Political subjects were scarcely alluded to; but, after the party had rejoined the ladies, or strolled out among Mr. Roselius’s olive and orange-trees, it was easy to see that the feeling of the Unionists was by no means sanguine. Some insisted that the Rebels were certain to resume control at the first election; others hoped for better things, but frankly added that there was no security save in the interference of Congress. “Let this election go on,” said Mr. Durant, “and a Legislature will be chosen which wouldn’t hesitate at sending John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin to the Senate again! Perhaps policy would prevent the choice of just those men; but the only change would be in the substitution of persons with the same principles and less ability. If you don’t get brilliant and artful Rebels, the lack of genius will be made up by malignity.”
Remembering that this Legislature subsequently did elect Mr. Randall Hunt, I have recalled with special interest the impressions left by the conversation of that gentleman, one morning, when he came to breakfast with the Chief Justice, to whom he is remotely related by his marriage into the family of the late Justice McLean, of the Supreme Court.
Mr. Hunt is in the prime of life, though his constitution seems somewhat broken, and his nervousness is extreme. He has been for years one of the leading lawyers of New Orleans. The secessionists seem to regard him as the foremost orator now left them. The Unionists concede that he is a fine speaker, but describe him as given to painfully elaborate rhetoric and ornate delivery. I have been told by Governor Hahn that Mr. Hunt was once asked by General Banks to give up the Rebel cause, and unite in the Free-State movement. It was intimated that, in return for his influence, the Governorship of the State would await his acceptance. Mr. Hunt took a day to consider the matter; then replied that he had supported the Rebel side, was thoroughly committed to it, had near and dear relatives by his advice then out in the armies fighting for it, and could not think of abandoning them! Possibly a whisper of this bit of secret history may have since helped in Mr. Hunt’s election as United States Senator by the returned Rebels.
It was easy to see how earnest were his sympathies with the men who had been fighting the Rebel battles. With him, as with most of the better classes in the South, this feeling is wholly unaffected by the utter defeat of all their hopes. To them the Rebel soldiers are still patriots, defeated, but not disgraced, in an ineffectual struggle against mercenary invaders; martyrs without the crown; heroes who have hazarded everything for their native land, and who now deserve only blessings from every true son of the State.
Reconstruction seemed to him an easy task. “We tried to leave the Union. You have defeated us in our effort. What can there be, then, for us to do but to return our Senators and Representatives to the Congress from which we tried to withdraw forever? We acknowledge the defeat, and are ready to send back our Congressmen. That is what you have been fighting for; what more can the General Government have to do with the matter?”
The Amnesty Proclamation had just arrived. Like nearly all other men of Southern sympathies, he thought the exceptions very unwise, and needlessly irritating. “You’ve determined to keep us in the Union. Isn’t it more statesmanlike, then, to avoid adding to our popular discontent? Is it better to have us a conquered province, or an integral part of the nation—better to have an Ireland on the Gulf, or a Scotland?”
The proposition for negro suffrage seemed to him utterly loathsome. “Surely, sir,” said he to the Chief Justice, “you do not know the negro. If you but understood as we understand the condition of these people, their ignorance, their degradation, you would shrink back in horror from your own proposition.” Mr. Hunt forgot that these once degraded creatures had been rescued from their native barbarism, and, as he and the other Southern orators have so often told us, had been elevated and civilized by the Christianizing influences of the system of slavery! If their degradation was now so horrifying, these gentlemen must have been formerly mistaken in regarding slavery as such a Christian civilizer. If they were mistaken then, it is among the possibilities that they may be mistaken now.
It is a continual source of surprise to observe how these thorough-going Southern gentlemen speak constantly of their knowledge of the negro, as one might speak of the most recondite theorems of the differential calculus. “If you only knew these negroes as we do—but, then, of course, you can’t. Why, we were born among them!” To credit such persons, one must regard the negro’s nature as something requiring very profound study and long-protracted investigation. I happened to mention to Mr. Hunt the story of “Old Sandie” of Key West. He considered it a very surprising story, “if credible.” “But then, if you understood, from a lifetime’s experience, the character and debasement of the negro, you would not be misled by such exceptional cases.” I mentioned the prosperity of the Sea Islanders, and their beginnings of self-government. “You saw only the one side of the picture. If you had been born among those people, you would have talked in a very different way.”
Nothing short of this “being born among negroes” is accepted as qualification for comprehending their nature. And I have observed that the most strenuous in insisting upon it are able editors, eloquent lawyers, and successful business men, who were born in the North, but have lived so long South that they suppose their origin to be unknown.