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!