[30]. Throughout the English-settled portion of the United States, the British Common Law is the basis of all our jurisprudence. But the French and Spanish settlements in Louisiana have left it the legacy of the Civil Law, and so made the practice of law in its courts a matter requiring special study, and presenting special perplexities.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Beginning Reaction—Northern Emigrants and New Orleans Natives.
To be waked up in the morning by a negro, pushing your musquito-bar aside to hand you a cup of coffee in bed; to have him presently return with a glass of iced Congress water, an orange, and the morning papers, and to be notified that he’ll come back after awhile to tell you when it is time to get up, are traces of the old style of living in New Orleans, to which our host scrupulously adhered. Slavery was doubtless very bad; but it did one thing we shall never have so well done again—it trained the best personal attendants to the last possibility of perfection. Under their careful ministrations the most industrious might be excused for an occasional languid lapse into seductive indolence. No wonder some ambitious young writer made the discovery, after Banks’s discomfiture on the Red River, that New Orleans has been the Capua of our Northern armies.
The morning papers began to present an altered tone. A month ago they sang only the softest strains in honor of the military management, laughed at the rags of the Confederacy, and had no squeamishness in speaking of Rebels and the rebellion. Now there were pleasant notices of the returning Confederate braves; rejoicings at the revival of the old appearance of things; hints about Yankee innovations which would soon be forced to disappear. The old papers, which had helped fan the flames of secession, and had only been permitted to continue their publication, after the surrender of the city, under the most comprehensive promises of good behavior, went even further. Mr. Lincoln already began to be referred to as a hard master, whose unconstitutional courses a Southerner like Mr. Johnson could not follow; and the demands of the “Radicals” (whom a few weeks before they had been praising), were denounced in terms quite equal to those of the old invectives against the Abolitionists.
Everywhere one observed the same signs of reaction. The returning Rebel soldiers seemed to have called into active utterance all the hostility to Northerners that for nearly four years had lain latent. Men quoted the North Carolina proclamation, and thanked God that there had suddenly been found some sort of a breakwater against Northern fanaticism. There were whispers that Governor Wells (who had been nominated as Lieutenant-Governor on the ticket with Governor Hahn, under the Banks military reorganization, and who, on Hahn’s election as Senator, had succeeded to the Governorship), was about going over to the planting (that is, to the Rebel) party. He had got all he could out of the Free-State party; as his old friends returned, and as the North Carolina proclamation emboldened him, he naturally drifted to the side where his sympathies had always drawn him. But a day or two before, this sallow-faced little official, who, but for the necessities of the Banks reorganization, would never have risen from the obscurity of his remote Red River plantation,[[31]] had received a young Northern officer, settled in New Orleans, and an applicant for an office which he thought he could fill. The Governor had already begun the free appointment of Rebel officers, but a Northern officer who had been wounded on the loyal side—to the success of which side alone he owed his position—presented a different sort of a case.
“The truth is, sir, that we’re very much obliged to you for all you Northern gentlemen have done; but now that you are successful, you had better go home. Louisiana must be governed by Louisianians!”
The bubbling of the political caldron was at its hight. General Banks had removed Mr. Kennedy, the Mayor of the city. In turn, he had himself been superseded, and now it was rumored that the representations of his creature, the Governor, who had betrayed him, having been listened to at Washington, his humiliation was to be made complete by the restoration of Kennedy. Such was the reward already being reaped for the proscription of Durant, Flanders, and the other genuine Union men of the State, in the mongrel military reorganization.
Carondelet Street, during these days, presented a curious scene. Sometimes it was impossible to approach within a couple of squares of the Provost-Marshal’s office, so great was the throng of returning Rebel soldiers, applying for their paroles. It was a jolly, hand-shaking, noisy, chattering crowd. Pushing about among them could be seen women, sometimes evidently of wealth and position, seeking for their brothers or husbands. Nothing could exceed the warmth with which they all greeted the ragged fellows in gray, and every few moments one found his own eyes growing dim as he watched the touching embrace of dear ones from whom for four years they had been parted.[[32]] “Registered enemies,” too, were returning; there was a general reunion and rejoicing, and amid it all, the men who had been fleeing before Sheridan, or surrendering under Lee, soon found it easy to forget how badly they had been beaten, or how generously their treason had been treated.
I do not think the Northern men who had come into New Orleans since its surrender, and who now so largely controlled its business, were doing much to promote a healthier tone of public feeling. Most of them were engrossed in trade. Scarcely any, officers or civilians, would hesitate to join with the Southerners in talk against the Abolitionists and the Sumnerites. Nearly all of them fell readily enough into the current abuse of niggers and nigger-lovers. And it seemed too prevalent an idea that, in order to secure profitable business, a man must either sink politics altogether, or fall into the old habit of pandering to the prejudices of those with whom he traded. Clearly, the days of Northern flunkeyism had not entirely passed away.