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 th 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 schoolstress 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 wav 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 outcry; 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. Tha 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

compelled to discontinue the grocery business, particularly for the reason that we have now no goods for sale, except a little L. F. salt. Persons ordering goods of us must send the cash to fill the order, unless they have money to their credit. Four of our partners and six of our clerks are in the army, and having sold out our stock of goods on credit, we have no money to buy more to be disposed of that way."

A word or two upon the "Thugs" of New Orleans, the party controlling municipal affairs for some years past. New Yorkers are in a position to understand this matter with very little explanation, since the local politics of New Orleans and of New York present the same essential features, the same dire results of the fell principle of universal suffrage. Martin Van Buren predicted it all forty-two years ago, when opposing the admission to the polls of every man out of prison who was twenty-one years of age. He said then, what we now know to be true, that universal suffrage, in large commercial cities, would make those cities a dead weight upon the politics of the states to which they belong; would repel from locai politics the men who ought to control them; would consign the cities to the tender mercies of the Dexterous Spoiler,* who could only be dethroned by bloody revolution. Is it not so? Who is master of certain great cities but Dexterous Spoiler, supported by the dollars of Head Jew?

It must be so under universal suffrage. Here we have, say, ten thousand ignorant voters; ignorant, many of them, of the very language of the country; ignorant, most of them, of the art of reading it. These ten thousand are thirsty men, hangers-on of our six or seven thousand groggeries, the keepers of which are as completely the minions and servants of Dexterous as though they were in his pay. New Yorkers know why this is so. Here, then, are sixteen or seventeen thousand votes to begin with, as capital-stock and basis of political business. Add to these five thousand of those lazy, thoughtless men in the carpeted spheres of life, who can never be induced to vote at all; some even pluming themselves upon the fact. So there are twenty thousand votes or more, which Dexter ous can, in all cases, and in all weathers, count upon with absolute certainty. Then there are sundry other thousands who can only be got to the polls by moving heaven and earth; which is an ex

* See Mr. Van Buren's argument in Parton's Life of Jackson, ili., 129.

pensive process, involving unlimited Roman candles and endless hirings of the Cooper Institute. The majority of these, in most elections, allow themselves to remain in the scale that weighs down struggling Decency. In a word, our Dexterous Spoiler, by his possession of the ten thousand votes which a justly restricted suffrage would exclude, controls the politics of the city. Probably, the mere exclusion of all voters who can not read would render the politics of cities manageable in the interests of Decency. In the absence of all restriction, the Spoiler must bear sway.

The curse

As in New York, so in New Orleans; only worse. of universal suffrage in New York is mitigated by several circumstances, which have hitherto sufficed to keep anarchy at bay. First, it is still true in New York, that when the issue is distinct and sole between Decency and Spoliation, and there has been the due moving of heaven and earth, the party of Decency can always secure a small majority of the whole number of votes. Secondly, one evening, about fifteen years ago, New York rowdyism fell, weltering in blood, in Astor Place, before the fire of the Seventh regiment. It has known three days of resurrection since, owing to a combination of causes never likely to be again combined. Third, New York has had the supreme happiness of rescuing its police from all control of the Spoiler. The police department has been taken out of politics, and has daily improved ever since, until now there is no better police in the world, and no city where the reign of order is more unbroken-where life and property are more secure. Again: the alliance between the Spoiler and the Banker compels the Spoiler to stop short of attempting the manifestly anarchic. The Spoiler, too, has his moneys and his usances, and values the same.

What New York would have been without its small, safe majority on the side of Decency, without the Astor Place riot, and without the timidity of Wall street, that New Orleans was, for many years before the rebellion; with all evil tendencies accelerated and aggravated by the presence of slavery. New Orleans was the metropolis of the cotton kingdom, the receptacle of its wealth and of its refuse, the theater of its display and the pool of its abominations.

Now, the peculiarity of the cotton kingdom-that which chiefly distinguishes it from the other kingdoms of the earth, is this: In