon to fight for the liberty
of Italy. Always liberty and God! Russia had gone to war against the
Turks because of a quarrel between the Greek and Latin Christians at
Jerusalem. Then the Czar demanded of the Turk the right of a
protectorate over all Greek Christians in the Ottoman empire. It was
refused. Hence war. And England and France and Cavour's Sardinians are
fighting Russia. Perhaps the Latin church is the inspiring cause. Minds
and noses concur, and the result is conscience.
America is in a distressed condition and growing worse. Politics raves.
Malice, destroying forces are abroad. Always war with or without the
sword. The Greek Christian must be protected; but the Turk must not be
vanquished, his country taken by Russia. Louis Napoleon would win a
little glory. England needs the Turk, because she lusts for Egypt and
India. France wants Algeria and Morocco. In America the North wants
power; the South wants power. Men are anxious for office. Labor has
interests at stake; so has manufacturing. Farsighted money makers,
imperialists, deploy these factions; parties are formed; the populace is
fooled with war records and catch words. Men must be destroyed in order
to achieve results--for God and liberty. Among others, Douglas must be
destroyed!
He has risen from obscurity to be the first man in America in the realm
of statecraft. He has been a cabinet maker, a lawyer, a legislator, a
judge, a Senator, then a leader, now chairman of the committee on
territories. He has perfected political efficiency, introduced the
convention system, done for representative government what the reaper
has done for the harvest field. He has done this all himself without
wealth or family to boost him. He is charged with being clever and
resourceful, but no one points to corruption in his life. Is there a
statesman in Europe or one in America with a cleaner record? His whole
energy has been devoted to the development of the country. He has worked
for schools, for colleges, for canals, for railroads, for the quick
dissemination of intelligence, for the rule of the people on every
subject, including slavery, and for that rule in places of maturing
sovereignty, like territories, and in places of complete sovereignty,
like states. He is spiritually hard, hates the sap-head, the agitator,
the simple-hearted moralist. He is indifferent to slavery, when it
stands in the way of his republic building. He knows that slavery cannot
thrive in the North. He knows that prairies of corn, hills of iron and
coal, fields of wheat are as alien to slavery as the tropics are alien
to polar bears and reindeer. He sees a God who works through climate;
and he sees that the cotton calls for a certain kind of worker, and corn
for another. He did not read and he did not know much of anything of the
work of Marx and the Revolutionary Manifesto of 1848. He did not need
to. He sensed the materialistic conception of history. He had no horror
of slavery, knowing exactly what it was; on the other hand he was
falsely accused of trying to plant it in the territories.
He was hunted and traduced! Moralists prattled of his lack of a moral
nature; envy tracked him, shooting from ambush! He had become rich and
famous. He was the first man in his party. He was young and full of
power. He might be President. The sanctimonious quoted Scripture against
him. "Where a man's treasure is, there will be his heart also," said an
enemy in the Senate, referring to the fact that Douglas had married a
woman who was a slave owner. Douglas had replied in these manly and
tender words: "God forbid that I should be understood by any one as
being willing to cast from me any responsibility that now does or has
ever attached to any member of-my family. So long as life shall last and
I shall cherish with religious veneration the memories and virtues of
the sainted mother of my children--so long as my heart shall be filled
with paternal solicitude for the happiness of those motherless
infants, I implore my enemies who so ruthlessly invade the domestic
sanctuary to do me the favor to believe that I have no wish, no
aspiration to be considered purer or better than she, who was, or they
who are slaveholders."
It was while I was in New Orleans that Douglas wrote me a letter
regarding the Presidency. "I do not wish to occupy that position," he
said. "I think that such a state of things will exist that I shall not
desire the nomination. Yet I do not intend to do any act which will
deprive me of the control of my own action. Our first duty is to the
cause--the fate of individual politicians is of minor consequence. The
party is in a distracted condition, and it requires all our wisdom,
prudence, and energy to consolidate its power and perpetuate its
principles."
It was this letter that stirred my reflections as I went about New
Orleans reading of conditions in Europe and foolishly searching for
Zoe. Moreover, I was beginning to be tired of everything in America, and
particularly worn with New Orleans. I longed to be back in Chicago in
the fresh air by the lake, away from the steam, the heat, the sensual
atmosphere of this southern city. Yet Dorothy could not just now venture
into the changeable climate of Lake Michigan. I was forced to stay on
for her sake. I continued my wanderings and my thoughts about the city,
guiding my business interests in Chicago by correspondence.
But at last we started.