“‘We have said more than we intended, and hope you will give this a place in your paper.
GOODRICH & Co.’”
There is some little soreness felt here about the use of the word “repudiation,” and it will do the hearts of some people good, and will carry comfort to the ghost of the Rev. Sydney Smith, if it can hear the tidings, to know I have been assured, over and over again, by eminent mercantile people and statesmen, that there is “a general desire” on the part of the repudiating States to pay their bonds, and that no doubt, at some future period, not very clearly ascertainable or plainly indicated, that general desire will cause some active steps to be taken to satisfy its intensity, of a character very unexpected, and very gratifying to those interested. The tariff of the Southern Confederation has just been promulgated, and I send herewith a copy of the rates. Simultaneously, however, with this document, the United States steam frigates Brooklyn and Niagara have made their appearance off the Pas-à-l’Outre, and the Mississippi is closed, and with it the port of New Orleans. The steam-tugs refuse to tow out vessels for fear of capture, and British ships are in jeopardy.
MAY 25.—A visit to the camp at Tangipao, about fifty miles from New Orleans, gave an occasion for obtaining a clearer view of the internal military condition of those forces of which one reads much, and sees so little, than any other way. Major-General Lewis of the State Militia, and staff, and General Labuzan, a Creole officer, attended by Major Ranney, President of the New-Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railway, and by many officers in uniform, started with that purpose at 4:30 this evening in a rail-carriage, carefully and comfortably fitted for their reception. The militia of Louisiana has not been called out for many years, and its officers have no military experience, and the men have no drill or discipline.
Emerging from the swampy suburbs, we soon pass between white clover pastures, which we are told invariably salivate the herds of small but plump cattle browsing upon them. Soon cornfields “in tassel,” alternate with long narrow rows of growing sugar-cane, which, though scarcely a fourth of the height of the maize, will soon over-shadow it; and the cane-stalks grow up so densely together that nothing larger than a rattle-snake can pass between them.
From Kennersville, an ancient sugar plantation cut up into “town lots,” our first halt, ten miles out, we shoot through a cypress swamp, the primitive forest of this region, and note a greater affluence of Spanish moss than in the woods of Georgia or Carolina. There it hung, like a hermit’s beard, from the pensile branch. Here, to one who should venture to thread the snake and alligator haunted mazes of the jungle, its matted profusion must resemble clusters of stalactites pendent from the roof of some vast cavern; for the gloom of an endless night appears to pervade the deeper recesses, at the entrance of which stand, like outlying skeleton pickets, the unfelled and leafless patriarchs of the clearing, that for a breadth of perhaps fifty yards on either side seems to have furnished the road with its sleepers.
The gray swamp yields to an open savannah, beyond which, upon the left, a straggling line of sparse trees skirts the left bank of the Mississippi, and soon after the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain appears within gunshot of our right, only separated from the road by one hundred yards or more of rush-covered prairie, which seems but a feeble barrier against the caprices of so extensive a sheet of water subject to the influences of wind and tide. In fact, ruined shanties and outhouses, fields laid waste, and prostrate fences remain evidences of the ravages of the “Wash” which a year ago inundated and rendered the railroad impassable save for boats. The down trains first notice of the disaster was the presence of a two-story frame building, which the waves had transported to the road, and its passengers, detained a couple of days in what now strikes us as a most grateful combination of timber-skirted meadow and lake scenery, were rendered insensible to its beauties by the torments of hungry mosquitoes. Had its engineers given the road but eighteen inches more elevation its patrons would have been spared this suffering, and its stock-holders might have rejoiced in a dividend. Many of the settlers have abandoned their improvements. Others, chiefly what are here called Dutchmen, have resumed their tillage with unabated zeal, and large fields of cabbages, one of them embracing not less than sixty acres, testify to their energy.
Again through miles of cypress swamps the train passes on to what is called the “trembling prairie,” where the sleepers are laid upon a tressel-work of heavier logs, so that the rails are raised by “cribs” of timber nearly a yard above the morass. Three species of rail, one of them as large as a curlew, and the summer duck, seem the chief occupants of the marsh, but white cranes and brown bitterns take the alarm, and falcons and long-tailed “blackbirds” sail in the distance.
Toward sunset a halt took place upon the long bridge that divides Lake Maurepas, a picturesque sheet of water which blends with the horizon on our left, from Pass Maunshae, an arm of Lake Pontchartrain, which disappears in the forest on our right. Half a dozen wherries and a small fishing-smack are moored in front of a rickety cabin, crowded by the jungle to the margin of the cove. It is the first token of a settlement that has occurred for miles, and when we have sufficiently admired the scene, rendered picturesque in the sunset by the dense copse, the water and the bright colors of the boats at rest upon it, a commotion at the head of the train arises from the unexpected arrival upon the “switch” of a long string of cars filled with half a regiment of Volunteers, who had been enlisted for twelve months’ service, and now refused to be mustered in for the war, as required by the recent enactment of the Montgomery Congress. The new comers are at length safely lodged on the “turn off,” and our train continues its journey. As we pass the row of cars, most of them freight wagons, we are hailed with shouts and yells in every key by the disbanded Volunteers, who seem a youngish, poorly-clad, and undersized lot, though noisy as a street mob.
After Maunshae, the road begins to creep up toward terra firma, and before nightfall there was a change from cypresses and swamp laurels to pines and beeches, and we inhale the purer atmosphere of dry land, with an occasional whiff of resinous fragrance, that dispels the fever-tainted suggestions of the swamp below. There we only breathed to live. Here we seem to live to breathe. The rise of the road is a grade of but a foot to the mile, and yet at the camp an elevation of not more than eighty feet in as many miles suffices to establish all the climatic difference between the malarious marshes and a much higher mountain region.