The Beginning Reaction—Northern Emigrants and New Orleans Natives.
To be waked up in the morning by a negro, pushing your musquito-bar
aside to hand you a cup of coffee in bed; to have him presently return
with a glass of iced Congress water, an orange, and the morning papers,
and to be notified that he’ll come back after awhile to tell you when it
is time to get up, are traces of the old style of living in New Orleans,
to which our host scrupulously adhered. Slavery was doubtless very bad;
but it did one thing we shall never have so well done again—it trained
the best personal attendants to the last possibility of perfection.
Under their careful ministrations the most industrious might be excused
for an occasional languid lapse into seductive indolence. No wonder some
ambitious young writer made the discovery, after Banks’s discomfiture on
the Red River, that New Orleans has been the Capua of our Northern
armies.
The morning papers began to present an altered tone. A month ago they
sang only the softest strains in honor of the military management,
laughed at the rags of the Confederacy, and had no squeamishness in
speaking of Rebels and the rebellion. Now there were pleasant notices of
the returning Confederate braves; rejoicings at the revival of the old
appearance of things; hints about Yankee innovations which would soon be
forced to disappear. The old papers, which had helped fan the flames of
secession, and had only been permitted to continue their publication,
after the surrender of the city, under the most comprehensive promises
of good behavior, went even further. Mr. Lincoln already began to be
referred to as a hard master, whose unconstitutional courses a
Southerner like Mr. Johnson could not follow; and the demands of the
“Radicals” (whom a few weeks before they had been praising), were
denounced in terms quite equal to those of the old invectives against
the Abolitionists.
Everywhere one observed the same signs of reaction. The returning Rebel
soldiers seemed to have called into active utterance all the hostility
to Northerners that for nearly four years had lain latent. Men quoted
the North Carolina proclamation, and thanked God that there had suddenly
been found some sort of a breakwater against Northern fanaticism. There
were whispers that Governor Wells (who had been nominated as
Lieutenant-Governor on the ticket with Governor Hahn, under the Banks
military reorganization, and who, on Hahn’s election as Senator, had
succeeded to the Governorship), was about going over to the planting
(that is, to the Rebel) party. He had got all he could out of the
Free-State party; as his old friends returned, and as the North Carolina
proclamation emboldened him, he naturally drifted to the side where his
sympathies had always drawn him. But a day or two before, this
sallow-faced little official, who, but for the necessities of the Banks
reorganization, would never have risen from the obscurity of his remote
Red River plantation,[31] had received a young Northern officer, settled
in New Orleans, and an applicant for an office which he thought he could
fill. The Governor had already begun the free appointment of Rebel
officers, but a Northern officer who had been wounded on the loyal
side—to the success of which side alone he owed his position—presented a
different sort of a case.
“The truth is, sir, that we’re very much obliged to you for all you
Northern gentlemen have done; but now that you are successful, you had
better go home. Louisiana must be governed by Louisianians!”
The bubbling of the political caldron was at its hight. General Banks
had removed Mr. Kennedy, the Mayor of the city. In turn, he had himself
been superseded, and now it was rumored that the representations of his
creature, the Governor, who had betrayed him, having been listened to at
Washington, his humiliation was to be made complete by the restoration
of Kennedy. Such was the reward already being reaped for the
proscription of Durant, Flanders, and the other genuine Union men of the
State, in the mongrel military reorganization.
Carondelet Street, during these days, presented a curious scene.
Sometimes it was impossible to approach within a couple of squares of
the Provost-Marshal’s office, so great was the throng of returning Rebel
soldiers, applying for their paroles. It was a jolly, hand-shaking,
noisy, chattering crowd. Pushing about among them could be seen women,
sometimes evidently of wealth and position, seeking for their brothers
or husbands. Nothing could exceed the warmth with which they all greeted
the ragged fellows in gray, and every few moments one found his own eyes
growing dim as he watched the touching embrace of dear ones from whom
for four years they had been parted.[32] “Registered enemies,” too, were
returning; there was a general reunion and rejoicing, and amid it all,
the men who had been fleeing before Sheridan, or surrendering under Lee,
soon found it easy to forget how badly they had been beaten, or how
generously their treason had been treated.
I do not think the Northern men who had come into New Orleans since its
surrender, and who now so largely controlled its business, were doing
much to promote a healthier tone of public feeling. Most of them were
engrossed in trade. Scarcely any, officers or civilians, would hesitate
to join with the Southerners in talk against the Abolitionists and the
Sumnerites. Nearly all of them fell readily enough into the current
abuse of niggers and nigger-lovers. And it seemed too prevalent an idea
that, in order to secure profitable business, a man must either sink
politics altogether, or fall into the old habit of pandering to the
prejudices of those with whom he traded. Clearly, the days of Northern
flunkeyism had not entirely passed away.
* * * * *
New Orleans had proved a rich harvest-field to a crowd of new men and
miscellaneous adventurers from the North. Hundreds had accumulated
fortunes since the occupation of the city. Here is a single case: A
gentleman, unfortunate in previous business ventures, and without a
thousand dollars in the world, came to New Orleans, to see if something
would turn up. The sugar-planters had all ostentatiously proclaimed that
the Emancipation Proclamation had demoralized their labor and ruined
their business. Some, through spite, others because they believed it,
were absolutely abandoning the cane as it stood in their fields, on the
ground that the negroes couldn’t be trusted to make the sugar. This
gentleman saw his chance. First purchasing the matured cane from the
owners for a trifle, to be paid out of the returns of the crop, he went
to the negroes, told them he was a Northern man, and would pay them
fairly for their work, if they would go ahead and make the sugar. In
this way he soon had a dozen or more plantations running again; and in a
few months, the end of the sugar season brought him a hundred and thirty
thousand dollars net profit!
Subsequently the same man took to purchasing cotton, on a system of what
seemed utterly reckless speculation. He would buy a hundred thousand
dollars’ worth, ship it to New York, and check against his bills of
lading for its full value. This money he instantly invested in another
lot of cotton of equal amount, which he likewise shipped and checked
against; then reinvesting, shipping again, checking again, still making
fresh purchases, each with the money thus procured, and so building up
his commercial house of card-boards. It thus happened that he sometimes
used his hundred thousand dollars a dozen times over, before the returns
were half in from his earlier shipments. So enormous became the ventures
of this man, who started two years before on nothing, that he had on the
ocean, exposed to the perils of ocean navigation, at one time, seven
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cotton!
Few of these Northerners had yet made permanent investments in the
South. Plantations had not begun to come into the market. Southerners
had hardly had time to look about them and decide what to do. But it was
already evident that, provided they could make titles which were good
for anything, plenty of them would soon be anxious to sell. Northern
capital and energy were likely to have still finer openings within a few
months, than any that the confusion of a captured city and the chaos of
constantly shifting military government had afforded.
* * * * *
Among the earliest callers, the day after our arrival, were General
Canby and General Banks. The former is a plain, rather heavy-looking
regular, giving you the impression of a martinet, though officers of
excellent judgment speak highly of his abilities. He knows nothing about
politics, tries to confine himself to the purely military duties of his
department, and says he told the Secretary of War he didn’t feel fit to
undertake the management of the complex questions arising out of the
political relations of his department.
General Banks was fully sensible of the treachery which the person he
had made Governor was contemplating; still, he seemed to think that if
his reorganized government could only have been recognized by Congress,
the evils that were then upon the state would have been in some way
averted. Now he saw no remedy but in negro suffrage, and for this he was
disposed to give hearty co-operation. He had doubts as to whether the
General Government would have power to insist upon it; but, in some way
or another, not only justice to the loyal blacks, but absolute safety to
the loyal whites and to the nation, required it.
A call by the members of the New Orleans bar in a body, to pay their
respects to the Chief Justice, gave one an opportunity not often
afforded to see the lawyers of this leading city together. They were a
fine-looking body of men, mostly of marked Southern accent and manner,
very courteous, and, on the whole, impressing a stranger as of much more
than ordinary ability. Many of them were by no means as loyal as they
might be; and a few were in sore trouble about the test oath, which
prevented their practicing in the United States Court.
* * * * *
In the evening we were taken to a fair held by the Catholic
negroes—mostly of the old Louisiana free-negro stock. By one of the
curious revenges of these avenging times, the fair was held in the
elegant residence of no less a person than ex-Senator and ex-Minister
Pierre Soulé. He who had so often demonstrated negro inferiority and the
rightfulness of slavery was now an exile, seeking a precarious
livelihood by the practice of the law in a foreign language, in the City
of Mexico; while the inferior negroes were selling ice-cream from his
tables and raffling fancy articles in his spacious parlors, for the
benefit of the slave children’s schools!
Nowhere else in the world could that scene have been witnessed. There
were elegantly dressed ladies, beautiful with a beauty beside which that
of the North is wax-work; with great, swimming, lustrous eyes,
half-veiled behind long, pendent lashes, and arched with coal-black
eyebrows; complexions no darker than those of the Spanish senoritas one
admires in Havana, but transparent as that of the most beautiful
Northern blonde, with the rich blood coming and going, under the olive
skin, with every varying emotion; luxuriant flowing tresses, graceful
figures, accomplished manners—perfect Georgian or Circassian beauties.
Yet every one of these was “only a nigger.” Many of them had been
educated in Paris, and more than one Parisian wardrobe shimmered that
evening under the radiance of Mr. Pierre Soulé’s chandeliers. Some of
them were wealthy; all were intelligent, and some conversed in the
foreign tongue in which they addressed us, with a vivacity and grace not
often surpassed in Washington ball-rooms. But they were only niggers.
They might be presented to the Empress Eugenie; they might aspire to the
loftiest connections in Europe; but they were not fit to appear in a
white man’s house in New Orleans, and the Chief Justice was eternally
disgraced (according to the talk of the city next day), for having so
forgotten dignity, and even decency, as to enter a parlor filled with
niggers that were trying to play lady and gentleman!
These people were not always outcasts. Under the great Napoleon they
were citizens of the French Empire. It was only when the flag of the
free came to cover them that they were disfranchised; only when they
were transferred to a republic that they lost their political rights.
Hitherto they have held themselves aloof from the slaves, and
particularly from the plantation negroes; have plumed themselves upon
their French descent, and thus isolated from both races, have
transferred to Paris an allegiance that was rejected at Washington.
“But now,” as one of them very frankly said during the evening, “we see
that our future is indissolubly bound up with that of the negro race in
this country; and we have resolved to make common cause, and rise or
fall with them. We have no rights which we can reckon safe while the
same are denied to the fieldhands on the sugar plantations.”
Among the negro men present were several who, whether in complexion,
clothes or conversation, would never have been suspected in any mixed
company at the North of being other than intelligent and polished
ornaments of the Anglo-Saxon race. Mingled with these were others of
darker hues, ranging down to mulattoes, and even darker still; and among
them were several negro officers whose behavior Generals Butler and
Banks had highly praised. A group of beautiful ladies, apparently white,
was suddenly invaded by a quaint old chocolate-colored dame, with high
bandana wound about her head, subscription-book in hand, and the most
extraordinary squeaking tones, calling for the taking of shares in her
raffle. She was the grandmother of two of the young ladies! Madame
Mottier, a mulatto, or quadroon, in whose education I think Boston had
some hand, seemed to be the inspiring divinity of the fair, to whom all
looked for direction or advice. She is teacher in a colored school.
By and by Mr. Pierre Soulé’s piano, under quadroon fingers, began a
march, and manly voices—albeit not from Rebel throats—swelled the
chorus. And so we left them: negroes raffling fans and picture-frames
and sets of jewelry in the Soulé parlors; negroes selling ice-cream in
the Soulé dining-room; negroes at his piano; negroes in his library;
negroes swarming amid his shrubbery; and yet as handsome, as elegantly
dressed, and in many respects almost as brilliant a party as he himself
ever gathered beneath his hospitable roof.
Remembering how eagerly they had been buying portraits of Mr. Lincoln, I
could not fail to recall, as we drove back, what I had seen in a picture
gallery during the day, where there were no obnoxious “niggers” about. A
picture of Lincoln hung side by side with one of Wilkes Booth, and above
the two was a large, handsomely finished portrait of Robert E. Lee!
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Footnote 31:
And who subsequently thought it in good taste for him, of all men, to
refer, in a public speech, to the Chief Justice of the United States,
as “the political adventurer who has recently been among us!” A very
intelligent correspondent (“V. H.”) of the Cincinnati Commercial,
writing from the Governor’s home, gives the following account of him:
“Governor Wells does not seem to have much honor in his own parish. He
was sheriff here once, and defaulter to a large amount. His brother,
Montford Wells, has since been sued as one of the securities upon the
forfeited bond. Montford and Jeff., both brothers of J. Madison (the
Governor), married sisters—heiresses. The joint weddings—runaway
matches—were a ‘spree,’ the gay young couples chartering a steamboat,
and with a large party of merry guests, setting off from Alexandria,
firing a salute, as a note of defiance to the grim, gray old guardian,
who had presumed to threaten the course of true love (despite the
adage, about to run so smooth down Red River), with vain opposition.
Jeff.’s wife has been for some time in the Insane Asylum, and, since
the death of Jeff. himself, Montford has been trying to get possession
of the estate, in his wife’s name, and for the interest of his insane
sister-in-law. J. Madison (the Governor), however, had interfered, as
the representative of his brother Jeff. Why, I can’t understand, for
Montford is older than the Governor.”
Footnote 32:
Bankrupt in all but honor, the paroled soldiers of the Confederacy can
only tender to the ladies of New Orleans their undying gratitude for
the cordial welcome which has greeted their advent in the city, and
pray that God will bless the “ministering angels,” who have lifted
from their hearts the dark cloud of gloom and despondency, and turned
its “silver lining” outward, brightened with their smiles. Congregated
here only for a brief space, they will soon be widely scattered,
perhaps never to meet again. They are returning home with blighted
hopes and ruined fortunes; all but honor, and the will which can never
be conquered, lost in the terrible struggle through which they have
passed. Many of them will be voluntary exiles from the fair Southern
land which gave them birth; but wherever their wandering fate may
lead, they will bear with them, among treasured relics of the past, a
remembrance ever more dear and sacred of the noble women of New
Orleans, who have had courage to believe that misfortune may exist
without guilt, and, refusing to worship the rising sun, have turned
aside from the prosperous and the powerful, to bestow their prayers,
their tears, and their smiles upon them.—_N. O. Picayune, June 17._