He had often given the soldiers orders not to shoot any valuable negroes who might run amuck. They were to be clubbed into submission, but not killed. Now he changed his command to: "Powder and ball! Shoot to kill!" The Chouacha's warning was not a minute too soon.
What a struggle that was! The negroes had not believed the whites would be ready. The whites had not imagined the negroes would be so well armed. The clash was something of a surprise to both. There have been many bloody uprisings among the New World blacks, many pathetic and losing rebellions, but none fraught with such consequences as the memorable one in New Orleans. Were white men to hold the Mississippi port and its lands for their kind of civilization, or was New France to become a negro republic as Santo Domingo and Haiti did? That was what the quarrel meant. That was why it became a fight to the death on both sides.
If after two centuries of development and training a President of the United States could say of the American soldiers who helped the island of Cuba win her freedom, "Our colored troops fought well at San Juan," what might not be said of the desperate bravery with which the West-Indian fanatics fought that long-ago battle in the streets of New Orleans when the voodoo doctor led them to make a strike for themselves? Here also the blacks fought well—too well for the safety of their cruel masters.
The howling of the storm, darkness broken by the awful lightning, accompanied the mob as it attacked and the French citizens as they defended themselves.
At the same time, during that strange and terrible hour there came laboring out of the Gulf, as vanguard of the wind, an old ship seeking a place of shelter. She was rickety and rotten, ancient and condemned, fit for no decent use. And so she had been taken to hold a cargo of the veriest misery on earth, a tribe of stolen blacks.
Some sorely hurt by the pitching ship, some dying, some already dead, all without hope during the long, hard voyage, the ill-fated ship bore them through the Great River's mouth and to the port at New Orleans where raged this battle of the races.
A flash showed her coming on like some huge swollen image in a dream, magnified by clouds and lightning. The plotters and the planters alike paused in mid-action to blink at what they could not believe they really saw. By the next flash the hurricane had struck the town—a chaos of wind and rain, falling houses, rending trees.
No fighting could go on.