Chapter V

There's villany abroad; this letter shall tell you
more.--LOVE'S LABOR LOST.

[Sidenote: NORTHERNERS AND THE MINUTE MEN.]

Nearly every northerner whom I heard of in the South, as suffering from the suspicion of Abolitionism, was really a pro-slavery man, who had been opposing the Abolitionists all his life. I recollect an amusing instance of a man, originally from a radical little town in Massachusetts, who had been domiciled for several years in Mississippi. While in New England, during the campaign after which Mr. Lincoln was elected, he expressed pro-slavery sentiments so odious that he was with difficulty protected from personal violence.

He was fully persuaded in his heart of hearts of the divinity of Slavery; and, I doubt not, willing to fight for it. But his northern birth made him an object of suspicion; and, immediately after the outbreak of Secession, the inexorable Minute Men waited upon him, inviting him, if he wished to save his life, to prepare to quit the State in one hour. He was compelled to leave behind property to the amount of twenty thousand dollars. His case was one of many.

Even from a Rebel standpoint, there was an unpleasant injustice about this. Perhaps Democrats were almost the only northerners now in the South--Republicans and Abolitionists staying away, in the exercise of that discretion which is the better part of valor.

I well remember thinking, as I strolled down to the post-office one evening, with a long letter in my pocket, which gave a minute and bitterly truthful description of the slave auctions:

[Sidenote: A LIVELY DISCUSSION.]

"If the Minute Men were to pounce upon me now, and find this dispatch, no amount of plausible talking could save me. There would be a vacancy on _The Tribune_ staff within the next hour."

But when the message was safely deposited in the letter-box, I experienced a sort of relief in the feeling that if the Rebels were now to mob or imprison me, I should at least have the satisfaction of knowing they were not mistaking souls; and that, if I were forced to emulate Saint Paul in "labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in pains more frequent, in deaths oft," I should, in their code, most richly have earned martyrdom.

NEW ORLEANS, _March 17, 1861_.

Yesterday was a lively day in the Convention. Mr. Bienvenu threw a hot shot into the Secession camp, in the shape of an ordinance demanding a report of the official vote in each parish (county) by which the delegates were elected. This would prove that the popular vote of the State was against immediate Secession by a majority of several hundred. The Convention would not permit such exposure of its defiance of the popular will; and, by seventy-three to twenty-two, refused to consider the question.

A warm discussion ensued, on the ordinance for submitting the "Constitution of the Confederate States of America" to the popular vote, for ratification or rejection. The ablest argument against it was by Thomas J. Semmes, of New Orleans, formerly attorney-general of Louisiana. He is a keen, wiry-looking, spectacled gentleman, who, in a terse, incisive speech, made the best of a bad cause. The pith of his argument was, that Republican Governments are not based upon pure Democracy, but upon what Mr. Calhoun termed "concurring majorities." The voters had delegated full powers to the Convention, which was the "sublimated, concentrated quintessence of the sovereignty of the people."

[Sidenote: BOLDNESS OF UNION MEMBERS.]

The speaker's lip curled with ineffable scorn as he rang the changes upon the words "mere numerical majorities." Just now, this is a favorite phrase with the Rebels throughout the South. Yet they all admit that a majority, even of one vote, in Mississippi or Virginia, justly controls the action of the State, and binds the minority. I wish they would explain why a "mere numerical majority" is more oppressive in a collection of States than in a single commonwealth.

Mr. Add Rozier, of New Orleans, in a bold speech, advocated submitting the constitution to the people. On being asked by a member--"Did you vote for the Secession ordinance several weeks ago?" he replied, emphatically:--

"No; and, so help me God, I never will!"

A spontaneous outburst of applause from the lobby gave an index of the stifled public sentiment. Mr. Rozier charged that the Secessionists knew they were acting against the popular will, and dared not appeal to the people. Until the Montgomery constitution should become the law of the land, he utterly spurned it, spat upon it, trampled it under his feet.

Mr. Christian Roselius, also of this city, advocated the ordinance with equal boldness and fervor. He insisted that it was based on the fundamental principle of Republicanism--that this Convention was no Long Parliament to rule Louisiana without check or limit; and he ridiculed with merciless sarcasm Mr. Semmes's theory of the "sublimated, concentrated quintessence of the sovereignty of the people."

The inexorable majority here cut off debate, calling the previous question, and defeated the ordinance by a vote of seventy-three to twenty-six.

This body is a good specimen of the Secession Oligarchy. It appointed, from its own members, the Louisiana delegates to the Convention of all the seceded States which framed the Montgomery Constitution, and now it proposes to pass finally upon their action, leaving the people quite out of sight.

[Sidenote: ANOTHER EXCITING DISCUSSION.]

_March 21._

Another exciting day in the Convention. Subject: "The adoption of the Montgomery Constitution." Five or six Union members fought it very gallantly, and denounced unsparingly the plan of a Cotton Confederacy, and the South Carolina policy of trampling upon the rights of the people. The majority made little attempt to refute these arguments, but some of the angry members glared fiercely upon Messrs. Roselius, Rozier, and Bienvenu, who certainly displayed high moral and physical courage. It is easy for you in the North to denounce Secession; but to oppose it here, as those gentlemen did, requires more nerve than most men possess.

The speech of Mr. Roselius was able and bitter. This was not a constitution; it was merely a league--a treaty of alliance. It sprung from an audacious, unmitigated oligarchy. It was a retrogression of six hundred years in the science of government. We were told (here the speaker's sarcasm of manner was ludicrous and inimitable, drawing shouts of laughter even from the leading Secessionists) that this body represented the "sublimated, concentrated quintessence of the sovereignty of the people!"

He supposed that Cæsar, when he crossed the Rubicon--Augustus, when he overthrew the Roman Republic--Cromwell, when he broke up the Long Parliament--Bonaparte, when he suppressed the Council of Five Hundred at the point of the bayonet--Louis Napoleon, when he violated his oath to the republic, and ascended the imperial throne--were each the "sublimated, concentrated quintessence of the sovereignty of the people."

[Sidenote: SECESSION IN A NUTSHELL.]

Like the most odious tyrannies of history, it preserved the forms of liberty; but its spirit was crushed out. The Convention from which this creature crept into light had imitated the odious government of Spain--the only one in the world taxing exports--by levying an export duty upon cotton. He was surprised that the Montgomery legislators failed to introduce a second Spanish feature--the Inquisition. One was as detestable as the other.

Mr. Roselius concluded in a broken voice and with great feeling. His heart grew sad at this overthrow of free institutions. The Secession leaders had dug the grave of republican liberty, and we were called upon to assist at the funeral! He would have no part in any such unhallowed business.

Mr. Rozier, firm to the last, now offered an amendment:

That in adopting the Montgomery Constitution, "the sovereign
State of Louisiana _does expressly reserve the right to
withdraw from the Union created by that Constitution,
whenever, in the judgment of her citizens, her paramount
interests may require it_."

This, of course, is Secession in a nutshell--the fundamental principle of the whole movement. But the leaders refused to take their own medicine, and tabled the proposition without discussion.

Mr. Bienvenu caused to be entered upon the journal his protest against the action of the Convention, denouncing it as an ordinance which "strips the people of their sovereignty, reduces them to a state of vassalage, and places the destinies of the State, and of the new Republic, at the mercy of an uncommissioned and irresponsible oligarchy."

The final vote was then taken, and resulted in one hundred and one yeas to seven nays; so "the Confederate Constitution" is declared ratified by the State of Louisiana.

[Sidenote: DESPOTIC THEORIES OF THE REBELS.]

_March 25._

The Revolutionists can not be charged with any lack of frankness. _The Delta_, lamenting that the Virginia Convention will not take that State out of the Union, predicts approvingly that "some Cromwellian influence will yet disperse the Convention, and place the Old Dominion in the Secession ranks." _De Bow's Review_, a leading Secession oracle, with high pretensions to philosophy and political economy, says, in its current issue:

"All government begins with usurpation, and is continued by
force. Nature puts the ruling elements uppermost, and the
masses below, and subject to those elements. Less than this
is not a government. The right to govern resides with a very
small minority, and the duty to obey is inherent with the
great mass of mankind."

To-day's _Crescent_ discusses the propriety of admitting northern States into the Southern Confederacy, "when they find out, as they soon will, that they can not get along by themselves." It is quite confident that they will, ere long, beg admission--but predicts for them the fate of the Peri, who

----"At the gate
Of Eden stood, disconsolate,
And wept to think her recreant race
Should e'er have lost that glorious place."

They must not be permitted to enter. Upon this point it is inexorable. It will permit no compunctious visitings of nature to shake its fell purpose.

[Sidenote: THE NORTHWEST TO JOIN THEM.]

I know all this sounds vastly like a joke; but _The Crescent_ is lugubriously in earnest. In sooth, these Rebels are gentlemen of magnificent expectations. "Sir," remarked one of them, a judge, too, while conversing with me this very day, "in seven years, the Southern Confederacy will be the greatest and richest nation on earth. We shall have Cuba, Central America, Mexico, and every thing west of the Alleghanies. We are the natural market of the northwestern States, and they are bound to join us!"

Think of that, will you! Imagine Father Giddings, Carl Schurz, and Owen Lovejoy--the stanch Republican States of Wisconsin, Michigan, and even young Kansas--whose infant steps to Freedom were over the burning plowshare and through the martyr's blood--knocking for admission at the door of a Slave Confederacy! Is not this the very ecstasy of madness?

_March 26._

That virtuous and lamented body, the Louisiana Convention, after a very turbulent session to-day, has adjourned until the 1st of November.

_The Crescent_ is exercised at the presence here of "correspondents of northern papers, who indite _real falsehoods and lies_ as coolly as they would eat a dinner at the Saint Charles." _The Crescent's_ rhetoric is a little limping; but its watchfulness and patriotism are above all praise. The matter should certainly be attended to.

[Sidenote: THE SWAMP--A TRIP THROUGH LOUISIANA.]

We are still enjoying the delights of summer. The air is fragrant with daffodils, violets, and roses, the buds of the sweet olive and the blossoms of the orange. I have just returned from a ride through the swamp--that great cesspool of this metropolis, which generates, with the recurrence of summer, the pestilence that walketh in darkness.

It is full of sights strange to northern eyes. The stagnant pools of black and green water harmonize with the tall, ghastly dead trees, from whose branches depend long fleeces of gray Spanish moss, with the effect of Gothic architecture. It is used in lounges and mattresses; but when streaming from the branches, in its native state, reminds one of the fantastic term which the Choctaw Indians apply to leaves--"tree-hair."

The weird dead trunks, the moss and the water, contrast strikingly with the rich, bright foliage of the deciduous trees just glowing into summer life. The balmy air makes physical existence delicious, and diffuses a luxurious languor through the system. Remove your hat, close your eyes, and its strong current strokes your brow lovingly and nestles against your cheek like a pillow.

* * * * *

During the last week in March, I went by the New Orleans and Great Northern Railway to Jackson, Mississippi, where the State Convention was in session.

There is not in Louisiana a hill two hundred feet high. Along the railroad, smooth, grassy everglades give place to gloomy swamps, dark with the gigantic cypress and the varnished leaves of the laurel.

On the plantations, the white one-story cabins of the negroes stood in long double rows, near the ample porched and balconied residences of the planters. Young sugar-cane, resembling corn two or three weeks old, was just peering through the ground. Noble live-oaks waved their drooping boughs above the fields. The Pride-of-China tree was very abundant about the dwellings. It produces a berry on which the birds eagerly feed, though its juice is said to intoxicate them. As they do not wear revolvers or bowie-knives, it is rather a harmless form of dissipation.

[Sidenote: LIFE IN THE CITY OF JACKSON.]

Jackson was not a paradise for a man of my vocation. Containing four or five thousand people, it was one of those delightful villages, calling themselves cities, of which the sunny South by no means enjoys a monopoly--where everybody knows everybody's business, and where, upon the advent of a stranger, the entire community resolves itself into a Committee of the Whole to learn who he is, where he came from, and what he wants.

In a great metropolis, espionage was easily baffled; but in Jackson, an unknown chiel, who looked capable of "takin' notes," to say nothing of "prentin' 'em," was subject to constant and uncomfortable scrutiny.

Contrasted with the bustle of New Orleans, existence seemed an unbroken seventh-day rest, though a dire certainty possessed me, that were my errand suspected, e'en Sunday would shine no Sabbath day for me.

Some months later, a refugee, who had resided there, pictured vividly to me the indignant and bewildered astonishment of the Jacksonians, when, through a stray copy of _The Tribune_, they learned that one of its correspondents had not only walked with them, talked with them, and bought with them, but, less scrupulous than Shylock, had been ready to eat with them, drink with them, and pray with them.

At this time the Charleston papers and some northern journals declared _The Tribune's_ southern correspondence fictitious, and manufactured at the home office. To remove that impression touching my own letters, I wrote, on certain days, the minutest records of the Convention, and of affairs in Jackson, which never found their way into the local prints.

Mournfully metropolitan was Jackson in one respect--the price of board at its leading hotel. The accommodations were execrable; but I suppose we were charged for the unusual luxury of an unctuous Teutonic landlord, who bore the formidable patronymic of H-i-l-z-h-e-i-m-e-r!

"----Ph[oe]bus, what a name,
To fill the speaking-trump of future fame!"

[Sidenote: REPORTING THE MISSISSIPPI CONVENTION.]

The Convention was discussing the submission of the Montgomery Constitution to the people. The chief clerk, with whom I formed a chance acquaintance, kindly invited me to a chair beside his desk, and as I sat facing the members, explained to me their capacity, views, and antecedents. Whether an undue inquisitiveness seemed to him the distinguishing quality of the New Mexican mind, he did not declare; but once he asked me abruptly if I was connected with the press? With the least possible delay, I disabused his mind of that peculiarly unjust misapprehension.

After a long discussion, the Convention, by a vote of fifty-three to thirty-two, refused to submit the Constitution to the people, and ratified it in the name of Mississippi. Seven Union members could not be induced to follow the usual practice of making the action unanimous, but to the last steadfastly refused their adherence.