A negro patriarch, with silvery hair, and legs infirm of purpose, hobbled up, to exhibit some balls collected on the ground. The bullets, which were flattened, he assured us, had "hit somebody." No doubt they were spurious; but we purchased a few buckshots and fragments of shell from the ancient Ethiop, and rode back to the city along avenues lined with flowers and shrubbery. Here grew the palm—the characteristic tree of the South. It is neither graceful nor beautiful; but looks like an inverted umbrella upon a long, slender staff. Ordinary pictures very faithfully represent it.
All About a "Black Republican Flag."
New Orleans, March 11, 1861.
We are a good deal exercised, just now, about a new grievance. The papers charged, a day or two since, that the ship Adelaide Bell, from New Hampshire, had flung defiant to the breeze a Black Republican flag, and that her captain vowed he would shoot anybody attempting to cut it down. As one of the journals remarked, "his audacity was outrageous." En passant, do you know what a Black Republican flag is? I have never encountered that mythical entity in my travels; but 'tis a fearful thing to think of—is it not?
The reporter of The Crescent, with charming ingenuousness, describes it as "so much like the flag of the late United States, that few would notice the difference." In fact, he adds, it is the old Stars and Stripes, with a red stripe instead of a white one immediately below the union. Of course, we are greatly incensed. It is flat burglary, you know, to love the Star Spangled Banner itself; and as for a Black Republican flag—why, that is most tolerable and not to be endured.
Captain Robertson, the "audacious," has been compelled, publicly, to deny the imputation. He asserts that, in the simplicity of his heart, he has been using it for years as a United States flag. But the newspapers adhere stoutly to the charge; so the presumption is that the captain is playing some infernal Yankee trick. Who shall deliver us from the body of this Black Republican flag?
If it were possible, I would like to see the "Southern Confederacy" work out its own destiny; to see how Slavery would flourish, isolated from free States; how the securities of a government, founded on the right of any of its members to break it up at pleasure, would stand in the markets of the world; how the principle of Democracy would sustain itself in a confederation whose corner-stones are aristocracy, oligarchy, despotism. This is the government which, in the language of one of its admirers, shall be "stronger than the bonds of Orion, and benigner than the sweet influences of the Pleiades."
Vice-President Hamlin a Mulatto.
A few days since, I was in a circle of southern ladies, when one of them remarked:
"I am glad Lincoln has not been killed."