“Memphis is a more disloyal town than New Orleans,” said some one, during the winter, to General Butler. The cock-eye twinkled as the General answered: “I’m afraid, then, they never had the gospel preached to them in its purity, in Memphis!”

That General Butler’s gospel was preached with all plainness of speech and freedom of utterance, in New Orleans, was a fact to which the whole city testified; but still, if Memphis was worse, it was bad indeed.

“What about the Union party here?” I asked of a conspicuous gentleman, the day after my arrival. “There is no Union party, sir. We are all washed under, and the most of us only live peaceable lives by the sufferance of our Rebel neighbors.”

I was constrained to confess the remark nearly if not quite just. Remove the military power, and the next day such men as ex-Marshal Graham, Benjamin F. Flanders, and Thomas J. Durant would live in New Orleans by bare sufferance. One of the newspapers soberly reproached Mr. Flanders with ingratitude to “the people of New Orleans,” who only drove him out of the city in 1861, when they might just as easily have hung him for his unconcealed hostility to the State! After this signal proof of personal kindness to him, the newspaper continued: “Mr. Flanders had the ingratitude to persist in stirring up strife in our midst, by presuming, contrary to the laws of the State and the feeling of our citizens, to make speeches to assemblages of negroes!”

A charge to the grand jury by a city judge, published in the papers, menaced Flanders, Durant, and others of the ablest men of New Orleans, with imprisonment, for illegally addressing negro meetings! Was it any wonder that the few Unionists grew cautious, or that they complained of having been washed under by the returning Rebel tide?

I do not use the word Rebel as a term of reproach—these people themselves would hardly regard it in that light—but simply as the best distinctive term by which they can be accurately described to Northern readers. It must not be understood that they still resisted the United States authority—on the contrary, they were profuse in their acknowledgments of being subdued; nor that they plotted new rebellion, for they would shrink from it as burnt children from the fire. But the great mass of the adult white male population of New Orleans (nine-tenths, indeed, of the white male population of Louisiana) were in sympathy, or, by active efforts, supporters of the rebellion. No reorganization was possible on a white basis which should not leave these men in full control of the civil government by an overwhelming majority. He was blind, therefore, who failed to see that any government then set in motion by the votes of these Rebel Louisianans, must be composed of Rebel officers, chosen because they were known to be in full sympathy with their Rebel electors.

Of course, these Rebels and Rebel sympathizers, and registered enemies, et id omne genus, all now professed to be Union men. They were Unionists according to their interpretation of Unionism. They meant by it that they accepted the fact of defeat, and the necessity for giving up just so much of their old policy as that defeat compelled them to give up—not a whit more.

Thus they abandoned the doctrine of secession. Most of them honestly said that they still believed it a constitutional right; but that having appealed to the verdict of arms, instead of the verdict of the Supreme Court, they were bound to acquiesce in the decision which the trial by battle had given. So they abandoned slavery. Three-fifths of them still insisted that slavery was an institution beneficial to both races, if not indeed indispensable to Southern prosperity; but they appealed to war to sustain it, and they yielded to the logic of accomplished facts in admitting that war had destroyed it.

So much they gave up, because they realized that they must. More they would have yielded in like manner, if equally convinced that more must be yielded. But all the concomitants and outgrowths of slavery and State sovereignty, doctrines which lie at the foundation of secession, and beliefs which reject the possibility of free negro labor, or the prudence of conferring legal rights upon free negroes, remained in full strength. They were imbedded in constitutions, they were walled about by the accretions of a century’s laws, they were part and parcel of the accepted faith of the people. They would be given up as was slavery—not otherwise. Every step must be by compulsion.

What need, then, could there be to point out the further danger, inseparable from this state of affairs, that, being compelled to such reluctant abandonment of their life-long policy, it would be equally hard to bring them to tax themselves to pay for such compulsion? In other words, that being whipped, and thus driven to give up the points in issue, they would be still less ready to pay our bills for the whipping. Politicians, whose status depended on the admission of the Louisiana members to Congress, professed great readiness to pay the National debt; but I did not hear one private citizen make a similar expression. They did their best in the rural districts to discredit the National currency; till the military interfered, they did the same in some of the city banks; and throughout the early part of the winter, outside the moneyed centers, the notes of the National banks were held at a discount of twenty to fifty per cent.

The politics of all Louisianians, (except a body of Union-men-from-the-first, less than five thousand in number,) as full and freely expressed up to the time when Congress refused to receive their members, might be thus summed up:

They freely acknowledged that they had been badly defeated.

They acknowledged, in consequence, the fact (not the rightfulness) of the destruction of slavery.

In the same way, and with the same limitation, they admitted the impossibility of secession.

These they regarded as all the concessions which they ought to make, in order to be restored to their old relations and powers in the Union. On the other hand,

They honestly disbelieved in the capacity of the late slaves to support or to protect themselves. Therefore, their tendencies were to the establishment of some sort of enforced labor system; and to the refusal of any right to the negroes to testify in courts,^[60] or of relief from other civil disabilities, which made the gift of freedom to them a mockery.

And, honestly believing themselves right in the outset of the quarrel in which they had been worsted, they were ready to array weighty influences in favor of an ultimate repudiation of the National debt.

The question, therefore, for the Washington statesmen to decide was a simple one. Should these positions of the Rebels be taken as satisfactory, and should they be thereupon restored to civil power? Or should further guarantees be exacted, and reorganization delayed until they were furnished?

In the one case, the work of the Provisional Governments might be accepted. In the other, it was necessary either to give suffrage to the negro, or to delay reorganization till time had elapsed for passions to cool, and opinions, based on old facts, to conform to the new ones.

Much of the above applies to the condition of the Gulf States at large, in the beginning of the winter, quite as well as to Louisiana alone. The case here was, in fact, complicated by the hybrid nature of the attempted reorganization. Elsewhere we had Provisional Governments instituted under appointments from President Johnson; here we had an organization instigated by General Banks, sanctioned by President Lincoln, and already sold out to the enemies of both. While, to complete the chaos, the policy of the returned Rebels, already advocated in most of the newspapers, and freely talked in all political circles, was, to have the Legislature call a new Convention, whose first act should be to declare all the State offices vacant, in order that citizens absent (in the Rebel armies or as registered enemies) when the present ones were chosen, might have a fair share in the voting!

“We’ll get Congress to sanction such a Convention,” said a lawyer. “For that matter we can buy up Congress. It doesn’t want to humiliate us, or, if it does, we have money enough to control it.”

“When we get in,” continued the lawyer, diverging into general politics, “we’ll put an end to this impudent talk of you Yankees about regenerating the South by Northern immigration. We’ll require you to spend ten years in the State before you can vote.” “Of course we don’t love the Union,” he went on. “We’re not hypocrites enough to make any such professions. I have no love for the flag. It never protected me; it has robbed me and mine!” That man could be believed. He honestly said what he plainly thought. But how should we regard the office-seeking class, who, after four years’ war against the flag, had suddenly been beaten into new-born but most ardent love for it?

One of the public journals, protesting against the charge of treason, cited President Buchanan’s book, as to the causes of the war, and exultantly exclaimed:

“Such will be the verdict of history. The triumphant party may apply to the people of the South all the opprobrious epithets known to the vocabulary of hate, but they can not efface historical records, or rebut documentary testimony. The guilt of being the originators of the late civil war lies at the door of the Abolitionists.

“The people of the South know very well where the guilt and odium of causing the war rests. While they accept and abide by the result as a finality, they do not now, nor will they ever, stand before the world as culprits and felons. They may sorrow over the war and its results, but they have no cause for shame or remorse.”