CHAPTER XL.
Phases of Public Sentiment in New Orleans before Congress met.
“Memphis is a more disloyal town than New Orleans,” said some one, during the winter, to General Butler. The cock-eye twinkled as the General answered: “I’m afraid, then, they never had the gospel preached to them in its purity, in Memphis!”
That General Butler’s gospel was preached with all plainness of speech and freedom of utterance, in New Orleans, was a fact to which the whole city testified; but still, if Memphis was worse, it was bad indeed.
“What about the Union party here?” I asked of a conspicuous gentleman, the day after my arrival. “There is no Union party, sir. We are all washed under, and the most of us only live peaceable lives by the sufferance of our Rebel neighbors.”
I was constrained to confess the remark nearly if not quite just. Remove the military power, and the next day such men as ex-Marshal Graham, Benjamin F. Flanders, and Thomas J. Durant would live in New Orleans by bare sufferance. One of the newspapers soberly reproached Mr. Flanders with ingratitude to “the people of New Orleans,” who only drove him out of the city in 1861, when they might just as easily have hung him for his unconcealed hostility to the State! After this signal proof of personal kindness to him, the newspaper continued: “Mr. Flanders had the ingratitude to persist in stirring up strife in our midst, by presuming, contrary to the laws of the State and the feeling of our citizens, to make speeches to assemblages of negroes!”
A charge to the grand jury by a city judge, published in the papers, menaced Flanders, Durant, and others of the ablest men of New Orleans, with imprisonment, for illegally addressing negro meetings! Was it any wonder that the few Unionists grew cautious, or that they complained of having been washed under by the returning Rebel tide?
I do not use the word Rebel as a term of reproach—these people themselves would hardly regard it in that light—but simply as the best distinctive term by which they can be accurately described to Northern readers. It must not be understood that they still resisted the United States authority—on the contrary, they were profuse in their acknowledgments of being subdued; nor that they plotted new rebellion, for they would shrink from it as burnt children from the fire. But the great mass of the adult white male population of New Orleans (nine-tenths, indeed, of the white male population of Louisiana) were in sympathy, or, by active efforts, supporters of the rebellion. No reorganization was possible on a white basis which should not leave these men in full control of the civil government by an overwhelming majority. He was blind, therefore, who failed to see that any government then set in motion by the votes of these Rebel Louisianans, must be composed of Rebel officers, chosen because they were known to be in full sympathy with their Rebel electors.
Of course, these Rebels and Rebel sympathizers, and registered enemies, et id omne genus, all now professed to be Union men. They were Unionists according to their interpretation of Unionism. They meant by it that they accepted the fact of defeat, and the necessity for giving up just so much of their old policy as that defeat compelled them to give up—not a whit more.
Thus they abandoned the doctrine of secession. Most of them honestly said that they still believed it a constitutional right; but that having appealed to the verdict of arms, instead of the verdict of the Supreme Court, they were bound to acquiesce in the decision which the trial by battle had given. So they abandoned slavery. Three-fifths of them still insisted that slavery was an institution beneficial to both races, if not indeed indispensable to Southern prosperity; but they appealed to war to sustain it, and they yielded to the logic of accomplished facts in admitting that war had destroyed it.
So much they gave up, because they realized that they must. More they would have yielded in like manner, if equally convinced that more must be yielded. But all the concomitants and outgrowths of slavery and State sovereignty, doctrines which lie at the foundation of secession, and beliefs which reject the possibility of free negro labor, or the prudence of conferring legal rights upon free negroes, remained in full strength. They were imbedded in constitutions, they were walled about by the accretions of a century’s laws, they were part and parcel of the accepted faith of the people. They would be given up as was slavery—not otherwise. Every step must be by compulsion.