CHAPTER XXIII.
New Orleans and New Orleans Notabilities.
Crossing from Mobile to New Orleans was going from the past of the South to its present. Till within a few weeks, Mobile had been among the latest strongholds of the rebellion; for some years New Orleans had been held by the national authorities, and had been changing under the operation of Northern influences. Mobile showed us the last of the old South; New Orleans the first of the new.
Before the Wayanda had reached the old battleground where what we would now call a sharp skirmish added the 8th of January to our public holidays, and gave the country one of its most famous Presidents, she was met by a tug containing a number of the officials, and some of the prominent lawyers of the city, come down to welcome the Chief Justice. Among them were natives of the South, and gentlemen whose interests were all wrapped up in New Orleans. But a day or two, before the city papers had published Mr. Chase’s remarks to the Charleston negroes, and much angry comment had been excited by this “desecration of the judicial ermine” and the sanction given to the claims of the negroes for suffrage; yet nothing could have exceeded the cordiality of his reception. His host was a young sugar-planter, born here, and inheriting large estates and many slaves from his father. Fortunately for the young man, much of his boyhood had been spent abroad, and when, at the age of seventeen, the sudden death of his father recalled him from St. Petersburg and made him a millionaire, he was measurably free from the ideas which slavery steadily instilled. When the Emancipation Proclamation came, his plantations were in the exempted parishes; but he was clear-sighted enough to see the inevitable end, and sagacious enough to recognize it as already practically accomplished. He gathered his slaves together, told them that henceforth they might consider themselves free, and proposed a bargain for their services, if they were willing to remain at their old places. They stipulated for rations, and an average of between eight and ten dollars wages per month, which was promptly paid. They have been working steadily ever since, and Mr. May now states that, in spite of the demoralizing effects of the war, to say nothing of the actual ravages of guerrillas, his principal plantation has been as profitable under the free-labor system as it was formerly, when labor cost him nothing.
Like most of the wealthy sugar-planters, Mr. May keeps up his town house, and, indeed, spends the greater part of his time in the city, where, for a year or two past, official duties have required his presence. At the age of twenty-three, he holds the position of United States Treasurer, appointed thereto mainly for the reason that he was the most responsible loyal Southerner then to be found in the city. Even he had served for a season in the Rebel service—to have stayed out of it, he says, would have been to have sacrificed his property—but he contrived to get back as soon as New Orleans fell, and was among the very first to present himself before General Butler to take the oath of allegiance.
We had been at his house scarcely an hour, and had just gathered about the table, at lunch, when a compact, little, big-chested, crop-headed, fiery-faced officer, in Major-General’s uniform, was shown in. He was altogether the most modest, bashful, and embarrassed little fellow we had seen on the whole trip; conversing under restraint, sitting uneasily on his chair, and flushing redder than ever when a lady addressed him. They tell a ludicrous story of his having taken a splendid bouquet to the theater, one evening, to give to a lady whom he knew he should see there. He held it nervously through half the performance; started once or twice from his box to pass around to the one which the lady occupied, but speedily returned, bouquet still in hand, his heart having each time failed him on the way. Finally, summoning one of his staff officers, he directed him to carry the bouquet over to Miss ——, with General Sheridan’s compliments. Yet, as one looks at the developments on the back of his head, it is easy to understand the tremendous energy and intense love of fighting for the sake of fighting, that have made “Phil. Sheridan” the most famous cavalry officer of the war, if not of the century.
He had but recently assumed command of the Gulf Department, and had been busily occupied with the affairs of Texas. He was by no means satisfied with the situation in the Lone Star State. There had been no real surrender. The officers had availed themselves of the chance for paroles, and the men had gone off, arms in their hands, half expecting a renewal of the war, with the Mexican frontier as a base of operations, and, at any rate, too far from being well whipped to become very quiet or orderly citizens. He did not say in terms that there had been bad faith on the part of Kirby Smith and the other Confederate officers, but it was evident that he more than suspected it.
Some talk that followed of cotton speculations in Texas, possible and proposed, disclosed pretty plainly a fact which had often been hinted at and as often denied in the newspapers. Either Kirby Smith, or some person assuming to speak for him, had been in indirect communication with our authorities on the subject of closing out the war in the Trans-Mississippi Department, by a big exportation of Confederate cotton on private account. “I’ve known for a long time that he was for sale,” said one, “but I have always doubted whether he was worth the price proposed.”
Among the stream of callers that filled up the afternoon was an old gentleman, whom, but for the half-modernized clothes, one might have taken for Dr. Franklin, as he is shown in the marble statue at the Capitol. The countenance had the same strong cast; the thin gray locks hung down, long, over the straight, collarless Quaker coat in the same way; the broad-brimmed hat, the cane, the general aspect of venerable but hearty old age, were all as we have them in the statue. This was Jacob Barker,[[29]] a Northern Quaker, whose term of residence in New Orleans counts further back than the lives of most of her citizens, and who had, nevertheless, apparently passed the prime of a prosperous business career before he emigrated to the South. Mr. Barker is now between eighty and ninety years of age. He has many ships carrying his trade to foreign and domestic ports. His children approach old age around him, and yet he may be seen almost every day, during business hours, behind the counter, in his old-fashioned little bank on Camp Street, counting money and waiting on customers, like a bank clerk of twenty.
Long ago Mr. Barker sympathized with the generous views of his sect on the sinfulness of slavery. It is even of record that he joined a party once in New York harbor, which steamed out in one of his own tug-boats to a vessel about to sail for Charleston, and rescued a runaway slave she was to carry back to his South Carolina owner. How Southern business has molded Northern consciences may be seen in the fact that, for a generation past, Mr. Barker has been as Southern in his views as the majority of the depositors in his bank; and, indeed, it seems scarcely known in a Rebel community, whose highest confidence he enjoys, that so devoted a Southern politician is not, after all, a Southern man.
We were joined at dinner by three gentlemen who might be taken as conspicuous representatives of the Southern bar, as well as of diverse phases of Southern Unionism. The eldest, a fine old gentleman, whose youthful spirits and ruddy face perpetually contradict the story of his thin gray hairs, is generally held to be the finest civil lawyer here, which is equivalent to pronouncing him the finest civil lawyer in the United States.[[30]] As long ago as during the administration of General Jackson, his prominence was such that, when it was plausibly argued that a vacancy on the Supreme Bench ought to be so filled as to give that tribunal of last resort at least one Judge learned in the civil law, Mr. Roselius was at once suggested. New Orleans lawyers still tell that he might have had the place if he would; but that the emoluments of the bar are here too great to be exchanged for the honorable beggary of the Supreme Court.