Retrospect of Western Travel, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Harriet Martineau

We left Mobile for New-Orleans on the 24th of April. The portion of forest which we crossed in going down from Mobile to the coast was the most beautiful I had seen. There was fresh grass under foot, and the woods were splendid with myrtles, magnolias, and many shrubs whose blossoms were new to me and their names unknown. We had plenty of time to look about us; for the hack which carried the four passengers whom the stage would not contain broke down every half hour, and the stage company had to stop till it could proceed. We had an excellent dinner in the gallery of a loghouse in the midst of the forest, where we were plentifully supplied with excellent claret. There had been showers all day, with intervals of sunshine, but towards sunset the settled gloom of the sky foreboded a night of storm. I was on the watch for the first sight of the Gulf of Mexico. I traced the line where the forest retires to give place to the marsh, and the whole scene assumes a sudden air of desolation. At this moment the thunder burst, sheets of lightning glared over the boiling sea, and the rain poured down in floods. Our umbrellas were found to be broken, of course; and we had to run along the pier to the steamboat in such a rain as I was never before exposed to; but it was well worth while getting wet for such a first sight of the Gulf of Mexico. It soon grew dark; and, before morning, we were in Lake Pontchartrain, so that this stormy view of the gulf was the only one we had.

We amused ourselves in the morning with tracing the dim shores of the State of Mississippi to the north, and of Louisiana to the west. About nine o'clock we arrived in sight of the long piers which stretch out from the swamp into the lake, the mudcraft, the canoes, with blacks fishing for crabs; the baths, and the large Washington hotel, with its galleries and green blinds, built for coolness, where gentlemen from New-Orleans go to eat fish and bathe. Next we saw the train of railroad cars waiting for us; and, without the loss of a moment's time, we were whirled away to the city, five miles in a quarter of an hour. I have expressed elsewhere[16] my admiration of the swamp through which our road lay; an admiration which faded as we traversed the lower faubourg, and died away in the Champs Elysées. Before ten o'clock we were breaking the seals of our English letters in the drawing-room of our temporary home.

When we had satisfied ourselves with home news, unpacked, dressed, and lunched, we took our seats by the window in the intervals of visits from callers. All was very new, very foreign in its aspect. Many of the ladies in the streets wore caps or veils instead of bonnets; the negroes who passed shouted their very peculiar kind of French; and everything seemed to tell us that we had plunged into the dogdays. I never knew before how impressions of heat can be conveyed through the eye. The intensity of glare and shadow in the streets, and the many evidences that the fear of heat is the prevailing idea of the place, affect the imagination even more than the scorching power of the sun does the bodily frame.

I was presented with a pamphlet written by a physician, which denies the unhealthiness of New-Orleans as strenuously as some of its inhabitants deny its immorality. To me it appears that everything depends on what is understood by Morals and Health. As to the morals of the city, I have elsewhere stated the principal facts on which my unfavourable judgment is founded.[17] In regard to another department of morals, the honourable fact of the generous charity of New-Orleans to strangers should be stated. Great numbers of sick and destitute foreigners are perpetually thrown upon the mercy of the inhabitants, and that mercy is unbounded. I have reason to believe that the sick are not merely nursed and cured, but provided with funds before departing. When I visited the hospital, it contained two hundred and fifty patients, not above fifty of whom were Americans. As to the health of the place, I believe the average is good among that portion of the population which can afford to remove northward for the hot months; but very low if the total white population be included. The pamphlet which I read argues that, though the fever is very destructive during a portion of the year, mortality from other diseases is much below the common average; that the variations of temperature are slight, though frequent; and that the average of children and old persons is high. All this may be true; but a place must be called peculiarly unhealthy whose inhabitants are compelled, on pain of death, to remove for three or four months of every year. Instead of arguing against such a fact as this, many citizens are hoping and striving to put an end to the necessity of such a removal. They hope, by means of draining and paving, to render their city habitable all the year round. Plans of drainage are under consideration, and I saw some importations of paving-stones. The friends of the New-Orleans people can hardly wish them a greater good than the success of such attempts; for the perpetual shifting about which they are subjected to by the dread of the fever is a serious evil to sober families of an industrious, domestic turn. It is very injurious to the minds of children and to the habits of young people, and a great hardship to the aged. I was struck with a remark which fell from a lady about her children's exercise in the open air. She said that she always took them out when the wind blew from over the lake, and kept them at home in warm weather when it blew from any other quarter, as it then only made them "more languid" to go out. This did not tend to confirm the doctrine of the pamphlet; but I was not surprised at the remark when I looked abroad over the neighbouring country from the top of the hospital. Thence I saw the marsh which was given to Lafayette, and which he sold, not long before his death, to a London firm, who sold it again. On this marsh, most of which was under water, the city of New-Orleans was begun. A strip of buildings was carried to the river bank, where the city spread.

In the midst of the flooded lots of ground stood the gas-works; surrounded by stagnant ponds lay the Catholic cemetery. The very churches of the city seemed to spring up out of the water. The blossomy beauties of the swamp could not be seen at this height, and all looked hideously desolate in the glaring sun. The view from the turret of the Cotton-press is much more advantageous. It commands many windings of the majestic river, and the point where it seems to lose itself in the distant forest; while below appears everything that is dry in all the landscape: the shipping, the Levée, the busy streets of the city, and the shady avenues of the suburbs.

The ladies of New-Orleans walk more than their countrywomen of other cities, from the streets being in such bad order as to make walking the safest means of locomotion. The streets are not very numerous; they are well distinguished, and lie at right angles, and their names are clearly printed up; so that strangers find no difficulty in going about, except when a fall of rain has made the crossings impassable. The heat is far less oppressive in the streets than in the open country, as there is generally a shady side. We were never kept within doors by the heat, though summer weather had fairly set in before our arrival. We made calls, and went shopping and sight-seeing, much as we do in London; and, moreover, walked to dinner visits, to the theatre, and to church, while the sun was blazing as if he had drawn that part of the world some millions of miles nearer to himself than that in which we had been accustomed to live. It is in vain to attempt describing what the moonlight is like. We walked under the long rows of Pride-of-India trees on the Ramparts, amid the picturesque low dwellings of the Quadroons, and almost felt the glow of the moonlight, so warm, so golden, so soft as I never saw it elsewhere. We were never tired of watching the lightning from our balcony, flashing through the first shades of twilight, and keeping the whole heaven in night-long conflagration. The moschetoes were a great and perpetual plague, except while we were asleep. We found our moscheto-curtains a sufficient protection at night; but we had to be on the watch against these malicious insects all day, and to wage war against them during the whole evening. Many ladies are accustomed, during the summer months, to get after breakfast into a large sack of muslin tied round the throat, with smaller sacks for the arms, and to sit thus at work or book, fanning themselves to protect their faces. Others sit all the morning on the bed, within their moscheto-curtains. I wore gloves and prunella boots all day long, but hands and feet were stung through all the defences I could devise. After a while the sting of the moscheto ceases to irritate more than the English gnat-sting; but, to strangers, the suffering is serious; to those of feverish habit, sometimes dangerous.

Sunday is the busiest day of the week to the stranger in New-Orleans. There is first the negro market to be seen at five o'clock. We missed this sight, as the mornings were foggy, and it was accounted unsafe to go out in the early damp. Then there is the Cathedral to be attended, a place which the European gladly visits, as the only one in the United States where all men meet together as brethren. As he goes, the streets are noisy with traffic. Some of those who keep the Sunday sit at their doors or windows reading the newspapers or chatting with their acquaintance. Merchants are seen hastening to the counting-house or the wharf, or busy in the stores. Others are streaming into the church doors. There are groups about the cathedral gates, the blacks and the whites parting company as if they had not been worshipping side by side. Within the edifice there is no separation. Some few persons may be in pews; but kneeling on the pavement may be seen a multitude, of every shade of complexion, from the fair Scotchwoman or German to the jet-black pure African. The Spanish eye flashes from beneath the veil; the French Creole countenance, painted high, is surmounted by the neat cap or the showy bonnet; while between them may be thrust a gray-headed mulatto, following with his stupid eyes the evolutions of the priest; or the devout negro woman telling her beads—a string of berries—as if her life depended on her task. During the preaching, the multitude of anxious faces, thus various in tint and expression, turned up towards the pulpit, afforded one of those few spectacles which are apt to haunt the whole future life of the observer like a dream. Several Protestants spoke to me of the Catholic religion as being a great blessing to the ignorant negro, viewing a ritual religion as a safe resting-place between barbarism and truth. Nothing that I saw disposed me to agree with them. I saw among Catholics of this class only the most abject worship of things without meaning, and no comprehension whatever of symbols. I was persuaded that, if a ritual religion be ever a good, it is so in the case of the most, not the least, enlightened; of those who accept the ritual as symbolical, and not of those who pay it literal worship. I could not but think that, if the undisguised story of Jesus were presented to these last as it was to the fishermen of Galilee and the peasants on the reedy banks of Jordan, they would embrace a Christianity, in comparison with which their present religion is an unintelligible and effectual mythology. But such a primitive Christianity they, as slaves, never will and never can have, as its whole spirit is destructive of slavery.

Half a year before my visit to New-Orleans, a great commotion had been raised in the city against a Presbyterian clergyman, the Rev. Joel Parker, on account of some expressions which he had been reported to have used, while on a visit in New-England, respecting the morals of New-Orleans, and especially the desecration of the Sunday. Some meddlesome person had called a public meeting, to consider what should be done with the Rev. Joel Parker for having employed his constitutional freedom of speech in declaring what almost everybody knew or believed to be true. Many gentlemen of the city were vexed at this encroachment upon the liberty of the citizen, and at the ridicule which such apparent sensitiveness about reputation would bring upon their society; and they determined to be present at the meeting, and support the pastor's rights. Matters were proceeding fast towards a condemnation of the accused and a sentence of banishment, when these gentlemen demanded that he should be heard in his own defence, a guarantee for his personal safety being first passed by the meeting. This was agreed to, and Mr. Parker appeared on the hustings. Unfortunately, he missed the opportunity—a particularly favourable one—of making a moral impression which would never have been lost. A full declaration of what he had said, the grounds of it, and his right to say it, would have turned the emotions of the assemblage, already softened in his favour, towards himself and the right. As it was, he did nothing wrong, except in as far as that he did nothing very right; but there was a want of judgment and taste in his address which was much to be regretted. He was allowed to go free for the time; but the newspapers reported all the charges against him, suppressed his replies, and lauded the citizens for not having pulled the offender to pieces; and Mr. Parker's congregation were called upon, on the ground of the resolutions passed at the public meeting, to banish their pastor. They refused, and appealed to all the citizens to protect them from such oppression as was threatened. No further steps were taken, I believe, against the pastor and his people; his church flourished under this little gust of persecution; and, when I was there, a handsome new edifice was rising up to accommodate the increased number of his congregation. I wished to hear this gentleman, and was glad to find that his flock met, while the building was going on, in the vestry of the new church; a spacious crypt, which was crowded when he preached. I had not expected much from his preaching, and was therefore taken by surprise by the exceeding beauty of his discourse; beauty, not of style, but spirit. The lofty and tender earnestness of both his sentiments and manner put the observer off his watch about the composition of the sermon. I was surprised to perceive in conversation afterward tokens that Mr. Parker was not a highly-educated man. I was raised by the lofty tone of his preaching far above all critical vigilance.

I had much opportunity of seeing in the United States what is the operation of persecution on strong and virtuous minds, and I trust the lesson of encouragement will never be lost. As it is certain that the progression of the race must be carried on through persecution of some kind and degree; as it is clear that the superior spirits to whom the race owes its advancement must, by their very act of anticipation, get out of the circle of general intelligence and sympathy, and be thus subject to the trials of spiritual solitude and social enmity—since thus it has ever been, and thus, by the laws of human nature, it must ever be—it is heart-cheering and soul-staying to perceive that the effects of persecution may be, and often are, more blessed than those of other kinds of discipline. Many quail under the apprehension of persecution; some are soured by it; but some pass through the suffering, the bitter suffering of popular hatred, with a strength which intermits less and less, and come out of it with new capacities for enjoyment, with affections which can no longer be checked by want of sympathy, and with an object in life which can never be overthrown. Mr. Parker's case was not one of any high or permanent character; though, as far as his trial went, it seemed to have given calmness and vigour to his mind. (I judge from his manner of speaking of the affair to me.) The abolitionists are the persons I have had, and always shall have, chiefly in view in speaking of the effects of persecution. They often reminded me of the remark, that you may know a philanthropist in the streets by his face. The life, light, and gentleness of their countenances, the cheerful earnestness of their speech, and the gayety of their manners, were enough to assure the unprejudiced foreign observer of the integrity of their cause and the blessedness of their pilgrim lives.