Like everybody else, he had much to say of the niggers. “A heap of the planters wants ’em all killed off. But I believe in the nigger. He’ll work, if they’ll only let him alone. They fool him, and tell him such lies, he’s no confidence. I’ve worked free niggers and white men, and always found the niggers worked the best. But no nigger, nor anybody else, will work like a slave works with the whip behind him. You can’t make ’em. I was brought up to work alongside o’ niggers, and soon as I got out of it, nothing, no money, could induce me to work so again.”
Speaking of other overseers, he said: “I admit I was about as tight on the nigger as a man ought to be. If I’d been a slave, I shouldn’t have wanted to work under a master that was tighter than I was. But I wa’n’t a priming to some. You see that red-faced feller with his right hand behind him, talking with two men? He’s an overseer. I know of his killing two niggers, and torturing another so that he died in a few days.” (I omit the shocking details of the punishment said to have been applied.) “The other night he came here to kill me because I told about him. He pulled out his pistol, and says he, ‘Dick P——, did you tell so-and-so I killed three niggers on Clark’s plantation?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I said so, and can prove it; and if there’s any shooting to be done, I can shoot as fast as you can.’ After that he bullied around here some, then went off, and I hav’n’t heard anything about shooting since.”
Among the earliest acquaintances I made at New Orleans was General Phil. Sheridan, perhaps the most brilliant and popular fighting man of the war. I found him in command of the Military Division of the Gulf, comprising the States of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. In Florida he had at that time seven thousand troops; in Louisiana, nine thousand; and in Texas, twenty thousand, embracing ten thousand colored troops at Corpus Christi and on the Rio Grande, watching the French movements.
It was Sheridan’s opinion that the Rebellion would never be ended until Maximilian was driven from Mexico. Such a government on our borders cherished the seeds of ambition and discontent in the minds of the late Confederates. Many were emigrating to Mexico, and there was danger of their uniting either with the Liberals or the Imperialists, and forming a government inimical to the United States. To prevent such a possibility, he had used military and diplomatic strategy. Three thousand Rebels having collected in Monterey, he induced the Liberals to arrest and disarm them. Then in order that they should not be received by the Imperialists, he made hostile demonstrations, sending a pontoon train to Brownsville, and six thousand cavalry to San Antonio, establishing military posts, and making extensive inquiries for forage. Under such circumstances, Maximilian did not feel inclined to welcome the Rebel refugees. It is even probable that, had our government at that time required the withdrawal of the French from Mexico, the demand, emphasized by these and similar demonstrations, would have been complied with. Maximilian is very weak in his position. Nineteen twentieths of the people are opposed to him. There is no regular, legitimate taxation for the support of his government, but he levies contributions upon merchants for a small part of the funds he requires, and draws upon France for the rest. His “government” consists merely of an armed occupation of the country; with long lines of communication between military posts, which could be easily cut off and captured one after another by a comparatively small force.
The Southern country, in the General’s opinion, was fast becoming “Northernized.” It was very poor, and going to be poorer. The planters had no enterprise, no recuperative energy: they were entirely dependent upon Northern capital and Northern spirit. He thought the freedmen’s affairs required no legislation, but that the State should leave them to be regulated by the natural law of supply and demand.
Phil. Sheridan is a man of small stature, compactly and somewhat massively built, with great toughness of constitutional fibre, and an alert countenance, expressive of remarkable energy and force. I inquired if he experienced no reaction after the long strain upon his mental and bodily powers occasioned by the war.
“Only a pleasant one,” he replied. “During my Western campaigns, when I was continually in the saddle, I weighed but a hundred and fifteen pounds. My flesh was hard as iron. Now my weight is a hundred and forty-five.”
He went over with me to the City Hall, to which the Executive department of the State had been removed, and introduced me to Governor Wells, a plain, elderly man, affable, and loyal in his speech. I remember his saying that the action of the President, in pardoning Governor Humphreys, of Mississippi, after he had been elected by the people on account of his services in the Confederate cause, was doing great harm throughout the South, encouraging Rebels and discouraging Union men. “Everything is being conceded to traitors,” said he, “before they have been made to feel the Federal power.” He spoke of the strong Rebel element in the Legislature which he was combating; and gave me copies of two veto messages which he had returned to it with bills that were passed for the especial benefit of traitors. The new serf code, similar to that of Mississippi, engineered through the Legislature by a member of the late Confederate Congress, he had also disapproved. After this, I was surprised to hear from other sources how faithfully he had been carrying out the very policy which he professed to condemn,—even going beyond the President, in removing from office Union men appointed by Governor Hahn and appointing Secessionists and Rebels in their place; and advocating the Southern doctrine that the Government must pay for the slaves it had emancipated. Such discrepancies between deeds and professions require no comment. Governor Wells is not the only one, nor the highest, among public officers, who, wishing to reconcile the irreconcilable, and to stand well before the country whilst they were strengthening the hands and gaining the favor of its enemies, have suffered their loyal protestations to be put to some confusion by acts of doubtful patriotism.
At the Governor’s room I had the good fortune to meet the Mayor of the city, Mr. Hugh Kennedy, whom I afterwards called upon by appointment. By birth a Scotchman, he had been thirty years a citizen of New Orleans, and, from the beginning of the Secession troubles, had shown himself a stanch patriot. He was appointed to the mayoralty by President Lincoln; General Banks removed him, but he was afterwards reinstated.
I found him an almost enthusiastic believer in the future greatness of New Orleans. “It is certain,” he said, “to double its population in ten years. Its prosperity dates from the day of the abolition of slavery. Men who formerly lived upon the proceeds of slave-labor are now stimulated to enterprise. A dozen industrial occupations will spring up where there was one before. Manufactures are already taking a start. We have two new cotton-mills just gone into operation. The effect upon the whole country will be similar. Formerly planters went or sent to New York and Boston and laid in their supplies; for this reason there were no villages in the South. But now that men work for wages, which they will wish to spend near home, villages will everywhere spring up.”