Four Years in Rebel Capitals Part 7

In the American town the likeness to Mobile was very marked, in the manners and style of the people. The young men of the French quarter had sought this society more of late years, finding in it a freedom from restraint, for which their a.s.sociations with other Americans in business gave them a taste. The character of the society was gay and easy--and it was not hedged in so carefully as that of the old town.

Strangers were cordially--if not very carefully--welcomed into it; and the barriers of reserve, that once protected it, were rapidly breaking down before the inroads of progress and petroleum.

The great hotels--the "St. Charles," "St. Louis" and others--were constantly filled with the families of planters from all points of the river and its branches, and with travelers from the Atlantic border as well. Many of these were people of cultivation and refinement; but many, alas! the roughest of diamonds with a western freedom of expression and solidity of outline, that is national but not agreeable.

In the season these people overflowed the hotels, where they had constant hops with, occasionally, splendid b.a.l.l.s and even masques. Many of them were "objects of interest" to the young men about town, by reason of papa's business, or Mademoiselle's proper bank account. So the hotels--though not frequented by the ladies of the city at all--became, each year, more and more thronged by the young men; and consequently, each year, the outsiders gained a very gradual, but more secure, footing near the home society and even began to force their way into it.

It must be confessed that some damsels from Red River wore diamonds at breakfast; and that young ladies from Ohio would drive tandem to the lake! And then their laughs and jokes at a soiree would give a dowager from Frenchtown an apoplexy!

_Que voulez vous?_ Pork is mighty! and cotton was king!

There was much difference of opinion as to the morals of the Crescent City. For my own part, I do not think the men were more dissipated than elsewhere, though infinitely more wedded to enjoyment and fun in every form. There was the French idea prevalent that gambling was no harm; and it was indulged to a degree certainly hurtful to many and ruinous to some. From the climate and the great prevalence of light wines, there was less drunkenness than in most southern towns; and if other vices prevailed to any great extent--they were either gracefully hidden, or so sanctioned by custom as to cause no remark, except by straight-laced strangers.

Oh! the delicious memories of the city of old! The charming cordiality to be found in no colder lat.i.tude, the cosy breakfasts that prefaced days of real enjoyment--the midnight revels of the _bal masque_! And then the carnival!--those wild weeks when the Lord of Misrule wields his motley scepter--leading from one reckless frolic to another till _Mardi Gras_ culminates in a giddy whirl of delirious fun on which, at midnight, Lent drops a somber veil!

Sad changes the war has wrought since then!

The merry "Krewe of Comus" has been for a time replaced by the conquering troops of the Union; the _salons_ where only the best and brightest had collected have been sullied by a conquering soldiery; and their leader has waged a vulgar warfare on the n.o.ble womanhood his currish spirit could not gaze upon without a fruitless effort to degrade.

Of the resident ladies, I can only say that to hear of a fast one--in ordinary acceptation of that term--was, indeed, rare.

The young married woman monopolized more of the society and its beaux than would be very agreeable to New York belles; but, if they borrowed this custom from their French neighbors, I have not heard that they also took the license of the Italian.

Public and open improprieties were at once frowned down, and people of all grades and cla.s.ses seemed to make their chief study good taste.

This is another French graft, on a stem naturally susceptible, of which the consequences can be seen from the hair ribbon of the _bonne_ to the decoration of the Cathedral.

The women of New Orleans, as a rule, dress with more taste--more perfect adaptation of form and color to figure and complexion--than any in America. On a dress night at the opera, at church, or at a ball, the _toillettes_ are a perfect study in their exquisite fitness--their admirable blending of simplicity and elegance. Nor is this confined to the higher and more wealthy cla.s.ses. The women of lower conditions are admirably imitative; and on Sunday afternoons, where they crowd to hear the public bands with husbands and children, all in their best, it is the rarest thing to see a badly-trimmed bonnet or an ill-chosen costume. The men, in those days, dressed altogether in the French fashion; and were, consequently, the worst dressed in the world.

The most independent and obtrusively happy people one noticed in New Orleans were the negroes. They have a sleek, shiny blackness here, unknown to higher lat.i.tudes; and from its midst the great white eyeb.a.l.l.s and large, regular teeth flash with a singular brilliance.

Sunday is _their_ day peculiarly--and on the warm afternoons, they bask up and down the thoroughfares in the gaudiest of orange and scarlet bandannas. But their day is fast pa.s.sing away; and in place of the simple, happy creatures of a few years gone, we find the discontented and besotted idler--squalid and dirty.

The cant of to-day--that the race problem, if left alone, will settle itself--may have some possible proof in the distant future; but the few who are ignorant enough to-day to believe the "negro question" already settled may find that they are yet but on the threshold of the "irrepressible conflict" between nature and necessity.

To the natural impressibility of the southron, the Louisianian adds the enthusiasm of the Frenchman. At the first call of the governor for troops, there had been readiest response; and here, as in Alabama, the very first young men of the state left office and counting-room and college to take up the musket. Two regiments of regulars, in the state service, were raised to man the forts--"Jackson" and "St. Philip"--that guarded the pa.s.ses below the city. These were composed of the stevedores and workingmen generally, and were officered by such young men as the governor and council deemed best fitted. The Levee had been scoured and a battalion of "Tigers" formed from the very lowest of the thugs and plugs that infested it, for Major Bob Wheat, the well-known filibuster.

Poor Wheat! His roving spirit still and his jocund voice now mute, he sleeps soundly under the sighing trees of Hollywood--that populous "city of the silent" at Richmond. It was his corps of which such wild and ridiculous stories of bowie-knife prowess were told at the Bull Run fight. They, together with the "Crescent Rifles," "Cha.s.seurs-a-pied"

and "Zouaves," were now at Pensacola.

The "Rifles" was a crack corps, composed of some of the best young men in New Orleans; and the whole corps of "Cha.s.seurs" was of the same material. They did yeomen's service in the four years, and the last one saw very few left of what had long since ceased to be a separate organization. But of all the gallant blood that was shed at the call of the state, none was so widely known as the "Washington Artillery." The best men of Louisiana had long upheld and officered this battalion as a holiday pageant; and, when their merry meetings were so suddenly changed to stern alarums, to their honor be it said, not one was laggard.

In the reddest flashings of the fight, on the dreariest march through heaviest snows, or in the cozy camp under the summer pines, the _guidon_ of the "W.A." was a welcome sight to the soldier of the South--always indicative of cheer and of duty willingly and thoroughly done.

It was very unwillingly that I left New Orleans on a transport, with a battalion of Cha.s.seurs for Pensacola. Styles was to stay behind for the present, and then go on some general's staff; so half the amus.e.m.e.nt of my travel was gone. "The colonel" was _desole_.

"_Such_ a hotel as the St. Charles!" he exclaimed, with tears in his voice--"such soups. Ah! my boy, after the war I'll come here to live--yes, sir, to live! It's the only place to get a dinner. Egad, sir, out of New Orleans _n.o.body_ cooks!"

I suggested comfort in the idea of red snapper at Pensacola.

"Red fish is good in itself. Egad, I think it _is_ good," replied the colonel. "But eaten in camp, with a knife, sir--egad, with a knife--off a tin plate! _Pah!_ You've never lived in camp." And in a hollow, oracular whisper, he added: "Wait!"

And they were real models, the New Orleans hotels of those days, and the colonel's commendations were but deserved. In _cuisine_, service and wines, they far surpa.s.sed any on this continent; and for variety of patrons they were unequaled anywhere.

Two distinct sets inhabited the larger ones, as antagonistic as oil and water. The _habitues_, easy, critical to a degree, and particular to a year about their wines, lived on comfortably and evenly, enjoying the very best of the luxurious city, and never having a cause for complaint. The up-river people flocked in at certain seasons by the hundred. They crowded the lobbies, filled the spare bed-rooms, and eat what was put before them, with but little knowledge save that it was French. These were the business men, who came down for a new engagement with a factor, or to rest after the summer on the plantation. One-half of them were terribly busy; the other half having nothing to do after the first day--they always stay a week--and a.s.suming an air of high criticism that was as funny to the knowing ones as expensive to them.

At our hotel, one evening, as favored guests, we found ourselves on an exploring tour with mine host. It ended in the wine-room.

The mysteries of that vaulted chamber were seldom opened to the outer world; and pa.s.sing the _profanum vulgus_ in its first bins, we listened with eager ears and watering mouths to recital of the pedigree and history of the dwellers within.

Long rows of graceful necks, golden crowned and tall, peered over dust and cobwebs of near a generation; bottles aldermanic and plethoric seemed bursting with the h.o.a.rded fatness of the vine; clear, white gla.s.s burned a glowing ruby with the Burgundy; and lean, jaundiced bottles--carefully bedded like rows of invalids--told of rare and priceless Hocks.

From arch to arch our garrulous _cicerone_ leads us, with a heightened relish as we get deeper among his treasures and further away from the daylight.

"There!" he exclaims at last with a great gulp of triumph. "There!

that's _Sherry_, the king of wines! Ninety years ago, the Conde Pesara sent that wine in his own ships. Ninety years ago--and for twenty it has lain in my cellar, never touched but by my own hand"--and he holds up the candle to the shelf, inch deep in dust, while the light seems to dart into the very heart of the amber fluid, and sparkle and laugh back again from the fantastic drapery the spiders had festooned around the bottles. "Yes, all the Pesaras are dead years gone; and only this blood of the vine is left of them."

"But you _don't_ sell that wine!" gasps the colonel. "Egad! you don't sell it to those--people--up stairs!"

"I did _once_"--and mine host sighs. "A great cotton man came down. He was a king on the river--he wanted the best! Money was nothing to him, so I whispered of this, and said twenty dollars the bottle!

And, Colonel, he didn't--_like it!_"

"Merciful heaven!" the colonel waxes wroth.

"So Francois there sent him a bottle of that _Xeres_ in the outer bin yonder--we sell it to you for two dollars the bottle--and he said _that_ was wine!"

But of the other family--who live in an American hurry and eat by steam--was the goblin diner of whom a friend told me in accents of awe.

One day, at the St. Charles, a resident stopped him on the way to their accustomed table:

"Have you seen these people eat?" he asked. "No? Then we'll stop and look. This table is reserved for the up-river men who have little time in the city and make the most of it. While they swallow soup, a nimble waiter piles the nearest dishes around them, without regard to order or quality. They eat fish, roast and fried, on the same plate, swallowing six inches of knife blade at every bolt. Then they draw the nearest pie to them, cut a great segment in it, make three huge arcs therein with as many snaps of their teeth; seize a handful of nuts and raisins and rush away, with jaws still working like a flouring-mill. Ten minutes is their limit for dinner." My friend only smiled. The other adding:

"You doubt it? Here comes a fine specimen; hot, healthy and evidently busy. See, he looks at his watch! I'll bet you a bottle of St. Peray he 'does' his dinner within the ten."

"Done"--and they sat opposite him, watch in hand.

And that wonderful Hoosier dined in seven minutes!

CHAPTER IX.

A CHANGE OF BASE.

Whatever activity and energetic preparation there may have been elsewhere, Pensacola was the first organized camp in the South. General Bragg and his adjutant-general were both old officers, and in the face of the enemy the utmost rigor of discipline prevailed. There had been no active operations on this line, yet; but the Alabama and the Louisiana troops collected--to the number of about nine thousand--had already become soldiers, in all the details of camp life; and went through it in as cheerful a spirit as if they had been born there.

In popular view, both Bragg and Beauregard were on probation as yet; and it was thought that upon the management of their respective operations depended their status in the regular army. All was activity, drill and practice in this camp; and if the army of Pensacola was not a perfectly-disciplined one, the fault certainly was not with its general.

The day we reached camp the President and Secretary of the Navy came down from Montgomery on a special train for an inspection. They were accompanied only by one or two officers, and had a long and earnest conference with General Bragg at his headquarters. After that there was a review of the army; and the then novel sight was made peculiarly effective by surroundings.

On the level, white beach, glistening in the afternoon sun, were drawn up the best volunteer organizations of the South--line upon line, as far as the eye could reach--their bright uniforms, glancing muskets and waving banners giving color to the view. Far in the rear the fringed woods made dim background; while between, regular rows of white tents--laid out in regiments and company streets--dotted the plain.