Of late, the cave near Matanzas has been much talked of, and all American tourists are urgently advised to visit it. They will find much that is beautiful, and some lofty passages deserving to be called grand; but whoever has seen our own great caves in the West will be apt to come away from that of Matanzas disappointed.

[25]. A panic which absolutely led to the extinguishment of the lights in sundry light-houses along the South-Atlantic coast, to prevent the dreaded pirate from running in and destroying our fleets.

CHAPTER XXI.
Scenes in Mobile—The Cotton Swindles.

Spring had ripened into fervid summer, as, after days of exquisite sailing on the Gulf, we steamed past the forts where Farragut added the latest laurels to our navy. Our pilot proposed taking us directly up the river, but presently the Wayanda’s keel plowed deep into the oozy mud of the channel, and admonished us that Mobile is an inland city, to which ocean-going vessels may not always venture to ascend.

A boat’s crew was sent forward, and even it had a perilous passage among the torpedoes which still lined the channel. Meantime we surveyed the greenish mud of the river from all its possible aspects, and through the long hours of a hot morning were taught the force of those early hopes which, in 1861, led the Mobilians to believe that their torrid weather and abounding mosquitoes would surely prevent the Yankees from making any successful movement against the forts.

Here, through all that braggart spring, from day to day, resounded the boasts of the young soldiers, who still thought war a sport like horse-racing or dueling.[[26]]

The first volunteer companies, eager for Yankee scalps, and carrying pine coffins among their camp equipage, in which, they had told their wives and sweethearts, when they started, that they meant to bring back the corpses of Lincoln and his Cabinet, were hurried here to possess the forts, before “old Harvey Brown” should send over some of his regulars from Fort Pickens. Here Colonel Hardee experienced the difficulty of making gallant Southerners conform to his own tactics; and here, amid their champagne, the brave fellows murmured at being kept ditch-digging, when they wanted to be led at once against the cowardly Yankees. Here John Forsyth, at once Peace Commissioner and professional inflamer of the Southern heart, (now desirous of renewing his old vocation,[[27]]) took Dr. Russell and other foreign visitors to show them model fortifications and model soldiers. By and by there was need for more serious work to the northward, and the young volunteers, their champagne and patés ruthlessly thrown out of the wagons, were taught on Virginia fields the beginnings of real war.

At last a light side-wheeler came steaming down the river for us, and presently we were joined by General Gordon Granger, and the whole array of city officials, representing the Yankee Government in the city. Among them was a keen-looking, suspiciously-elegant cotton agent, shirt and fingers ablaze with diamonds, and face wreathed in smiles, to meet the gentlemen whom he supposed all-powerful at the Treasury Department. He was enamored of the South; thought it would be best now not to irritate her, and especially that there should be no more offensive abolitionism than was absolutely necessary. He doubted very much the policy of talking about negro suffrage, and was sure he could do better for the Government in cotton by conciliating the Southern character. Besides, the negroes ought to be under some rigid control any way. If left to absolute freedom, they would not work, and the country would be ruined.

Secretary McCulloch once said: “I am sure I sent some honest cotton agents South; but it sometimes seems very doubtful whether any of them remained honest very long.” This man, who greeted us with such bright smiles and smooth-spoken talk, has since been fined two hundred thousand dollars and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for cotton stealing!