New Orleans and New Orleans Notabilities.
Crossing from Mobile to New Orleans was going from the past of the South
to its present. Till within a few weeks, Mobile had been among the
latest strongholds of the rebellion; for some years New Orleans had been
held by the national authorities, and had been changing under the
operation of Northern influences. Mobile showed us the last of the old
South; New Orleans the first of the new.
Before the Wayanda had reached the old battleground where what we would
now call a sharp skirmish added the 8th of January to our public
holidays, and gave the country one of its most famous Presidents, she
was met by a tug containing a number of the officials, and some of the
prominent lawyers of the city, come down to welcome the Chief Justice.
Among them were natives of the South, and gentlemen whose interests were
all wrapped up in New Orleans. But a day or two, before the city papers
had published Mr. Chase’s remarks to the Charleston negroes, and much
angry comment had been excited by this “desecration of the judicial
ermine” and the sanction given to the claims of the negroes for
suffrage; yet nothing could have exceeded the cordiality of his
reception. His host was a young sugar-planter, born here, and inheriting
large estates and many slaves from his father. Fortunately for the young
man, much of his boyhood had been spent abroad, and when, at the age of
seventeen, the sudden death of his father recalled him from St.
Petersburg and made him a millionaire, he was measurably free from the
ideas which slavery steadily instilled. When the Emancipation
Proclamation came, his plantations were in the exempted parishes; but he
was clear-sighted enough to see the inevitable end, and sagacious enough
to recognize it as already practically accomplished. He gathered his
slaves together, told them that henceforth they might consider
themselves free, and proposed a bargain for their services, if they were
willing to remain at their old places. They stipulated for rations, and
an average of between eight and ten dollars wages per month, which was
promptly paid. They have been working steadily ever since, and Mr. May
now states that, in spite of the demoralizing effects of the war, to say
nothing of the actual ravages of guerrillas, his principal plantation
has been as profitable under the free-labor system as it was formerly,
when labor cost him nothing.
Like most of the wealthy sugar-planters, Mr. May keeps up his town
house, and, indeed, spends the greater part of his time in the city,
where, for a year or two past, official duties have required his
presence. At the age of twenty-three, he holds the position of United
States Treasurer, appointed thereto mainly for the reason that he was
the most responsible loyal Southerner then to be found in the city. Even
he had served for a season in the Rebel service—to have stayed out of
it, he says, would have been to have sacrificed his property—but he
contrived to get back as soon as New Orleans fell, and was among the
very first to present himself before General Butler to take the oath of
allegiance.
We had been at his house scarcely an hour, and had just gathered about
the table, at lunch, when a compact, little, big-chested, crop-headed,
fiery-faced officer, in Major-General’s uniform, was shown in. He was
altogether the most modest, bashful, and embarrassed little fellow we
had seen on the whole trip; conversing under restraint, sitting uneasily
on his chair, and flushing redder than ever when a lady addressed him.
They tell a ludicrous story of his having taken a splendid bouquet to
the theater, one evening, to give to a lady whom he knew he should see
there. He held it nervously through half the performance; started once
or twice from his box to pass around to the one which the lady occupied,
but speedily returned, bouquet still in hand, his heart having each time
failed him on the way. Finally, summoning one of his staff officers, he
directed _him_ to carry the bouquet over to Miss ——, with General
Sheridan’s compliments. Yet, as one looks at the developments on the
back of his head, it is easy to understand the tremendous energy and
intense love of fighting for the sake of fighting, that have made “Phil.
Sheridan” the most famous cavalry officer of the war, if not of the
century.
He had but recently assumed command of the Gulf Department, and had been
busily occupied with the affairs of Texas. He was by no means satisfied
with the situation in the Lone Star State. There had been no real
surrender. The officers had availed themselves of the chance for
paroles, and the men had gone off, arms in their hands, half expecting a
renewal of the war, with the Mexican frontier as a base of operations,
and, at any rate, too far from being well whipped to become very quiet
or orderly citizens. He did not say in terms that there had been bad
faith on the part of Kirby Smith and the other Confederate officers, but
it was evident that he more than suspected it.
Some talk that followed of cotton speculations in Texas, possible and
proposed, disclosed pretty plainly a fact which had often been hinted at
and as often denied in the newspapers. Either Kirby Smith, or some
person assuming to speak for him, had been in indirect communication
with our authorities on the subject of closing out the war in the
Trans-Mississippi Department, by a big exportation of Confederate cotton
on private account. “I’ve known for a long time that he was for sale,”
said one, “but I have always doubted whether he was worth the price
proposed.”
Among the stream of callers that filled up the afternoon was an old
gentleman, whom, but for the half-modernized clothes, one might have
taken for Dr. Franklin, as he is shown in the marble statue at the
Capitol. The countenance had the same strong cast; the thin gray locks
hung down, long, over the straight, collarless Quaker coat in the same
way; the broad-brimmed hat, the cane, the general aspect of venerable
but hearty old age, were all as we have them in the statue. This was
Jacob Barker,[29] a Northern Quaker, whose term of residence in New
Orleans counts further back than the lives of most of her citizens, and
who had, nevertheless, apparently passed the prime of a prosperous
business career before he emigrated to the South. Mr. Barker is now
between eighty and ninety years of age. He has many ships carrying his
trade to foreign and domestic ports. His children approach old age
around him, and yet he may be seen almost every day, during business
hours, behind the counter, in his old-fashioned little bank on Camp
Street, counting money and waiting on customers, like a bank clerk of
twenty.
Long ago Mr. Barker sympathized with the generous views of his sect on
the sinfulness of slavery. It is even of record that he joined a party
once in New York harbor, which steamed out in one of his own tug-boats
to a vessel about to sail for Charleston, and rescued a runaway slave
she was to carry back to his South Carolina owner. How Southern business
has molded Northern consciences may be seen in the fact that, for a
generation past, Mr. Barker has been as Southern in his views as the
majority of the depositors in his bank; and, indeed, it seems scarcely
known in a Rebel community, whose highest confidence he enjoys, that so
devoted a Southern politician is not, after all, a Southern man.
We were joined at dinner by three gentlemen who might be taken as
conspicuous representatives of the Southern bar, as well as of diverse
phases of Southern Unionism. The eldest, a fine old gentleman, whose
youthful spirits and ruddy face perpetually contradict the story of his
thin gray hairs, is generally held to be the finest civil lawyer here,
which is equivalent to pronouncing him the finest civil lawyer in the
United States.[30] As long ago as during the administration of General
Jackson, his prominence was such that, when it was plausibly argued that
a vacancy on the Supreme Bench ought to be so filled as to give that
tribunal of last resort at least one Judge learned in the civil law, Mr.
Roselius was at once suggested. New Orleans lawyers still tell that he
might have had the place if he would; but that the emoluments of the bar
are here too great to be exchanged for the honorable beggary of the
Supreme Court.
The next was in every particular a contrast to this genial, rosy-faced
Nestor of the city bar. He was tall, thin, sallow, cadaverous. His
habitual expression seemed saturnine; he had less to say; indulged in
fewer compliments; told fewer stories. This was Mr. Thos. J. Durant, the
leader of the Radical Free-State party in the State, and an orator whom
Northern men pronounce not unworthy of mention in the same connection
with Wendell Phillips.
Judge Whittaker, the third of the party (reported to be now an aspirant
for the Supreme Bench, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Judge
Catron), though an emigrant to New Orleans from South Carolina, looked
rather like one of the free-and-easy Kentucky lawyers in the mountain
districts. His collar was carelessly turned down; his tall,
loose-jointed figure matched well with his careless toilet, and his
hearty ways, and irregular features, lit up with a smile of Western
rather than Southern cordiality, all bespoke a different origin.
These three men stand in the foremost rank of Louisiana lawyers, and
typify various grades of Louisiana Unionism. Mr. Durant is an intense
Radical. In Boston he would be an Abolitionist of the Abolitionists. He
speaks at negro meetings, demands negro suffrage, unites with negroes in
educational movements, champions negroes in the courts. The resident
Rebels hate him with an intensity of hatred due only to one whom they
regard as an apostate; but all are glad to avail themselves of his legal
abilities, and he is daily compelled to reject business he has no time
for. Judge Whittaker is far more cautious. He may be as innocent as the
dove; but, at any rate, under all his hearty, warm manner there is a
good deal of the wisdom of the serpent. He was always a Union man, but
he took pains not to make himself personally offensive to the Rebels,
and was not disturbed by them during their control of the city. Now that
the Union cause has triumphed, he would move very slowly. Negro suffrage
may become necessary, but he would wait and see. If there were any
possible way of avoiding it, he would avoid it. Mr. Roselius is at once,
through age and by temperament, still more cautious. His conservative
tendencies led him to oppose secession; the same tendencies lead him to
want now a return as nearly as possible to the old condition of
affairs—the veritable _status in quo ante bellum_. Slavery, of course,
can not be restored, nor would he desire it; but he would have the
abolition of slavery work just as few attendant changes as possible.
Above all, treat the returning Rebels well; dine them, and wine them;
tell them it’s high time they would quit making fools of themselves, and
that you’re glad to see them back.
* * * * *
In the cool of the evening, Mr. May drove us out to see the city. It
recalls no other town in the South; reminds one more of Havana than of
any of them, and is very much unlike even it. “A town where all their
drains are above ground; where a cellar would be a cistern; where the
river is as high as the roofs of the houses, and where, when you die,
instead of burying you like a Christian, they tuck you away on a shelf,
and plaster you in with lath and mortar—that’s New Orleans.” Such was
the description once given by an energetic Yankee, and it conveys as
accurate an idea as whole pages might. He should have added that it is a
town where half the inhabitants think of Paris as their home, and feel
as much interest in the Tuilleries as the White House; that of the other
half, the most are cotton factors or commercial men of some sort, with
principles not infrequently on sale with their goods; that it is at once
the most luxurious, the most unprincipled, the most extravagant, and, to
many, the most fascinating city in the Union—the only place that, before
the war, could support the opera through an entire winter; the only
place where the theaters are open on Sunday evening; where gambling is
not concealed, and keeping a mistress is not only in no sense
discreditable, but is even made legal. What Boston is to the North,
Charleston and Richmond are, in a diminished sense, to the South; what
New York is to the North, New Orleans is, in an exaggerated sense, to
the South.
The city itself showed no traces of war. Mounted orderlies dashed along
the streets; and in front of a few palatial residences guards in uniform
paced slowly to and fro. But the superb shrubbery of the Garden District
had not suffered as had that of Charleston. The spacious and airy wooden
residences in the upper part of the city never looked more attractive;
below Canal Street, the quaint, projecting roofs, and curious
green-barred doors and windows of the French quarter remained as in the
days when Napoleon sold out to the United States, and the inhabitants
woke up to find their allegiance transferred. Even the levee began to be
crowded again, and business seemed quite as active as could have been
expected in June.
* * * * *
In the evening our host took me down to the office of the principal
newspaper of the city. It has been started since the national
occupation, on the ruins of old Rebel papers; is, in shape and size, a
_fac simile_ of leading New York journals, is crowded with
advertisements, and is paying a net profit of eight to ten thousand
dollars a month. Yet, with such a start, its proprietors, though strong
Unionists, are afraid to take any decided political stand. Its main
rival, the Picayune, was already appealing to the returning Rebels, and
there was danger, they thought, of their being “cut under.” It was the
old, sad story of making principles as little offensive as possible, and
softening them away, point by point, to conciliate imperious patrons.
“You call our course hard names,” said one of the proprietors. “But look
at our condition. We have the largest circulation and the business lead.
The interior is just being opened up to us, and we want to occupy this
new field in advance of any rival. If we denounce Rebels, or advocate
negro suffrage, we lose what we have here, and throw away, at the same
time, all chance of extending our circulation in the country; for, the
moment we say anything particularly displeasing to the Rebels, the
Picayune stands ready for the chance, and steps into our business. No,
no. Our only chance is to make a good _news_ paper, and politically
drift with the tide!”
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Footnote 29:
Since elected Congressman from one of the New Orleans districts, in
the hope that his position and age might help to secure the admission
of himself and his colleagues. The House, however, proved
unimpressible, and he soon gave up an effort after such barren honors,
and returned.
Footnote 30:
Throughout the English-settled portion of the United States, the
British Common Law is the basis of all our jurisprudence. But the
French and Spanish settlements in Louisiana have left it the legacy of
the Civil Law, and so made the practice of law in its courts a matter
requiring special study, and presenting special perplexities.