What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent
a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle.
From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations
border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch
their league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls
of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely
no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on
both banks— standing so close together,
for long distances, that the broad river lying between
the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.
A most home-like and happy-looking region. And
now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great
manor-house, embowered in trees. Here is testimony
of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists
that filed along here half a century ago. Mrs.
Trollope says—
’The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi
continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans;
but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark
and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere
to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary
of looking at them.’
Captain Basil Hall—
’The district of country which lies adjacent
to the Mississippi, in the lower parts of Louisiana,
is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar planters, whose
showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous
slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly
thriving air to the river scenery.
All the procession paint the attractive picture in
the same way. The descriptions of fifty years
ago do not need to have a word changed in order to
exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day—except
as to the ‘trigness’ of the houses.
The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and
many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so
shining white, have worn out their paint and have a
decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of
the war. Twenty-one years ago everything was
trim and trig and bright along the ‘coast,’
just as it had been in 1827, as described by those
tourists.
Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them
with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them
for believing and printing the same. They told
Mrs. Trollope that the alligators—or crocodiles,
as she calls them— were terrible creatures;
and backed up the statement with a blood-curdling
account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept
into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman
and five children. The woman, by herself, would
have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator;
but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children
besides. One would not imagine that jokers of
this robust breed would be sensitive—but
they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand,
and impossible to justify, the reception which the
book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly,
charitable, well-meaning Capt. Basil Hall got.
