Four Years in Rebel Capitals Part 6

"Hurrah for Muggins!"

Spring Chicken stopped, balanced himself on his heels and announced with much dignity--

"Sir, _I_ am Muggins!"

"Didn't know you, Muggins," responded the shouter, who fortunately had not taken fighting whisky. "Beg pardon, Muggins! Hurrah for Peac.o.c.k!

_Yah--a-h!_"

"See here, my good fellow, I'm Peac.o.c.k!" repeated Spring Chicken.

"The thunder you are! You can't be two people!"

"Sir!" responded Spring Chicken, with even greater dignity, "I do not--_hic_--desire to argue with you. I am Peac.o.c.k!"

The man laughed. "The Peac.o.c.k I mean is a northern man----"

"_I'm_ a northern man," yelled the now irate Spring Chicken. "Curse you, sir! what are my principles to you? I'll cut your ear off!" And it was this peaceful proposition that attracted our attention, in time to prevent any trouble with the ugly knife he drew from his back.

Spring Chicken had remained pa.s.sive during the recital of the more sober worldling. Sundry muttered oaths had sufficed him until it was over, when he made the lucid explanation:

"Reas'l didl't--_hic_--dam decoy--bet ol red--ev'ry cent--_hic_!"

This the worldling translated and the murder was out. When we lost sight of the boys on the Southern Republic, they had ordered wine. At dinner they had more; and--glowing therewith, as they sat over their cigars on the gallery--did not "stop their ears," but, on the contrary, "listed to the voice of the charmer." When the stool pigeon once more stood in the doorway, rattling his half dollars, they followed him into the den of the tiger.

"Faro" went against them; "odd-and-even" was worse; _rouge-et-noir_ worst of all; and at night they were sober and dead broke, an unpleasant but not infrequent phase of boat life.

"Didl't have aly wash to spout," remarked Spring Chicken, with his head under his arm.

"Yes--we owed our wine bill," continued the middie, whose worldliness decreased as he got sober, "and our trunk was in p.a.w.n to the n.i.g.g.e.r we owed a quarter for taking care of it. So as soon as the boat touched, I ran for'ard and jumped off, while he waited to keep the things in sight till I came back."

"So he was in p.a.w.n, too, egad!" said the colonel.

"Tha.s.so, ol' c.o.c.k!" hiccoughed Spring Chicken.

"And when I got the money and we went up town, we met the cussed decoy again, and we were fools enough to go again----"

"Williz molley--d.a.m.niz--_hic_--eyes!" interpolated the other.

"----And we got broke again--and this fellow that hollowed Muggins looked like the decoy, but he wasn't. That's the whole truth, Mr.

Styles."

"Mussput--_hic_--fi dollus on-jack?" remarked Spring Chicken. "See yer, Styse--o'boy, damfattolman--Con'l is!" and he curled from the lounge to the floor and slept peacefully.

"My young friend," remarked Styles gravely to the middie, as we tucked the insensible Spring Chicken into his berth--"If you want to gamble, you'll do it--so I don't advise you. But these amphibious beasts are dangerous; so in future play with gentlemen and let them alone."

"And, my boy," said the colonel, enunciating _his_ moral lesson--"gambling is bad enough, egad! but any man is lost--yes, sir, lost!--who will drink mint--_after dinner!_"

With which great moral axioms we retired and slept until our steamer reached the "Queen City of the South."

CHAPTER VIII.

NEW ORLEANS, THE CRESCENT CITY.

At a first glimpse, New Orleans of those days was anything but a picturesque city. Built upon marshy flats, below the level of the river and protected from inundation by the Levee, her antique and weathered houses seemed to cower and cl.u.s.ter together as though in fear.

But for a long time, "The Crescent City" had been at the head of commercial importance--and the desideratum of direct trade had been more nearly filled by her enterprising merchants than all others in the South. The very great majority of the wealthy population was either Creole, or French; and their connection with European houses may account in some measure for that fact. The coasting trade at the war was heavy all along the Gulf sh.o.r.e; the trade with the islands a source of large revenue, and there were lines and frequent private enterprises across the ocean.

For many reasons, it was then believed New Orleans could never become a great port. Foremost, the conformation of the Delta, at the mouth of the river, prevented vessels drawing over fifteen feet--at most favorable tides--from crossing either of the three bars; and the most practical and scientific engineers, both of civil life and the army, had long tried in vain to remedy the defect for longer than a few weeks. Numerous causes have been a.s.signed for the rapid reformation of these bars; the chemical action of the salt upon the vegetable matter in the river water; the rapid deposit of alluvium as the current slackens; and a churning effect produced by the meeting of the channel with the waves of the Gulf. They could not be successfully removed, however, and were a great drawback to the trade of the city; which its location at the mouth of the great water avenue of the whole West, makes more advantageous than any other point in the South.

The river business in cotton, sugar and syrup was, at this time, immense; and the agents of the planters--factor is the generic term--made large fortunes in buying and selling at a merely nominal rate of percentage. The southern planter of _ante-bellum_ days was a man of ease and luxury, careless of business and free to excess with money; and relations between him and his agent were entirely unique.

He had the same factor for years, drawing when he pleased for any amount, keeping open books. When his crop came in, it was s.h.i.+pped to the factor, the money retained--subject to draft--or invested. But it was by no means rare, when reckoning day came, for the advance drafts to have left the planter in debt his whole crop to the factor. In that case it used to cost him a trip to Europe, or a summer at Saratoga only; and he stayed on his plantation and did not cry over the spilt milk, however loudly his ladies may have wailed for the missing _creme-de-la-creme_ of Virginia springs.

The morning after arrival we at last saw "the house;" which, far from being an imposing edifice, was a dingy, small office, just off the Levee, with the dingier sign of "Long, Staple & Middling" over the door. There were a few stalwart negroes basking in the sun about the entrance, sleeping comfortably in the white glare, or showing glancing ivories, in broad grins--each one keeping his s.h.i.+ning cotton hook in full view, like a badge of office. Within was a perfect steam of business, and Staple _pere_ was studying a huge ledger through a pair of heavy gold spectacles--popping orders like fire-crackers, at half a dozen attentive clerks. Long, the senior partner, was in Virginia--and Middling, the junior, was hardly more than an expert foreman of the establishment.

"Happy, indeed, to meet you, sir!--93 of Red River lot, Mr. Edds--Heard of you frequently--Terribly busy time these, sir, partner away--13,094 middlins, for diamond B at 16-1/3, Adams--. We dine at seven, you remember Styles--Don't be in a hurry, sir!--1,642 A.B., page 684, Carter--Good day--See you at seven."

And it was only over the perfect claret, at the emphasized hour, that we discovered Mr. Staple to be a man of fine mind and extensive culture, a hearty sympathizer in the rebellion--into which he would have thrown his last dollar--and one of the most successful men on the Levee. Long, his senior partner, was a western man of hard, keen business sense, who had come to New Orleans fifty years before, a barefooted deck-hand on an Ohio schooner. By shrewdness, dogged industry and some little luck, he made "Long's" the best known and richest house in the South-west, until in the crash of '37 it threatened to topple down forever. Then Mr. Staple came forward with his great credit and large amount of spare capital, saved the house and went into it himself; while Middling, the former clerk of all work, was promoted, for fidelity in the trying times, to a small partners.h.i.+p.

Like all the heavy cotton men of the South, Mr. Staple believed firmly that cotton was king, and that the first steamer into a southern port would bring a French and British minister.

"It's against our interest for the present to do so," he said, confidently; "but my partner and I have advised all our planters to hold their cotton instead of s.h.i.+pping it, that the market may not be glutted when the foreign s.h.i.+ps come in. And, yet, sir, it's coming down now faster than ever. Everybody prefers, in the disorganized state of things, to have ready money for cotton, that in three months' time must be worth from twenty to thirty cents!"

"Hard to believe, sir, isn't it? Yet our planters, looking at things from their own contracted standpoint, think the English and French cabinets will defer recognition of our Government. As for 'the house,'

sir, it will put all it possesses into the belief that they can not prove so blind!"

Like most of the wealthy men in New Orleans, Mr. Staple had a charmingly located villa a mile from the lake and drove out every evening, after business hours, to pa.s.s the night.

"Not that I fear the fever," he explained. "What strangers regard as such certain death is to us scarce more than the agues of a North Carolina flat. 'Yellow Jack' is a terrible scourge, indeed, to the lower cla.s.ses, and to those not acclimatized. The heavy deposits of vegetable drift from the inundations leave the whole country for miles coated four or five inches deep in creamy loam. This decomposes most rapidly upon the approach of hot weather, and the action of the dews, when they begin to fall upon it, causes the _miasmata_ to rise in dense and poisonous mists. Now these, of course, are as bad in country--except in very elevated localities--as in town; but they are only _dangerous_ in crowded sections, or to the enervated const.i.tutions that could as ill resist any other disease."

"You astonish me, indeed," I answered. "For I have always cla.s.sed yellow fever and cholera as twin destroyers. They must be, from such seasons as you have every few years."

"So all strangers think. But to the resident, who from choice, or business engagements, has pa.s.sed one summer in the city, 'Jack' loses his terrors. The symptoms are unmistakable. Slight nausea and pain in the back, headache and a _soupcon_ of chill. The workingman feels these. He can not spare the time or the doctor's bill, perhaps. He poohs the matter--it will pa.s.s off--and goes to work. The delay and the sun set the disease; and he is brought home at night--or staggers to the nearest hospital--to die of the black vomit in thirty-six hours.

Hence, the great mortality.

"Now, I feel these pains, I at once recognize the fever, go right home, bathe feet and back in hot water, take a strong aperient, put mustard on my stomach and pile on the blankets. In an hour I am bathed in sweat till maybe it drips through the mattress. I put on another blanket, take a hot draught with an opiate, and go to sleep. It is not a pleasant thing, with the thermometer at ninety degrees in the shade; but when I wake in the morning, I have saved an attack of fever."

This regimen was constantly repeated to me. In the district crowded with the poorer cla.s.ses, who are dependent on their daily labor for their daily bread, the fever stalks gaunt and noisome, marking his victims and seldom in vain. All day long, and far into the night in bad seasons, the low, dull rumble of the dead-cart echoed through the narrow streets; and at the door of every squalid house was the plain pine box that held what was left of some one of its loved inmates. Yet through this carnival of death, steadily and fearlessly, the better cla.s.s of workers walk; not dreading the contagion and secure in their harness of precaution.

To sleep in the infected atmosphere in sickly quarters was thought more dangerous; but any business man considered himself safe, if he only breathed the poisonous air in the daytime. The resident physicians, in their recent treatment, feel the disease quite in their hands, when no other foe than the fever is to be combated. Any preceding excess of diet, drink or excitement is apt to aggravate it; but in ordinary cases, where proper remedies are taken in season, nine out of ten patients recover.

Otherwise, this ratio is just reversed; and in the working cla.s.ses--especially strangers--to take the fever, in bad years, is to die. The utmost efforts of science, the most potent drugs--even the beautiful and selfless devotion of the "Howard a.s.sociation" and its like--availed nothing in the wrestle with the grim destroyer, when he had once fairly clutched his hold. And in the crowded quarters, where the air was poison without the malaria, his footing was too sure for mortal to prevail against him.

New Orleans was, at this time, divided into two distinct towns in one corporation--the French and American. In the one, the French language was spoken altogether for social and business purposes, and even in the courts. The theaters were French, the cafes innocent of English, and, as Hood says, the "very children speak it." Many persons grow up in this quarter--or did in years back--who never, to their old age, crossed to the American town or spoke one word of English. In the society of the old town, one found a miniature--exact to the photograph--of Paris. It was jealously exclusive, and even the most petted beaux of the American quarter deemed it privilege to enter it. A stranger must come with letters of the most urgent kind before he could cross its threshold. All the etiquette and form of the _ancien regime_ obtained here--the furniture, the dress, the cookery, the dances were all French.