Life on the Mississippi
into the bank and got another shot gun. About this time Joseph A. Mabry,
Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing down the street, unseen by
O'Connor until within forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the
shot taking effect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body
near the heart. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired, the
load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry fell
pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly O'Connor fell dead
without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise, but fell back dead. The whole
tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the three spoke
after he was shot. General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body.
A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and
another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their clothing
pierced by buckshot. The affair caused great excitement, and Gay Street
was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe
were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don
Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Will Mabry was
killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was President
of the Mechanics' National Bank here, and was the wealthiest man in the
State.--_Associated Press Telegram_.
One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville, Tenn.,
Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that his
brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him. Burton, it
seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. The
Professor armed himself with a double-barreled shot gun, started out in
search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon,
and blew his brains out. The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the
Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community;
knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public
sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself.
About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreled about a
girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile
them, but had their labor for their pains. On the 24th the young men
met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the
other an ax. The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but
it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his
club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man.
About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians, clerks in
a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,' came to blows.
Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes; Roads demanded an
apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was
inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and
it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that
butcher-knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the
suggestion; the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in
his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. If Dick has been arrested,
the news has not reached us. He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are
told by a Staunton correspondent of the _Philadelphia Press_ that 'every
effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--_Extracts From The Public
Journals_.]}
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.
CHAPTER 41
The Metropolis of the South
THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were
unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped
in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms
through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under
his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New
Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim,
the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a
dish--and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down
upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that
frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.
The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city
looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of
Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the
war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed
with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a
sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned
into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a
height had the war news sent up the price of the article.
The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as
many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not
altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.
The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased
in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The
dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep,
trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of
reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the
sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads;
the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as
dusty-looking as ever.
Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,
with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying
street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas
crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.
Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad,
general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the
cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-seeing,
and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is
true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine
enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like
a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America
may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe,
has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--to have had no great
fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case,
I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical
improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this
in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace
before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city
in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty,
elegance, and tastefulness.
However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When
completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful
building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams
or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will
be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has
been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate
eye and taste; a _suggester_, so to speak.
The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious,
long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the
city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep.
Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature.
The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent
disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times
a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never
stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have
been made; and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during
the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one
of the healthiest cities in the Union. There's plenty of ice now for
everybody, manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially,
and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our
visit, it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking.
The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New
York, and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in
Canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch
of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city
now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style
pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is
everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The
newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they
are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news,
let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack-grinding, but
literature. As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it
may be mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained