One is interested to learn how much cotton left this port during the war. In 1860–1861, 1,915,852 bales were shipped, nearly all before hostilities began; in 1861–1862, 27,627 bales; in 1862–1863, 23,750; in 1863–1864, 128,130; in 1864–1865, 192,351. The total receipts during this last year were 271,015 bales. From September 1st, 1865, to January 1st, 1866, the receipts were 375,000 bales; and cotton was still coming. The warehouses on the lower tributaries of the Mississippi were said to be full of it, waiting for high water to send it down. There had been far more concealed in the country than was supposed: it made its appearance where least looked for; and such was the supply that experienced traders believed that prices would thenceforth be steadily on the decline.
A first-class Liverpool steamer is calculated to take out 3000 500-pound bales, the freight on which is 7–8ths of a penny per pound,—not quite two cents. The freight to New York and Boston is 1 1–4th cents by steamers, and 7–8ths of a cent by sailing-vessels.
I put up at the St. Charles, famous before the war as a hotel, and during the war as the head-quarters of General Butler. It is a conspicuous edifice, with white-pillared porticos, and a spacious Rotunda, thronged nightly with a crowd which strikes a stranger with astonishment. It is a sort of social evening exchange, where merchants, planters, travellers, river-men, army men, (principally Rebels,) manufacturing and jobbing agents, showmen, overseers, idlers, sharpers, gamblers, foreigners, Yankees, Southern men, the well dressed and the prosperous, the rough and the seedy, congregate together, some leaning against the pillars, and a few sitting about the stoves, which are almost hidden from sight by the concourse of people standing or moving about in the great central space. Numbers of citizens regularly spend their evenings here, as at a club-room. One, an old plantation overseer of the better class, told me that for years he had not missed going to the Rotunda a single night, except when absent from the city. The character he gave the crowd was not complimentary.
“They are all trying to get money without earning it. Each is doing his best to shave the rest. If they ever make anything, I don’t know it. I’ve been here two thousand nights, and never made a cent yet.”
I inquired what brought him here.
“For company; to kill time. I never was married, and never had a home. When I was young, the girls said I smelt like a wet dog; that’s because I was poor. Since I’ve got rich, I’m too old to get married.”
What he was thinking of now was a fortune to be made out of labor-saving machinery to be used on the plantations: “I wish I could get hold of a half-crazy feller, to fix up a cotton planter, cotton-picker, cane-cutter, and a thing to hill up some.”
He talked cynically of the planters. “They’re a helpless set. They’re all confused. They don’t know what they’re going to do. They never did know much else but to get drunk. If a man has a plantation to rent or sell, he can’t tell anything about it; you can’t get any proposition out of him.”
He complained that Northern capital lodged in the cotton belt; but little of it getting through to the sugar country. He did not know any lands let to Northern men. “They hav’n’t got sugar on the brain; it’s cotton they’re all crazy after.”
He used to oversee for fifteen hundred dollars a year: he was now offered five thousand. He was a well-dressed, rather intelligent, capable man; and I noticed that the planters treated him with respect. But his manner toward them was cool and independent: he could not forget old times. “I never was thought anything of by these men, till I got rich. Then they began to say ‘Dick P—— is a mighty clever feller;’ and by-and-by it got to be ‘Mr. P——.’ Now they all come to me, because I know about business, and they don’t know a thing.”