CHAPTER XXVI.
Talks with the Citizens, White and Black.
One morning we were interrupted at lunch by a message that Mr. Durant had called with the party for whom he had made the engagement yesterday. Remembering that Mr. Durant had promised to bring around some of the “ancient freedmen,” as they were called—that, is the free negroes of French descent—I went out a few moments afterward to witness the interview. A group of gentlemen stood about Mr. Chase in the library, and one, a bald-headed, gray-bearded, vivacious, youngish-old man was making an animated little address.
I felt sure that here was a mistake. Imagining that some other party had got into the library by accident—some delegation of Rebel lawyers, perhaps, to remonstrate against the test oath—I turned into the parlors to hunt up Mr. Durant and his French negroes. But they were nowhere to be found; and returning to the library, I saw in the furthest corner Mr. Durant himself, listening to the talk of the bald-headed old spokesman. Even then it was hard to realize that these quiet, well-bred gentlemen, scarcely one darker than Mr. Durant himself—many of them several shades whiter—were negroes, to be seen walking with whom on the streets of New Orleans was social disgrace. Before their call was concluded, old Mr. Jacob Barker was shown into the parlor. The eminently respectable and conservative old banker looked more like a negro, in point of complexion, than any one out of the twelve or fifteen in Mr. Durant’s party.
Every man of them was well educated. All spoke French fluently; the English of all was passable, of some perfect. Some of them were comparatively wealthy, and all were in easy circumstances. They simply asked the Chief Justice to represent to the President, in their behalf, that they paid heavy taxes to support schools for the whites, and could get none for themselves; that they paid heavy taxes to support city and State governments, and were without voice in either; and that they desired to ask whether this accorded with Mr. Johnson’s well-known ideas of genuine democracy? They had been citizens of an Empire; when the Republic bought Louisiana they were disfranchised. Now that the Republic was beginning a new life, could it longer refuse them such rights as the Empire had accorded? What answer can legislators give who profess to believe the Declaration of Independence, and who cheerfully confirm a full-blooded Indian in a conspicuous position on the staff of their Lieutenant General?
One pleasant afternoon, when the June sun was a little less fervid than usual, and a moist breeze blew across the lake, we drove up the levee, past elegant country places, embowered in shrubbery and half concealed from the road by luxuriant hedges of Cherokee rose, to the residence of Mr. Roselius, to keep an engagement for dinner. Our genial old host came running out to greet us, hurrying like a boy down the high steps, which, after the prevailing fashion in this moist climate, lead directly from the paved walk to the second-story veranda. A dozen or more gentlemen were in the parlor. Among them I remember two or three noted New Orleans lawyers, one or two sugar-planters who had been absent in Europe during the war, and a Spanish officer, fresh from some one of the perpetually recurring South American revolutions. One noticed here, as at most of the formal dinner parties given during our stay, and at my subsequent visits to the city, the absence of all ladies save those of the host’s household. Indeed, except in peculiar cases like this, the prevailing idea of a dinner in New Orleans seems to have for its leading feature copious libations of a great many kinds of the choicest wines—to be licensed by the earliest possible retiracy of the hostess.
Among Mr. Roselius’s guests that evening was a modest-looking little gentleman, of retiring manners, and with apparently very little to say; though the keen eyes and well-shaped head sufficiently showed the silence to be no mask for poverty of intellect. It was Mr. Paul Morphy, the foremost chess-player of the world, now a lawyer, but, alas! by no means the foremost young lawyer of this his native city. “If he were only as good in his profession as he is at chess-playing!” said one of the legal gentlemen, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he spoke in an undertone of the abilities of the elder Morphy, and the hopes that had long been cherished of the son. They evidently looked upon the young chess-player as a prosperous banker does upon his only boy, who persists in neglecting his desk in the bank parlor and becoming a vagabond artist.
The gentlemen just returned from Europe expressed their astonishment at the fortunes that had been accumulated by shrewd adventurers during their absence. Men whom they had left the masters of Carondelet Street, they found in a state of genteel beggary. New names had arisen, unknown to their four-year old memories of the city. “By the way, Mr. Durant,” said one, “how does it happen that you haven’t profited more by your chances—become Governor, or Senator, say, if you didn’t care for any more money?”
“I should have blushed if Cato’s house had stood secure
And flourished in a civil war,”
was the ready and only response.