instruction in the art of war that the truth upon this point should be known and established. The testimony of Lieutenant Weitzel will settle the question in the mind of every officer of the regular army. In a report to General Butler, dated May 5th, 1862, Lieutenant Weitzel says:

"The navy passed the works, but did not reduce them. Fort St. Philip stands, with one or two slight exceptions, to-day without a scratch. Fort Jackson was subjected to a torrent of thirteen-inch and eleven-inch shells during a hundred and forty-four hours. To an inexperienced eye it seems as if this work were badly cut up. It is as strong to-day as when the first shell was fired at it. The rebels did not bomb-proof the citadel; consequently the roof and furring caught fire. This fire, with subsequent shells, ruined the walls so much that I am tearing it down and removing the debris to the outside of the work. Three shot-furnaces and three cisterns were destroyed. At several points the breast-hight walls were knocked down. One angle of the magazine on the north side of the postern was knocked off. Several shells went through the flank casemate arches (which were not covered with earth), and a few through the other casemate arches (where two or more struck in the same place). At several points in the casemates, the thirteen-inch shell would penetrate through the earth over the arches, be stopped by the latter, then explode, and loosen a patch of brick work in the souffoir of the arch about three feet in diameter and three-quarters of a brick deep, at its greatest depth.

“To resist an assault, and even regular approaches, it is as strong to-day as ever it was. I conducted a land force, after the navy had passed up the river by the way of the gulf, through a bayou and canal which were familiar to me, to a point on the river about five miles above the works, and in plain sight of the rebels, but out of range. The garrison of Fort Jackson seeing themselves completely surrounded, became demoralized, three hundred mutinied and deserted in a body, and were taken by a picket which I had posted as soon as I landed on the west bank of the river, from Cyprien's canal to Allen's store. The commanding officer the next day surrendered both works. He had provisions in them for four months, and ammunition in abundance.

"They had about eighty heavy guns mounted, in all, at Fort Jackson, and about forty at Fort St. Philip. All of them were the

old guns picked up at the different works around the city, with the exception of about six ten-inch columbiads, and two one-hundredpounder rifled guns (the latter of their own manufacture and quito a formidable gun). They had done nothing to the lower battery at Fort Jackson in the way of building the breast-heights and laying the platforms. Nearly all the platforms are at the works. They had only six guns in the lower battery at Fort Jackson, only fourteen guns in casemate at the same fort (all smooth bore). They had seventeen guns in the upper battery and eighteen in the lower battery at Fort St. Philip (all the old guns), and only five in the main work.

"The fleet suffered most from the two batteries at Fort St. Philip. They being so low the fleet fired over them, and they in their turn repeatedly hulled the vessels.

"The fire on both sides, as a general thing, was too high. The fleet followed the advice I gave them, to run in right close, and a great many of the officers have already thanked me for my advice. I was with the fleet during the bombardment, giving the flag-officer and others the benefit of my knowledge of the works, and during the engagement was on board the armed transport Saxon, in the bend of the river just opposite Fort Jackson, and had a good view of the engagement.

"In conclusion I beg leave to say, that you have every reason to be proud of the works; and had they had their full armament (the new one), with the proper amount of shell-guns, that fleet would never have passed them. The chain was removed two nights before the attack, without any loss. It was a grand humbug."

If the splendid daring of Captain Farragut and the fleet deprived General Butler of his lieutenant-generalship, it is but just to him and the army to declare, that it was the prompt and unexpected landing of the troops in the rear of St. Philip that caused the mutiny which led to the surrender. Fighting wins the laurel, and justly wins it, for fighting is the true and final test of soldierly merit: but a maneuver which accomplishes results without fighting-that also merits recognition.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE PANIC IN NEW ORLEANS.

NEW ORLEANS did not rush headlong into secession in the Charleston manner. The doctrine, that if Mr. Lincoln was elected the nation must be broken up, was not popular there during the canvass of 1860; it was, on the contrary, scouted by the ablest newspapers, and the influential men. In 1856, the city had given a majority of its votes to Mr. Fillmore; in 1860, Bell and Everett were the favorite candidates. Bell, 5,215; Douglas, 2,996; Breckinridge, 2,646; Lincoln, 0. The fact was manifest to all reflecting men, that the two states which derived from the Union the greatest sum-total of direct pecuniary benefit were Massachusetts and Louisiana.

The great sugar interest, the Creole sugar-planters, who held the best of the cultivated parts of the state, stood by the Union last of all. Thomas J. Durant, an eminent lawyer of New Orleans, one of the half dozen men of position who have never deserted the cause of their country, says, in a letter to General Butler:

"The protection and favor which were enjoyed by these men under the government of the United States, and the benefit they derived from their possession of the home market for their product, to the utter exclusion of all foreign competition, was thoroughly understood by them. They are men retaining all the peculiarities of a French ancestry: not apt in what is called business, yet fond of gain; generous, high-spirited, and averse to the active strife of commerce as well as of politics. They never concerned themselves too eagerly in the contests of party, and no equal body of men in the South looked upon secession with so much reluctance, or were so unwilling to be dragged into it, as the sugar-planters of Louisiana. It is true, they at last yielded to the moral epidemic which overspread the South; and when the young men, under the excitement of martial enthusiasm and a mistaken view of the interests of their section, went to the war, their feelings became, to a certain extent,

enlisted on the side of the Confederacy. But no prominent officer in the Confederate army has come from the ranks of the sugar-planters of Louisiana of French descent, and, indeed, only one from the sugar-planters at all-Brigadier-General Richard Taylor, son of the late president of the United States."

The first gun fired in a war, carries conviction to wavering minds. Every man in the world either is a secessionist, or could become one, who holds slaves, or who could hold slaves, with an easy conscience, or who can contemplate the fact with indifference that slaves are held. In this great controversy, the United States has not one hearty and perfectly trustworthy adherent on earth, who is not now an abolitionist. Its actual and possible enemies are all who do not detest slavery, whether they be called secessionists, copperheads, or Englishmen.

So the "moral epidemic" spread in New Orleans, and it became nearly unanimous for secession. If the majority for secession was small in the city, it sufficed to make secession master. Union men were banished by law; Union sentiments suppressed by violence. I know not whether the horrid tale of the New England schoolmistress stripped naked in Lafayette Square, and tarred and feathered amid the jeers of the mob, is true or false. I presume it is false; but the fact remains, that neither man nor woman could utter a syllable for the Union in New Orleans in the hearing of the public, and live. A very few persons of pre-eminent standing in the city, like the noble Durant, and a few old men, who could not give up their country and the flag they had fought under in the days of their youth, were tolerated even with ostentation-so firm in the saddle did secession feel itself.

Even the foreign consuls were devoted secessionists; all except Señor Ruiz, the Mexican consul. Reichard, the consul of Prussia, raised a battalion in the city, and led it to Virginia, where he rose to the rank of brigadier-general, having left in New Orleans, as acting-consul, Mr. Kruttsmidt, his partner, who had married a daughter of the rebel secretary of war. The other consuls, connected with secession by ties of business or matrimony, or both, were among the most zealous adherents of the Confederate cause. This is an important fact, when we consider that two-thirds of the business men were of foreign birth, and a vast proportion of the whole population were of French, Spanish, and German descent.

The double blockade-blockade above and blockade belowstruck death to the commerce of New Orleans, a city created and sustained by commerce alone. How wonderful was that commerce! The crescent bend of the river upon which the city stands, a way ing line seven miles in extent, used to display the commercial activity of the place to striking advantage. Cotton ships, eight or ten deep; a forest of masts, denser than any but a tropical forest; steamboats in bewildering numbers, miles of them, puffing and hissing, arriving, departing, and threatening to depart, with great clangor of bells and scream of whistles; cotton-bales piled high along the levee, as far as the eye could reach; acres and acres covered with hogsheads of sugar; endless flotillas of flat-boats, market-boats, and timber-rafts; gangs of negroes at work upon every part of the levee, with loud chorus and outery; and a constant crowd of clerks, merchants, sailors, and bandanna-crowned negro women selling coffee, cakes, and fruit. It was a spectacle without parallel on the globe, because the whole scene of the city's industry was presented in one view.

What a change was wrought by the mere announcement of the blockade! The cotton ships disappeared; the steamboats were laid away in convenient bayous, or departed up the river to return no more. The cotton mountains vanished; the sugar acres were cleared. The cheerful song of the negroes was seldom heard, and grass grew on the vacant levee. The commerce of the city was dead; and the forces hitherto expended in peaceful and victorious industry, were wholly given to waging war upon the power which had called that industry into being, defended it against the invader, protected and nourished it for sixty years, guiltless of wrong. The young men enlisted in the army, compelling the reluctant stevedores, impressing with violence the foreign born. At the Exchange, books were opened for the equipment of privateers. For the first six months there was much running of the blockade, one vessel in three escaping, and the profit of the third paying for the two lost. Hollins was busy in getting ready a paltry fleet of armed vessels for the destruction of the blockaders, and there was rare hammering upon rams and iron-clad steamboats. Seventeen hundred families meanwhile were daily supplied at the "free market." Look into one wholesale grocery store through the following advertisement :

"We give notice to our friends generally, that we have been