“I saw it was no use arguing with such an obstinate man, and remarked to him that I only wanted compensation for my cotton, nothing more, and that the best compensation would be to give me back the same quantity and quality that had been taken from me; that I would appoint one merchant, he another; they would agree as to quality, buy the cotton, deliver it me, and he should pay for it.
“‘No, no, sir!’ replied Jackson; ‘I like straightforward business, and that is too complicated. You must take 6 cents for your cotton. I have nothing more to say.’
“I wanted to make the whole thing clear to him, but he cut me short: ‘Come, sir, come! Take a glass of whiskey-and-water; you must be damned dry after all your arguing.’
“All I could do was to say: ‘Well, general, I did not expect such injustice at your hands! Good morning, sir!’ And I went away. Three days afterwards news came of the conclusion of peace, and the consequence was an immediate rise of cotton to 16 cents, at which price I bought several parcels. The committee of claims were embarrassed; they felt that it was now impossible to fob me off with 6 cents. At last I was asked if I would now be content with payment of my invoice; and I agreed to be so, since I must else have complained to Congress, and the affair might have dragged on for years.”
Some pages are devoted by Mr Nolte to an appreciation of Old Hickory’s character. He condemns his arbitrary and overbearing disposition, and his cruelty to the unfortunate Indians, whom he so implacably and perseveringly hunted down, but does justice to his shrewdness and other good qualities, considering, however, that good luck had more to do than commanding talent with the distinction and popularity he attained to in the States—an opinion which we suspect to be now entertained by a very large number of Jackson’s countrymen. Of the general’s tone and manners—rough as those of a far-west woodsman—Mr Nolte gives some humorous examples. After the action in front of New Orleans, demonstrations innumerable were made in the hero’s honour. On his return into the city, Mrs Livingston placed a crown of laurel upon his head, which seemed considerably to embarrass the slayer of Seminoles, who took it off as if it burned his brow; the ladies subscribed for a costly set of jewels for Mrs General Jackson; and the principal inhabitants got up a grand ball in the French Exchange. Mr Nolte, who had seen more public festivities than most of the people of New Orleans, was a prominent and active member of the committee.
“The upper part of the Exchange was arranged for dancing, the lower part for supper, with flowers, coloured lamps, and transparencies. Before supper, Jackson desired to go alone and take a view of the arrangements, and I had to show him the way. On one of the transparencies, between the arcades, were to be read the words: ‘Jackson and victory, they are but one.’ The general turned round to me, in a more cordial manner than I might have expected, and asked, ‘Why did you not say Hickory and victory, they are but one?’ After supper the hero of the day gave us the diverting spectacle of a pas de deux between him and his wife—an Irish emigrant of low origin and considerable corpulence, whom he had taken away from a planter in Georgia. To see those two, the general a long lean man with skeleton-like limbs, and his wife, a short thick specimen of the female figure, dancing opposite to each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild tune of ‘Opossum up a gum tree,’ was truly one of those remarkable spectacles which would be sought in vain in any European ballet.”
During the second year of the war between England and the States, a fine West Indiaman of 900 tons burthen, the “Lord Nelson,” was captured by the Yankee privateer Saratoga, taken into New Orleans, and sold by auction for a fourth of its value. Mr Nolte was the purchaser. Now that the war was over, he loaded her with cotton and deerskins, altered her name to the “Horatio,” and sailed for Nantes, with several passengers on board. The ship was but just outside the mouths of the Mississippi, when she spoke a vessel that had made an unusually short voyage from Havre, and brought news of Napoleon’s landing at Cannes, rapid march through France, and reinstallation in the Tuileries. Two Frenchmen, who were amongst the passengers, and one of whom had served under the emperor, were overjoyed. Presently it was discovered that the “Horatio” had not enough ballast for her two thousand bales of cotton, and she put into the Havana to supply the deficiency, thus somewhat lengthening her voyage. Off the Scilly Islands she spoke the monthly packet from London to New York. After the interchange of a little nautical information: “What news from France?” roared Mr Nolte’s captain through his speaking-trumpet. “The Duke of Wellington and the British army are in Paris,” was the reply. “Where is Buonaparte?” “Fled—nobody knows where.” And the two ships pursued their respective courses. The French passengers would not believe a word of it. It was English news, they said, manufactured in London; and they proved to each other, as clear as sunlight, that it was physically and morally impossible the intelligence should be true. It took the testimony of a French pilot, and the sight of the white flag on the banks of the Loire, to convince them that Napoleon had again fallen. The French population of New Orleans went yet farther in their incredulity. The Buonapartist Courrier de la Louisiane analysed the news, and ingeniously proved that the pretended victory of the Allies was merely a mask for a total defeat; that the emperor had achieved one of his great triumphs, which should forthwith be celebrated. And accordingly Napoleon’s bust, crowned with laurels, was that evening carried in procession, by the light of hundreds of torches, with several bands of music playing French national airs;—premature rejoicings, which the confirmation of the defeat of the French converted into profound consternation.
Paris, whither Mr Nolte hastened as soon as possible after landing, was full of novelty and excitement, and the focus on which the eyes of Europe were fixed. He devotes an interesting chapter to sketches of “Paris after Waterloo.” Amongst the crowds of foreign uniforms were here and there to be seen, he says, “spectral figures, in long blue coats buttoned to the chin, spurred boots, and hats pressed down over their eyes. These men, who cast such gloomy glances around them, were the officers of the disbanded French army. The ribbon of the Legion of Honour had disappeared from their button-hole, but it was easy to recognise them by their flashing eyes and fierce expression when an English uniform drew near. An accidental push or touch on the foot, often unavoidable in a crowd, and they would burst out, in great bitterness, with an angry—‘Je suis Français, Monsieur!’ or, ‘No, Padrone, questa e l’uniforme di Amburgo!’ and if the ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ was not forthcoming, a quarrel was the almost inevitable result. The police had the difficult task of keeping these remnants of the French army out of Paris, but they were not very successful in so doing. Notwithstanding the violent irritation of the French military, which was kept under only by the strong hand, nobody in Paris went amongst them more fearlessly than the Duke of Wellington, who showed himself everywhere in a plain blue frock, with the English red scarf round his waist, and a simple red and white feather in his cocked hat, and usually rode about alone, followed only by a sergeant. Thus plainly equipped and slenderly escorted, I saw him one morning ride into the court of the Hotel de l’Empire, and ask for the celebrated London banker Angerstein, who was stopping there.” Ney’s death, the restaurants and coffeehouses then in vogue, and which were thronged with English and Prussian officers, and grand reviews of the allied troops, are in turn glanced at. At the review of the Russian guard, drawn up along the whole length of the boulevards, Mr Nolte had a particularly good view of the sovereigns. By favour of a colonel, with whom he had fallen into conversation, he was allowed to remain within the line cleared by the sentries, and close to the colonel’s horse. “Suddenly the three monarchs came riding rapidly up, the Emperor Alexander in the middle, his eyes directed to the ladies in the balconies and at the windows—on his right the Emperor Francis, with a serious straightforward gaze—on his left King Frederick-William III., who seemed to be examining the grisettes in the crowd rather than the ladies at the windows. The staff, according to the estimate of my obliging colonel, comprised more than a thousand military men of all nations. As good luck would have it, the sovereigns and their whole retinue paused in front of the regiment on my right, and the colonel pointed out to me the Russian grand-dukes, the Austrian archdukes, several Prussian princes, Wellington, Schwarzenberg, Blucher, Platoff,” &c. &c. Of all the commanders then assembled in Paris, the most dissatisfied was the American general, Scott (since noted for his campaign in Mexico), who had been opposed to the English on the Canadian frontier, had taken a fort or two, and was looked upon by his countrymen as a military star of the very first magnitude—second only to Jackson, and equal to any other warrior then extant. He had been sent to Europe to increase his military knowledge and study the art of war, and reached Paris fully convinced that all the great chiefs of the Continental armies would hasten to greet and compliment him. “To his visible vexation, he found himself completely mistaken. In the great military meetings in the French capital, where Wellington, Blucher, Schwarzenberg, Kutusoff, Woronzoff, and a host of other celebrities, laden with stars and orders, were assembled—the long thin man, in his blue coat without embroidery, and with only a pair of moderate-sized epaulets, excited no attention. Scott could not get over the contrast between the figure he had so recently cut in his native land, and the insignificance he was condemned to in France, and he often exhibited bitter and somewhat laughable ill-humour.” After a visit to the field of Waterloo, Mr Nolte returns to America, on cotton speculations intent—of which, and of Baring Brothers, he for some time discourses, until we are not sorry to see the theme changed, and him back in Paris, passing a Sunday at the country-house of Maison sur Seine, built by Louis XIV., and then just purchased from the French government by the banker Jacques Laffitte, whom he found in his park, accompanied by two plainly-dressed and plain-mannered Englishmen, who talked knowingly about cotton, and whom he took for Manchester cotton-spinners. At dinner, to his surprise, although Casimir Perrier and several deputies and Frenchmen of mark were present, the places of honour were for the Englishmen. He made up his mind that they must be very great people in the cotton-spinning line—perhaps the first in Manchester—and that they must have large credits on Laffitte’s house—that giving, not unfrequently, the measure of the hospitality of Parisian bankers. Laffitte, who was a great talker—given to discourse for hours together, with scarcely a break, and with innumerable digressions totally irrelevant to the subject under discussion—was loquacious as usual, and related many things that had occurred during the Hundred Days. At that time Napoleon had sent for and consulted him almost daily. Laffitte said that he had never been a worshipper of Napoleon’s, but he then had opportunity of convincing himself that the emperor possessed, in the highest degree, the art of popularity. “‘He was very confidential with me,’ said Laffitte, ‘spoke without reserve, and once made a striking remark concerning our nation. “To govern the French,” he said, “one must have arms of iron and gloves of velvet.”’ My readers may probably have heard this remark, but not the reply immediately made by Madame Laffitte’s right-hand neighbour (one of the Manchester cotton-spinners aforesaid). ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is very true, but—he often forgot to put on his gloves.’ The remark was so apt and true that all present laughed heartily. I asked my next neighbour who the witty foreigner was, and learned that it was the Marquis of Lansdowne.”
Involved in the commercial disasters of 1825–6, Mr Nolte left New Orleans, sixteen years after his first establishment there, and went to seek in Europe that fortune which had constantly eluded his grasp in the States. His success in the Old World was little better than in the New. In after years, he again more than once visited America, and engaged in enormous cotton speculations, in which he burnt his fingers. Cotton seems to have had for him the same irresistible attraction that dice have for the veteran gambler. Although many of his misfortunes were the result of circumstances neither to be foreseen nor guarded against, and although we may suppose that he makes out the best case he fairly can, the impression left by his book upon the reader’s mind is, that Mr Vincent Nolte has been, to say the least, a very venturesome person, and that his abilities and opportunities would have amply sufficed to insure him ultimate affluence, had he been less impatient to acquire a large and rapid fortune. On the other hand, he deserves credit for his unflinching pluck, and for his elasticity under misfortune. When he left New Orleans, he attempted to form a partnership at Havre, but in vain; and he himself frankly admits that he was unsuccessful, because the merchants with whom he would have associated himself were deterred by his reputed taste for the vast and daring operations in which he had been early initiated. The slow but sure gains of the steady trader he never had patience to collect; the ordinary routine of commercial affairs was to him wearisome and intolerable; he carried into the peaceful paths of trade something of that venturesome and aspiring spirit which, upon the battle-field, insures the soldier high distinction or sudden death—a bullet or a marshal’s baton. We regret to fear that it has led Mr Nolte, after his long and busy life, to no very prosperous position; although he seems to preserve to the last the spirit and vigour that have borne him through so many trying vicissitudes. At the time now referred to, he was still in his prime, and full of hope and confidence. From Havre he betook himself to his favourite city of Paris, where, by the assistance and introduction of his staunch friends the Barings, he was on the eve of concluding a partnership for the establishment of a house at Marseilles. The circulars were printed; Mr Nolte took a run to Hamburg, Holland, and England, to visit commercial friends, and everywhere he met a kind and encouraging reception. He reached Southampton, on his return to Paris, two hours after the departure of the packet, and, with characteristic impatience, rather than wait two days, hired an open boat, whose owner undertook to land him at Havre early the next morning. It was a moonlight night, and a fair wind at starting, but he was becalmed in the Channel, and lay a whole day roasting in the sun. Upon the morning of the 26th July 1830, he landed at Havre, and posted on to Paris. At Rouen he remarked signs of uneasiness, and the troops were under arms; at Courbevoie he received the first news of the fatal ordinances; outside the Paris barrier, a few persons stopped his chaise, and tore the white cockade from the postilion’s hat. Paris was enacting the most peaceful and respectable of its numerous revolutions.
Mr Nolte witnessed the proceedings of the three days of July, and betook himself to Marseilles, where he had scarcely commenced business when the failure of the Irish-French bankers who were to advance the greater part of the capital on behalf of his partner compelled him again to abandon it, and once more to return to Paris. He had been on very intimate terms with General Lafayette during that veteran revolutionist’s visit to the United States in 1825, had travelled with him, acted as his banker, rendered him some service, and shown him many attentions; for which he deemed himself far more than compensated by the privilege of the general’s society, and by the interest of his conversation. Alone with him, in the cabin of the American steamer which the authorities of New Orleans had allotted to the use of Washington’s old friend and comrade, Lafayette spoke freely of his past life and present opinions, and Mr Nolte was astonished by the revelation of plans which he would never have suspected to have lingered in that venerable head—so soon, in all probability, to be laid in the grave. The man who, at least as well as any living, had had opportunities of judging the Bourbon character—before and since the day when, upon the balcony at Versailles, he kissed, in sign of peace and good understanding, the hand of the defamed and martyred Marie Antoinette, amidst the acclamations of assembled thousands, whose discontent the symbol and the promised return of the royal family to Paris promptly, although but temporarily, appeased—declared his conviction of its unworthiness. For the good of France, in his opinion, she must expel the race of whom Talleyrand so truly said, that they had forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. “‘France cannot be happy under the Bourbons,’ said Lafayette, ‘and we must get rid of them. It would be already done, had Laffitte chosen.’