April 23. Louisiana Day! Sixty thousand people in Exposition Park; order and good feeling everywhere. I am asked to be sponsor for one of the companies in the competition drill next week. Very charming, the way they have here of bringing the ladies into public ceremonies. Last night to a fête at the Jockey Club. Full moonlight. Fifteen hundred doctors gathered for the Medical Congress were invited. Most of them came; some were rough diamonds!
April 24. To a wedding in the old cathedral of St. Louis. The bride, Miss Daisy Breaux (now Mrs. Calhoun), was followed by a dozen bridesmaids dressed as field flowers. Two fairy children walked before the bride, whose long court train was carried by a pair of little black velvet pages with Van Dyke collars. Her face looked like a sunbeam caught between the folds of her wedding veil. At the reception met Mr. Walker Fearn, the newly appointed Minister to Greece. He asked me much of Athens. He seems quite the right man for the office. He has a good-looking daughter.
April 25. General Beauregard and Mr. Nott drove us to the Spanish Fort for dinner. The blue iris, so wonderful last week, has almost gone. The talk was thrilling. The General spoke of the Mexican War, where he first distinguished himself; of the beauty of the country, the exhilarating life free from care, full of excitement. I asked him if he had hesitated about throwing in his lot with the Confederacy in 1861,—he was superintendent of the military academy at West Point at the time the war broke out.
“No,” he said, “I was sorry, but I did not hesitate. Louisiana, my own State, summoned me; it was as if the voice of my mother had called me.”
General Beauregard looks more a Frenchman than an American, and prefers to speak French. He is small, active, with fiery eyes, and a military cut. He does not like to talk about the Civil War, and is almost the only person here I have known well who has not mentioned General Butler and the silver spoons.
On the twenty-fifth of April, 1862, twenty-three years before the day we dined with General Beauregard at the Spanish Fort, our friend Lieutenant George Hamilton Perkins, with Captain Bailey of the United States Navy, landed on the levee at New Orleans and walked alone through an angry mob to the City Hall to demand the surrender of the city in the name of Commodore Farragut. More than once I have asked my friend Commodore Perkins to tell me of that adventure, but he always put me off, saying it was too old a story. George Cable, who as a boy saw the whole affair, thus describes it:
The crowd on the levee howled and screamed with rage. And now the rain came down in sheets. There came a roar of shoutings and imprecations and crowding feet down Common Street. “Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Shoot them! Kill them! Hang them!” I locked the door on the outside and ran to the front of the mob, calling with the rest, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” About every third man had a weapon out. Two officers of the United States Navy were walking abreast, unguarded and alone, looking not to right or left, never frowning, never flinching, while the mob screamed in their ears, shook cocked pistols in their faces, cursed and crowded and gnashed upon them. So through the gates of death those two men walked to the City Hall to demand the town’s surrender. It was one of the bravest deeds I ever saw done.
Thus, through all the hurly-burly of our active life I sometimes caught glimpses of the stirring events of long ago that make the history of Louisiana so enthralling. “The late onpleasantness” was generally avoided in conversation except when we were in the company of Northerners. I greatly preferred consorting with the Creoles, who still dominated the social life of the city, and did not speak of themselves as Americans if they could avoid it. Why should they? Their civilization is Latin to the core! While they celebrate the national holiday on the Fourth of July, ten days later they observe with far more pomp and circumstance the Fourteenth of July, the French national holiday, that commemorates the fall of the Bastille.
We made a pilgrimage to the lovely old Girard Street cemetery where in the street of tombs we found the inscription:
“Francis Marion Ward, died 1847.”