mer upon our success with free black laborers, and have been obliged to acknowledge that they never saw a more cheerful, industrious set of laborers in all their experience. But wait till sugar-making if you can get off your crop Your niggers will flare up They are not going to work

comes,' they have said, 'and then see without the old system of compulsion. when you get off your ten-hour system. night and day, and you cannot get off the crop unless they do.' "White sugar-makers presented themselves, telling us, in all sobriety, Niggers cannot be trusted to make sugar,' and offering, with great magnanimity, to oversee the matter for five hundred dollars. J———— declined all such friendly offers, and last Monday morning commenced grinding cane. The colored men and women went to work with a will, no shirking or flinching. The cutters pushed the handlers, the handlers pushed the haulers, and so on, night and day, each gang taking their respective watches, and all moving on with the regularity of clock-work.

--

"And so the business went on with black engineers, black crushers, black filterers, black sugar-makers, all black throughout,— but the sugar came out splendid in quantity and quality. Sixty hogsheads of sugar, finished by Saturday night, and things in readiness for the Sabbath's rest, is acknowledged by old planters to be the largest run ever made in this sugar-house for the first week of the sugar season. So they gape and stare, and wonder that humanity and justice can bring forth more profitable results than the driver's whip."

Louisiana has been the great sugar-growing State of the Union. For several years before the war, the annual crop varied from 100,000 to 450,000 hogsheads. In 1864 less than nine thousand hogsheads were produced. In 1865 the crop amounted to between sixteen and seventeen thousand hogsheads, less than was raised in 1860 on four plantations!

Attempts were being made to introduce white laborers into Louisiana. While I was there, one hundred Germans, who had been hired in New York for a sugar plantation, were landed in New Orleans. Within twenty-four hours thirty of them deserted for higher wages; by which trifling circumstance planters, who had hoped to exchange black for white labor, were very much disgusted.

CAPTURE OF STEAMER "WATER-WITCH." 415

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY.

LEAVING New Orleans for Mobile at half-past four o'clock, by the usual route, I reached Lake Ponchartrain by railroad in time to take the steamer and be off at sunset.

The lake, with its low, dark-wooded shores, and its placid, glassy waters, unruffled by a breeze, outspread under the evening sky, was a scene of solitary and tranquil beauty. Here its breast was burnished with the splendors of a reflected cloud, which faded, leaving upon the darkening rim of the lake the most delicate belts of green, and blue, and violet, until these faded in their turn, and the gloomy surface appeared sprinkled all over with molten stars. Strange constellations rose in the Southern hemisphere; while others about the opposite pole, which never set in the latitude of the Northern States, were below the horizon. The "Dipper" was dipped in the lake. I had never seen the North Star so low before.

I walked the deck with the mate, who had been a good Rebel, and was concerned in the capture of the United States steamer "Water Witch."

·

"I had command of one of the boats," said he. "There was a consultation of officers, and it was proposed to make the attack that night at eleven o'clock; we would have the tide with us then. For that very reason,' I said, I would postpone it until two. Then we shall have the tide against us. It will be harder pulling down to her, but we can board better, and if we miss grappling the first time we shan't drift by and get fired upon; and if we fail, we can come back on the tide.'' The steamer was surprised, and the boarding was a success. "The officer in command of our party was killed, and the

command devolved upon me. I got three wounds, one through this arm, one across my stomach, and one through the fleshy part of my thigh. But I laid out a man for each wound. I got to the cabin, and had my sword at the captain's throat, and would have run him through, if he had n't been mighty glib in his speech: I surrender! I surrender!' He did n't stammer a bit! Do you surrender your command?' 'Yes, yes! I do!' And in a minute I stopped the fighting."

This is the style of story one hears travelling anywhere in the South. Lying in my berth in the cabin, I was kept awake half the night by Rebel soldiers relating similar adventures."

The next morning we were in the Gulf of Mexico. We had entered by the South Pass, the tide being unfavorable for an inside passage between the islands and the coast. It was a summer-like, beautiful day. Gulls and pelicans were sailing around and over the steamer and sporting on the waves.

On

A POET IN THE FIGHT.

417

the south was the open Gulf; on our left, a series of low, barren, sandy islands, — Ship Island among them, reminding one of Butler's Expedition.

us.

All the morning we sailed the lustrous, silken waters of the Gulf; approaching in the afternoon the entrance to Mobile Bay. Porpoises were tumbling, and pelicans diving, all around Flocks of gulls followed, picking up the fragments of our dinner thrown overboard by the cook. Sometimes a hundred would be fighting in the air for a morsel one of them had picked up, chasing the bird that bore it, snatching it, dropping it, and darting to catch it as it fell, — until left far behind, and almost lost to sight on the horizon; then they would come up again, flapping low along our white wake, until another fragment attracted and detained them.

We passed the curious, well-defined line, where the yellowish river-water from the Bay and the pure liquid crystal of the Gulf met and mingled. On our left, the long, smooth swells burst into white breakers on the shoals below Pelican Island. On the point of Dauphin Island beyond was Fort Gaines, while close upon our right, as we passed up, was Fort Morgan, on a point of the main land, a sheet of sand white as snow.

its brick walls built upon

Having kept the outside passage, instead of the usual route of the New Orleans steamers, our course lay between these forts, up the main ship-channel, past the scene of Farragut's famous fight. I thought of Brownell's ringing lyric of that day:

"Gaines growled low on our left,

Morgan roared on our right:

Before us, gloomy and fell,

With breath like the fume of hell,

Lay the Dragon of iron shell,
Driven at last to the fight!

"Every ship was drest

In her bravest and her best,
As if for a July day;

Sixty flags and three,

As we floated up the Bay;
Every peak and mast-head flew

The brave Red, White, and Blue:
We were eighteen ships that day.

"On in the whirling shade

Of the cannon's sulphury breath,
We drew to the Line of Death
That our devilish Foe had laid;
Meshed in a horrible net,

And baited villanous well,

Right in our path were set

Three hundred traps of hell!"

These were the torpedoes, one of which destroyed the iron clad "Tecumseh," Commander T. A. M. Craven.

"A moment we saw her turret,

A little heel she gave,

And a thin white spray went o'er her,
Like the crest of a breaking wave;

In that great iron coffin,

The Channel for their grave,

The Fort their monument,

(Seen afar in the offing,)

Ten fathom deep lie Craven,

And the bravest of our brave."

We passed very near to the spot where that " coffin still lies at the bottom of the stream. But the ships went in undismayed.

great iron