One morning we were interrupted at lunch by a message that Mr. Durant had called with the party for whom he had made the engagement yesterday. Remembering that Mr. Durant had promised to bring around some of the “ancient freedmen,” as they were called—that, is the free negroes of French descent—I went out a few moments afterward to witness the interview. A group of gentlemen stood about Mr. Chase in the library, and one, a bald-headed, gray-bearded, vivacious, youngish-old man was making an animated little address.

I felt sure that here was a mistake. Imagining that some other party had got into the library by accident—some delegation of Rebel lawyers, perhaps, to remonstrate against the test oath—I turned into the parlors to hunt up Mr. Durant and his French negroes. But they were nowhere to be found; and returning to the library, I saw in the furthest corner Mr. Durant himself, listening to the talk of the bald-headed old spokesman. Even then it was hard to realize that these quiet, well-bred gentlemen, scarcely one darker than Mr. Durant himself—many of them several shades whiter—were negroes, to be seen walking with whom on the streets of New Orleans was social disgrace. Before their call was concluded, old Mr. Jacob Barker was shown into the parlor. The eminently respectable and conservative old banker looked more like a negro, in point of complexion, than any one out of the twelve or fifteen in Mr. Durant’s party.

Every man of them was well educated. All spoke French fluently; the English of all was passable, of some perfect. Some of them were comparatively wealthy, and all were in easy circumstances. They simply asked the Chief Justice to represent to the President, in their behalf, that they paid heavy taxes to support schools for the whites, and could get none for themselves; that they paid heavy taxes to support city and State governments, and were without voice in either; and that they desired to ask whether this accorded with Mr. Johnson’s well-known ideas of genuine democracy? They had been citizens of an Empire; when the Republic bought Louisiana they were disfranchised. Now that the Republic was beginning a new life, could it longer refuse them such rights as the Empire had accorded? What answer can legislators give who profess to believe the Declaration of Independence, and who cheerfully confirm a full-blooded Indian in a conspicuous position on the staff of their Lieutenant General?

One pleasant afternoon, when the June sun was a little less fervid than usual, and a moist breeze blew across the lake, we drove up the levee, past elegant country places, embowered in shrubbery and half concealed from the road by luxuriant hedges of Cherokee rose, to the residence of Mr. Roselius, to keep an engagement for dinner. Our genial old host came running out to greet us, hurrying like a boy down the high steps, which, after the prevailing fashion in this moist climate, lead directly from the paved walk to the second-story veranda. A dozen or more gentlemen were in the parlor. Among them I remember two or three noted New Orleans lawyers, one or two sugar-planters who had been absent in Europe during the war, and a Spanish officer, fresh from some one of the perpetually recurring South American revolutions. One noticed here, as at most of the formal dinner parties given during our stay, and at my subsequent visits to the city, the absence of all ladies save those of the host’s household. Indeed, except in peculiar cases like this, the prevailing idea of a dinner in New Orleans seems to have for its leading feature copious libations of a great many kinds of the choicest wines—to be licensed by the earliest possible retiracy of the hostess.

Among Mr. Roselius’s guests that evening was a modest-looking little gentleman, of retiring manners, and with apparently very little to say; though the keen eyes and well-shaped head sufficiently showed the silence to be no mask for poverty of intellect. It was Mr. Paul Morphy, the foremost chess-player of the world, now a lawyer, but, alas! by no means the foremost young lawyer of this his native city. “If he were only as good in his profession as he is at chess-playing!” said one of the legal gentlemen, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he spoke in an undertone of the abilities of the elder Morphy, and the hopes that had long been cherished of the son. They evidently looked upon the young chess-player as a prosperous banker does upon his only boy, who persists in neglecting his desk in the bank parlor and becoming a vagabond artist.

The gentlemen just returned from Europe expressed their astonishment at the fortunes that had been accumulated by shrewd adventurers during their absence. Men whom they had left the masters of Carondelet Street, they found in a state of genteel beggary. New names had arisen, unknown to their four-year old memories of the city. “By the way, Mr. Durant,” said one, “how does it happen that you haven’t profited more by your chances—become Governor, or Senator, say, if you didn’t care for any more money?”

was the ready and only response.

Political subjects were scarcely alluded to; but, after the party had rejoined the ladies, or strolled out among Mr. Roselius’s olive and orange-trees, it was easy to see that the feeling of the Unionists was by no means sanguine. Some insisted that the Rebels were certain to resume control at the first election; others hoped for better things, but frankly added that there was no security save in the interference of Congress. “Let this election go on,” said Mr. Durant, “and a Legislature will be chosen which wouldn’t hesitate at sending John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin to the Senate again! Perhaps policy would prevent the choice of just those men; but the only change would be in the substitution of persons with the same principles and less ability. If you don’t get brilliant and artful Rebels, the lack of genius will be made up by malignity.”

Remembering that this Legislature subsequently did elect Mr. Randall Hunt, I have recalled with special interest the impressions left by the conversation of that gentleman, one morning, when he came to breakfast with the Chief Justice, to whom he is remotely related by his marriage into the family of the late Justice McLean, of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Hunt is in the prime of life, though his constitution seems somewhat broken, and his nervousness is extreme. He has been for years one of the leading lawyers of New Orleans. The secessionists seem to regard him as the foremost orator now left them. The Unionists concede that he is a fine speaker, but describe him as given to painfully elaborate rhetoric and ornate delivery. I have been told by Governor Hahn that Mr. Hunt was once asked by General Banks to give up the Rebel cause, and unite in the Free-State movement. It was intimated that, in return for his influence, the Governorship of the State would await his acceptance. Mr. Hunt took a day to consider the matter; then replied that he had supported the Rebel side, was thoroughly committed to it, had near and dear relatives by his advice then out in the armies fighting for it, and could not think of abandoning them! Possibly a whisper of this bit of secret history may have since helped in Mr. Hunt’s election as United States Senator by the returned Rebels.

It was easy to see how earnest were his sympathies with the men who had been fighting the Rebel battles. With him, as with most of the better classes in the South, this feeling is wholly unaffected by the utter defeat of all their hopes. To them the Rebel soldiers are still patriots, defeated, but not disgraced, in an ineffectual struggle against mercenary invaders; martyrs without the crown; heroes who have hazarded everything for their native land, and who now deserve only blessings from every true son of the State.

Reconstruction seemed to him an easy task. “We tried to leave the Union. You have defeated us in our effort. What can there be, then, for us to do but to return our Senators and Representatives to the Congress from which we tried to withdraw forever? We acknowledge the defeat, and are ready to send back our Congressmen. That is what you have been fighting for; what more can the General Government have to do with the matter?”

The Amnesty Proclamation had just arrived. Like nearly all other men of Southern sympathies, he thought the exceptions very unwise, and needlessly irritating. “You’ve determined to keep us in the Union. Isn’t it more statesmanlike, then, to avoid adding to our popular discontent? Is it better to have us a conquered province, or an integral part of the nation—better to have an Ireland on the Gulf, or a Scotland?”

The proposition for negro suffrage seemed to him utterly loathsome. “Surely, sir,” said he to the Chief Justice, “you do not know the negro. If you but understood as we understand the condition of these people, their ignorance, their degradation, you would shrink back in horror from your own proposition.” Mr. Hunt forgot that these once degraded creatures had been rescued from their native barbarism, and, as he and the other Southern orators have so often told us, had been elevated and civilized by the Christianizing influences of the system of slavery! If their degradation was now so horrifying, these gentlemen must have been formerly mistaken in regarding slavery as such a Christian civilizer. If they were mistaken then, it is among the possibilities that they may be mistaken now.

It is a continual source of surprise to observe how these thorough-going Southern gentlemen speak constantly of their knowledge of the negro, as one might speak of the most recondite theorems of the differential calculus. “If you only knew these negroes as we do—but, then, of course, you can’t. Why, we were born among them!” To credit such persons, one must regard the negro’s nature as something requiring very profound study and long-protracted investigation. I happened to mention to Mr. Hunt the story of “Old Sandie” of Key West. He considered it a very surprising story, “if credible.” “But then, if you understood, from a lifetime’s experience, the character and debasement of the negro, you would not be misled by such exceptional cases.” I mentioned the prosperity of the Sea Islanders, and their beginnings of self-government. “You saw only the one side of the picture. If you had been born among those people, you would have talked in a very different way.”

Nothing short of this “being born among negroes” is accepted as qualification for comprehending their nature. And I have observed that the most strenuous in insisting upon it are able editors, eloquent lawyers, and successful business men, who were born in the North, but have lived so long South that they suppose their origin to be unknown.

Mr. Chase’s reply to the address of a negro delegation appeared in the papers before we left the city.^[34] It very briefly expressed his own desire for negro suffrage, and his trust that the conduct of the negroes themselves would be such that, sooner or later, it would be found impossible longer to refuse it. The letter closed with a significant sentence, looking apparently in the direction of the proposed policy which Mr. Horace Greeley afterward condensed into the terse phrase, “Universal amnesty and universal suffrage.” Not more than half the nominal Louisiana Unionists, who had during the previous winter made up the two or three factions of the Free-State party, would publicly approve it. They thought negro suffrage might become a necessity; but they still hoped something less offensive would offer safety, and preferred to trust in Congress and wait for something to turn up. Only those who followed Mr. Durant accepted the naked issue. They looked to it as the only salvation of the Union cause; the only means for securing the rights of the negro, or for protecting the credit of the Government. The Rebels, meanwhile, considered Mr. Johnson’s North Carolina proclamation as settling the question in their favor, and already began to talk, in tones subdued only by the presence of the military authorities, about soon putting an end to the career of nigger agitators in Louisiana.

It was noticeable that General Banks, who had just been relieved, seemed to have gained no popularity by his relaxation of Butler’s iron rule. The returning Rebels appeared in no way grateful for any of the concessions he was charged with having made to their prejudices. The Unionists were in no way grateful for his late conversion to negro suffrage. All described his administration as vacillating. When Butler said a thing, they knew precisely what to expect. He might be severe, but they always knew where to find him. Banks, they complained, had done too little for the radical Unionists to command their confidence, and too little for the reconstructing Rebels to command theirs. Possibly a General who should have pleased any one of these parties would have disobeyed his instructions; certainly he would have displeased the rest. But, at the end, the man who marked out his own policy, and inflexibly pursued it, was found commanding a certain sort of respect. All classes, Rebel or Union, expressed it for General Butler. General Banks was less fortunate.

The General was still occupying, with his hospitable family, the elegant residence of an absent Rebel, in the Garden District. General Sheridan was not less comfortably quartered; and one who had heard of Sheridan and his bold riders only from the newspapers, would have been surprised at being led over velvet carpets, through spacious saloons, to find them. “I’d a great deal rather be allowed to take a good cavalry brigade and cross the Rio Grande,” said the uneasy soldier. “I’d ride, with such a force as that, from Matamoras to Mexico.”