The most independent and obtrusively happy people one noticed in New Orleans were the negroes. They have a sleek, shiny blackness here, unknown to higher latitudes; and from its midst the great white eyeballs and large, regular teeth flash with a singular brilliance. Sunday is their day peculiarly—and on the warm afternoons, they bask up and down the thoroughfares in the gaudiest of orange and scarlet bandannas. But their day is fast passing away; and in place of the simple, happy creatures of a few years gone, we find the discontented and besotted idler—squalid and dirty.
The cant of to-day—that the race problem, if left alone, will settle itself—may have some possible proof in the distant future; but the few who are ignorant enough to-day to believe the "negro question" already settled may find that they are yet but on the threshold of the "irrepressible conflict" between nature and necessity.
To the natural impressibility of the southron, the Louisianian adds the enthusiasm of the Frenchman. At the first call of the governor for troops, there had been readiest response; and here, as in Alabama, the very first young men of the state left office and counting-room and college to take up the musket. Two regiments of regulars, in the state service, were raised to man the forts—"Jackson" and "St. Philip"—that guarded the passes below the city. These were composed of the stevedores and workingmen generally, and were officered by such young men as the governor and council deemed best fitted. The Levee had been scoured and a battalion of "Tigers" formed from the very lowest of the thugs and plugs that infested it, for Major Bob Wheat, the well-known filibuster.
Poor Wheat! His roving spirit still and his jocund voice now mute, he sleeps soundly under the sighing trees of Hollywood—that populous "city of the silent" at Richmond. It was his corps of which such wild and ridiculous stories of bowie-knife prowess were told at the Bull Run fight. They, together with the "Crescent Rifles," "Chasseurs-à-pied" and "Zouaves," were now at Pensacola.
The "Rifles" was a crack corps, composed of some of the best young men in New Orleans; and the whole corps of "Chasseurs" was of the same material. They did yeomen's service in the four years, and the last one saw very few left of what had long since ceased to be a separate organization. But of all the gallant blood that was shed at the call of the state, none was so widely known as the "Washington Artillery." The best men of Louisiana had long upheld and officered this battalion as a holiday pageant; and, when their merry meetings were so suddenly changed to stern alarums, to their honor be it said, not one was laggard.
In the reddest flashings of the fight, on the dreariest march through heaviest snows, or in the cozy camp under the summer pines, the guidon of the "W.A." was a welcome sight to the soldier of the South—always indicative of cheer and of duty willingly and thoroughly done.
It was very unwillingly that I left New Orleans on a transport, with a battalion of Chasseurs for Pensacola. Styles was to stay behind for the present, and then go on some general's staff; so half the amusement of my travel was gone. "The colonel" was desolé.
"Such a hotel as the St. Charles!" he exclaimed, with tears in his voice—"such soups. Ah! my boy, after the war I'll come here to live—yes, sir, to live! It's the only place to get a dinner. Egad, sir, out of New Orleans nobody cooks!"
I suggested comfort in the idea of red snapper at Pensacola.
"Red fish is good in itself. Egad, I think it is good," replied the colonel. "But eaten in camp, with a knife, sir—egad, with a knife—off a tin plate! Pah! You've never lived in camp." And in a hollow, oracular whisper, he added: "Wait!"