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extracted from
New York Times, September 14, 1853, submitted by Harry Dodsworth
| 1852 image courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, used to illustrate,
but not original to the New York Times item
Impressions
of New Orleans, 1853
To mark
the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, here is part of a
column about
New Orleans from the New York Times, September
14, 1853. The second part of the column (as long again as this)
concerned the
beauty of the "free women of slight African blood" and the details of taking
them as mistresses!
While I think of New Orleans as a blend of English and French, I was surprised
to read of the Irish and German influences. According to the Cabildo website,
New Orleans was the second biggest immigration port in the United States, after
New York, before the
Civil War.
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Cabildo Online Project http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cab8.htm
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I have copied this as accurately as I can but there
were some errors
in the printed text.
— Harry Dodsworth
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New York Times, September 14, 1853, page 2 |
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THE SOUTH
Letters on the Production, Industry and Resources of the Slave States.
NUMBER THIRTY EIGHT
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE N. Y. DAILY TIMES
First impression of New Orleans...Curious variety of the population..
The free people of slight African blood...Prostitution, &c. |
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I was awakened by the loud ringing of a hand-bell, and turning
out of my berth, dressed by dim lamp-light. The waiters were serving
coffee and collecting baggage in the cabin; and upon stepping outside,
I found that the boat was made fast to a long wharf, or wooden jetty,
and the passengers were going ashore.
 A ticket for New Orleans was handed me as I crossed the gang-plank.
There was a rail-track and a train of cars upon the wharf, but no locomotive;
and I got my baggage checked and walked toward the shore. It was early
day-light, but a fog rested on the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, and
only the nearest point of land could be discerned. There were many
small buildings erected on piles over the water, bathing-houses, bowling-alleys,
and billiard rooms, with other indications of a place of holiday resort,
and on reaching the shore, I found a village quietly slumbering. The
first house had a garden about it made of complex alleys, and plats,
and tables, and arbors, and rustic seats, and cut shrubs, and shells,
and statues, and vases; and a lamp was still feebly burning in a large
lantern over the
entrance gate.
I was thinking how like it was to a rural restaurant in France or Germany, when
the locomotive backed, screaming hoarsely, down the jetty, and I returned to
get my seat. Off we puffed, past the restaurant, through the village; - the name
of which I did not inquire, everybody near me seemed so cold and cross, and I
have not learned in since - and through the little village whatever it was, of
white houses, we rushed, and from among them into the midst of a dense gray cypress
swamp. For three or four rods each side of the track, the trees had all been
felled and removed, leaving a dreary strip of swamp covered with stumps. This
was bounded and intersected by broad ditches or narrow and shallow canals, with
a great number of small punts in them, which I supposed were used for shrimp
catching.
So it continued for two or three miles; then the ground became drier, there was
an abrupt termination of the gray barrier of wood, and I looked far over a flat
country, skirted still, and finally bounded in the back-ground with the swamp
forest. There were scattered irregularly over it a few low houses, one story
high, and all with verandahs before them. At length a broad road struck in by
the side of the track; houses of the same description became more frequent, fronting
upon it. Soon it was a village, smoke ascending from breakfast fires, windows
and doors opening, steps swept off, a baker's wagon passing, broad streets little
built upon breaking off at right angles, and with, what was strange, tall poles
at the corners from the tops of which, connecting them, were ropes with blocks
and halyards to swing great square lanterns over the middle of the street. Just
as in France, I said to myself; and turning to one of my cold and cross companions,
a man wrapped in a loose coat with a cowl over his head, I asked the name of
the village for my geography was all at fault. I had expected to be landed at
New Orleans by the boat, and had not been informed of the railroad arrangement,
and had no idea in what part of Louisiana
we might be. "Ner Anglishe" was the gruff reply. There was a sign, "Cafe du Faubourg;" putting
my head out and looking forward, I saw that it was indeed a Faubourg, and we
were thundering into New Orleans. We reached the terminus, which was surrounded
with fiacres in exactly the style of Paris.
"To the hotel St. Charles" I said to a driver, confused with the loud French
and quiet English of the crowd about me; "Oui, yer 'onor, " was the equally cosmopolitan
reply of my
evidently Irish young fellow-citizen. He obtained another "fare" and away we
rattled, through narrow, dirty streets, grimy, old, stucco walls, high round
arched windows and doors with entrecols between the first and second stories;
balconies and French signs ten to one of English, and with occasional odd bits
of other tongues, "Vins et liqueurs;" "Vins tres vieux," "Kossuth Coffee House," "A
la fee aux roses;" "Depot de graines pour les oiseux," "Chambres a louer;" "Gasthaus
zur Rhein platz," "Vin, Biere en detail," "To LOYANTE Intelligence office only
for the girls and
women answering ho, On demande 50 homes pour le
Chemin de Fer," etc.
The other fare, whom I had not ventured to speak to, was set down at a salle
pour le vente des somethings, and soon after the fiacre turned out upon the river
bank, a broad place covered with bales of cotton, and casks of sugar, and weighing
scales, and disclosing an astonishing number of steamboats lying all close together,
with their heads in the same direction, run diagonally upon the bank, in a line,
the other end of which was lost in the mist, which still hung upon the river.
Now the signs became English, and the new brick buildings American. We turned
into a broad street, in which shutters were being taken from great glass store-fronts,
and clerks were exercising their
ingenuity in the display of dry goods.
In the middle of the broad street there was an open space, equal perhaps to one-third
its width, of waste ground, looking as if the corporation had not been able to
pave the whole of it at once, and had left this interval to be attended to when
the treasury was better filled; whatever the purpose, it had a most shabby and
poverty-stricken appearance.
Crossing through a gap in this waste, we entered a narrow street of high buildings,
French, Spanish, and English signs, the latter predominating and at the second
block I was landed before the great, white, stuccoed, Grecian portico of the
stupendous, tasteless, ill-contrived and inconvenient
St. Charles Hotel.
After a bath and breakfast I went out to look at the town. There is no city in
America so interesting to the traveler, or in which one can stroll with more
pleasure and with so long-coming weariness as New Orleans. I doubt if there is
a city in the world where the resident population has been so divided in its
origin, or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits, manners, and
moral codes of the citizens, Although this hinders civic enterprise and prevents
the esprit d'corps, and public spirit, which the peculiar situation of the city
greatly demands to be directed to the means of cleanliness, convenience, comfort,
and health; it also gives a greater scope to the working of individual enterprise,
taste, genius, and conscience, so that nowhere are the higher qualities of man,
as displayed in generosity, hospitality, benevolence, and courage, better developed,
or the lower qualities, likening him to a beast, less interfered with by law
or the action
of public opinion.
There is no place where a stranger, no matter what
his predilections, could be so sure of finding society to suit him as in New
Orleans. You meet in succession
Englishmen, staid, awkward, but reliable and true good fellows; Frenchmen, graceful,
impulsive, whimsical; every variety of European grim, melancholy refugees; startling,
wild, eccentric professors, teachers and artists; severe, animated, smoothly-dressed
commercial men; uneasy questioning, impatient sea-faring men; energetic suspicious,
and self-conscious New Englanders; proud and arrogant, showy and swaggering,
but true, open-hearted, genial and hospitable Southerners; rough, rash, strong
and manly Western men; Irish emigrants, hasty, uncertain, and ready for anything;
German emigrants, moving on with steady, well-considered purpose; languid, proud,
eccentric, wealthy, handsome and courtly, old French and Spanish creoles; little,
graceful, chatty, happy, good-for-nothing, poor old French habitans; Indians,
half-breeds, frontier, white demi-savages; negroes, mulattos, quadroons, of every
possible condition and character; and all mingling and mixing and working together,
without in the least loosing unwholesomely, but rather intensifying and developing
all their individuality of character. Whether virtue or vice gains the most under
this order of things I am not prepared to answer.........[text about mistresses,
not included here] |
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see also Germans To New Orleans, recommended tools and household
goods ca. 1830-1840 |
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