BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.

New Orleans is our most pleasing American city to persons from a northern climate. Florida presents no place important enough to illustrate a large general society. Texas has rising towns, but the Anglo-Saxon domination there brings them more and more into resemblance to our own settled English, or rather, British communities. In San Francisco we are charmed not only with a complete change of foliage, scenery, and climate, but with unexpected varieties in the population, there being a little tinge of the south of Europe as well as of Mexico and of the Celestial Kingdom in the speculative yet placid elements there. Yet New Orleans is not so hard as even San Francisco. It is a land not merely of fruit, but of the sugar-cane. It lies on that warm gulf whose farther shores were more historical three hundred years ago than now. As time advances and we complete our own connections and general developments we see more and more that the American destiny must be southward. Canada, which has had a much longer history than the United States, presents even now but a thin rim of settlement, and her entire population from the banks of Newfoundland to Vancouver’s Island is not equal to that of the single state of New York. On the other hand, Mexico, through which the Americans have built costly railroad systems piercing to the very capital city, has a population certainly twice that of Canada, and probably three times the number, considering the extension of Mexico toward Central America. American diplomacy has little other ground to cover for the near future, than the republics to the south of us. The surfeit of enterprises and of productions in the United States compels us to consider a time when we must not only find markets in the Spanish American states, but shall become, if not pioneers, as we once were, certainly competitors in the Pacific Ocean, of the English, Germans, and other modern nations. We have opened a way to the Pacific by railroad, but the canal long contemplated across Central America will operate more impartially toward shippers, will cheapen the movement of goods, and incline the United States rapidly toward an understanding of the new peoples to our southwest, in methods no doubt providentially designed. New Orleans has been so clearly understood by our railroad magnates that they have hastened, almost without public assistance, to connect her not only with great points like Hampton Roads, Richmond, Cincinnati and Chicago, but the railroads are finished from San Francisco to New Orleans, and the only continental railroad system from ocean to ocean under a single management, does not pass by Chicago, but by New Orleans. The Americans originally stimulated by the governmental credit to build from the Missouri River to San Francisco, have upon their own credit and earnings stretched a railroad through California nearly to the gulf of that name, and then across the deserts and Texas, until New Orleans is at this moment the Atlantic seaport of California. Mr. Gould, who succeeded Colonel Thomas A. Scott, has stretched another railroad system parallel to Mr. Huntington’s from the desert through Northern Texas and down the Red River to New Orleans.

Near the close of the past year another important railroad was built from Memphis directly to New Orleans. A little earlier last year the Cincinnati Southern Railroad was extended directly to New Orleans by the great syndicate which had leased it. Therefore, there now run into New Orleans four lines of rail east of the Mississippi River, and two great lines west of the Mississippi. Contrast this with the railroad facilities which existed there only fourteen years ago. At that time New Orleans had only one railroad to the north, and that had certain connections, and was under no consolidated sway. It was not even connected with its adjacent city of Mobile by rail. It had no railroad facilities whatever to reach Texas, except a little piece of road which ran to the Gulf near the mouth of the Atchafalaya, and there found steamships for Galveston.

While other cities in the South have shown a cheerful energy to revive themselves, and while new cities have started up at many points, and have become respectable centers of trade, New Orleans has retained all that imperial promise under freedom which she had in the palmiest days of slavery. Perhaps no city in the South, or in the world, has so thoroughly changed its ideas, political and social, in spite of sharp contests for party supremacy there.

The great exhibition of the present year is the best instance that New Orleans means to lead the industrial spirit of the South, and to become no longer the great filibuster in the tropics, but the energetic merchant and projector there. No lawless impulse guided the erection of the great buildings which are now crowded with the productions of America and Mexico.

The attempt to let the sugar interests of Louisiana and Mississippi go in favor of the productions of Cuba and the East Indies, distinctly points the people at the mouth of the Mississippi to the fact that their alliance is probably to be with the Northern states, not merely in politics, but in commerce.

New Orleans is not the only French city in the United States, but it is the only one which preserves the French quality and language perfectly, and in that respect resembles Montreal and Quebec. St. Louis had a French and Spanish basis, but when that post became American the small Latin element was compelled, in self-defense, to adopt the language and living of the Anglo-Saxons. New Orleans, however, had a sufficient start when the Americans occupied it in 1803, to grow relatively with the American settlers and consequently two cities arose side by side, which still preserve their differences as much as if a quarter of London and a quarter of Paris had been cut out and united. Besides, there was a large rural and planting element in Louisiana, of the French stock, which has assisted to keep up the French infusion, and hence the market at New Orleans is the most characteristic thing in the city, where the habitants and the hucksters, the fishers from the Gulf, and the porters and carters, carry us back to a scene anterior to the France of to-day, or before republican ideas had reached the far French colonies. New Orleans, too, constantly received emigration from neighboring French and Spanish islands and coasts as they were affected by negro insurrections, or by internal revolutions. Naturally the fleeing planters from Hayti and the Lesser Antilles made their way to the nearest large town, and the steam shipping of the Gulf all concentrates at the two centers of the ellipse, New Orleans and Havana. The Mississippi River, which is the only river of the first class on the globe to pass through a cultivated land and an enlightened population, sufficiently marks New Orleans as the eye of its destiny adjacent to its mouth. There are many Americans who have never been to New Orleans, who are unaware that it, like New York, has two distinct harbors or outlets. As New York has Long Island Sound and the Bay of New York, one opening a hundred miles to the east of the other, so New Orleans has a lake system close by which gives her internal communication far to the east, or almost to the bay of Mobile, and saves her two hundred miles of round-about river navigation to reach her own coasts. It may be thought that New Orleans is too far from the mouth of the Mississippi to command that the commerce of the Gulf should come a hundred miles up that river for her benefit, yet Philadelphia and Baltimore are quite as far from the ocean, and these cities have easily commanded a great interior trade through the communications they possessed, and from the products they had to supply. Coal, for example, makes the most effective article of the commerce of both Baltimore and Philadelphia, and coal is more valuable in the Gulf because farther from the mines, than it is on the near east coast. The coal furnished to the shipping at New Orleans has descended the entire line of the river, yet by such easy facilities that at New Orleans it is probably the cheapest coal in the world for the distance it has to come to get a market. Great floats, of which dozens are hauled by a small tug or tow boat, go down the Ohio to its mouth, and pass on to New Orleans and are there so easily discharged that the lumber in them finds a market with the coal.

Besides, the railroad projectors, without other inducement than their own sagacity, have concurred in running all their railroads to New Orleans, for the country at the mouth of the Mississippi is neither so healthy nor so strategical for trade as this old town which was founded by the French under the direction of their government when they picked slowly and carefully the sites of future trade and military empire. These same French located St. Louis, and it has not been found advisable by any succeeding generation to try a better situation.

We may ask whether New Orleans has as great an antiquity as our own English cities? It is not as old as Philadelphia by almost thirty years, and is somewhat younger than Charleston, and is about fifteen years older than Savannah. Of course it does not compare in antiquity with the colonial cities of the northeast, such as New York, Albany, Boston, Montreal and Quebec. But it is nearly a century older than any of our important Anglo-Teuton cities of the West. It is more than half a century older than Cincinnati, and we may almost call it a century older than Chicago. St. Louis was its Albany, or upstream neighbor, and was under the same political domination. Mobile was the parent place the French established on the Gulf, and Governor Bienville made New Orleans his capital as late as 1723, or about nine years before the birth of General Washington.

Soon after this a levee was built in front of the new town, and the early French authors and novelists took pleasure in visiting it, and even at that date they called it “the famous place.” As in Quebec and Montreal, the early French settlement was almost simultaneous with the bringing out of monks and nuns, and soon a cathedral was conceived and nunneries were built. The French, however, had not the vigorous nature of the English in founding new places, and after nearly half a century of occupation there were hardly three thousand persons in it to transfer to the Spanish who took possession of the place in the midst of a revolution, and had some of the best French citizens shot in order to be a terror to what the Spanish governor, O’Reilly, already suspected to exist in French Louisiana, the spirit of independence, which Spain wanted to extirpate in all her colonies, fearing that they would speedily rise to importance and overwhelm the parent power. Spain had been dismembered by a treaty early in the eighteenth century, and was left with enormous American possessions, and with a very small Spain to handle them. The Spanish cabinet then conceived the policy of preventing the growth of the colonies, so as to keep them down, use them merely for trade, and not let that spirit of municipal independence which makes great fermentations in states commence anywhere. Some of the Spanish governors, however, ordered public buildings to be constructed, and the American residents at New Orleans say that the Spanish sway of about forty years has left better monuments than the French.

A Spanish infusion of settlers marks the present population, and the Americans call all the Latin races, no matter whether they come from France and her islands, or Spain and her coasts, by the name of Creoles.

A curious feature of New Orleans is the existence of considerable elements there from states as foreign to ourselves as Yucatan.

At the close of the American Revolution there were less than five thousand persons in New Orleans. During that Revolution a considerable number of respectable British settlers who wanted to avoid the War of Independence, settled in West Florida and about Natchez, and in other spots contiguous to New Orleans. Hence the Revolution was hardly over before the first chapter of manifest destiny was directed from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky upon the opening of the Mississippi River. That physical achievement was so important to the producers on the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers that schemes of every sort were tried to hasten the opening of commerce to the Gulf. One Senator of the United States was expelled from his place for an intrigue partaking of the nature of treason with the British who still backed up the Spanish on the Gulf; and a Vice President was actually pursued nearly to the Gulf and brought back and tried for treason at Richmond. How long the United States might have had to wait the slow course of diplomacy or the rough chance of war to get New Orleans, is uncertain, but Napoleon, who had acquired Louisiana by his mastery over Spain, believing that he could not hold it against the English fleets, made haste to sell it to the Americans for a sum of money and old commercial claims.

Eighty-two years ago, or about the rounded lifetime of an old man, the Americans occupied New Orleans, and much of the city burnt up the year our forefathers were voting for the first President of the United States. A French newspaper had been issued in New Orleans several years before the American possession. There were perhaps eight thousand persons in the city when it was transferred to us. Twelve years after the transfer, the Americans under General Jackson had to give battle to hold the city, which the English attacked with the best troops they had used in Spain against Napoleon who had already fallen. Napoleon was contemplating his last endeavor to astonish the world at Waterloo, when the English and Americans, unconscious that a treaty of peace had been made between themselves, fought the battle of New Orleans, which resulted in more disaster to the British arms than any battle on land during our second conflict for independence. In St. Paul’s Cathedral stand the monuments and statues of Packenham and Gibbs who lost their lives in the marshes around New Orleans.

In 1862, Farragut with his fleet took New Orleans. His victory drove an entering wedge into the heart of the Confederacy and gave to the navy of the United States a prestige which it had never enjoyed and which in its present enfeebled state it is rapidly losing. New Orleans was the wealthiest and most populous city of the Confederacy; it was four times larger than either Charleston or Richmond, and before the war had the largest export trade of any city in the world. Commanding mid-continental navigation and being the key to the Gulf, its military value was equal to its commercial importance.

The plan for the capture of New Orleans by the navy, and the reduction of the forts which guarded the approach to it from the south, originated in the Navy Department in the fall of 1861. The credit for proposing this plan has been claimed by more persons than one, and it is likely that it was conceived and developed from suggestions and hints received from a variety of sources. It was determined that a naval expedition should be sent against New Orleans. The plan found little favor with army officers, but the President became interested in it and Secretary Welles set about carrying it into effect. The attention of military men was concentrated on a proposed combination of the forces of the army and the navy for the capture of New Orleans, in an expedition which was to descend to the city from the upper waters of the Mississippi River. This scheme seemed more attractive, and the idea of taking New Orleans by means of a fleet advancing from the Gulf had never been entertained in military circles. When Stanton became Secretary of War and was told of the proposed naval expedition, he was astonished at the originality and audacity of the idea and exclaimed: “An attack upon New Orleans by the navy! I never heard of it! It is the best news you could give me.” Secretary Stanton entered cordially into the spirit of the project and increased the number of the troops which General McClelland had promised, from ten thousand to eighteen thousand. Shortly after this, General B. F. Butler was made acquainted with the purpose of Secretary Welles and he was given the command of the military force which was to hold New Orleans after the fleet had taken it. There is no evidence that General Butler suggested any of the important plans or details for the expedition or that he had any definite plans concerning it.

Congress had ordered the blockade of 3,500 miles of coast line. There were scarcely ships enough to maintain it, and the vessels for the New Orleans expedition had to be built or procured from other sources. After the Secretary of the Navy had decided to send a fleet against New Orleans and had given orders for the construction of it, the most serious question which presented itself was the selection of a commander. All of the naval officers of high rank were suggested and considered. It was to be the most powerful and splendid fleet ever gathered under the stars and stripes, and the Department moved cautiously in the matter of choosing a leader for it. Finally the name of David Glasgow Farragut was proposed. The Secretary of the Navy remembered that years before in the war with Mexico, Farragut had offered a daring plan for the capture of the strong fort of San Juan de Ulloa, at Vera Cruz. He proposed that the fort be “boarded” by attaching long ladders to the masts of the attacking ships, which should then be towed up to the walls of the fort. Secretary Welles was impressed at the time with the boldness and dash of the scheme, and though he had not seen Farragut since that day, and really knew very little of him, yet after some consultation he decided to offer him the command of the fleet. Farragut, who had never had a squadron, gladly accepted the honor and the responsibility. He had been trained by a life of study and active service for some great emergency like this, which came late in life, in his sixty-second year, but he was prepared for it and he knew it. Farragut adopted the plans which had been considered by the Navy Department and made them his own. He grasped the work before him with a degree of earnestness and enthusiasm unusual in men of his age. Secretary Welles says of him at that time: “In every particular he came up to all that was expected or required of him. He determined to pass the forts and restore New Orleans. He might not come back, he said, but the city would be ours.” After his arrival at Ship Island on the 25th of March, 1862, Farragut wrote: “I have now attained what I have been looking for all my life—a flag—and having attained it, all that is necessary to complete the scene is a victory. If I die in the attempt it will only be what every officer has to expect. He who dies in doing his duty to his country and at peace with his God, has played out the drama of life to the best advantage.” Here was a genuine pious hero of the old school, determined to do or to die. His task was a herculean one. New Orleans was defended by two forts erected at the lowest favorable point for the location of military works, above the Gulf. Fort St. Philip occupied the left bank of the river, and a short distance below it on the right bank stood Fort Jackson. These forts mounted in all one hundred and fifteen guns. A fort on the site of Jackson in 1815 held the British fleet in check for nine days. The rebel forts were garrisoned by 1,500 men commanded by General J. K. Duncan. A short distance above the forts lay fifteen rebel vessels. This fleet included the iron ram “Manassas” and a great floating battery clad with railroad iron. Below the forts a heavy chain supported by the hulks of eight dismasted ships obstructed the river. Farragut was to break through the chain, fight his way by the forts, destroy or capture the rebel fleet and then steam up to New Orleans and place that city under his guns. The attack was commenced by the mortar fleet. For six days the mortars poured a ceaseless fire of shells into the fort. The shells were flying through the air at all times; nearly six thousand were thrown, but the forts were damaged very little and the Confederate loss was only fourteen killed and thirty-nine wounded. It was determined to pass the forts on April 24th. At sunset on the 23d there were indications of the approaching conflict on every ship in Farragut’s fleet. The attack was to be made under cover of darkness. At eleven o’clock that night an officer signaled that an opening which had been made in the chain was still clear. Five minutes before two o’clock in the morning two red lights were displayed from the peak of the flag ship. It was the signal to steam up the river. In about one hour the fleet of seventeen vessels, in three divisions, was moving. The moon was rising, but its light was lost in the fierce flames from bonfires and fire rafts. Both forts opened fire upon the first ship as she passed through the row of hulks. Five minutes later the little “Cayuga” was pouring grape and canister into Fort St. Philip, and in ten minutes more she had passed from the range of its guns and was in the arms of the rebel fleet. It was a lively moment for the brave little boat. Eleven rebel gunboats tried to demolish her at once. She could not go forward, she would not go backward. There was nothing to do but to close with the enemy. She drove an “eleven inch” shot through one of her antagonists and it ran aground and burned up. Another one was crippled by a well directed shot, and the “Cayuga” was about to grapple with the third when two ships of the Union fleet came to her aid, the “Oneida” and the “Varuna.”

The former ran into one of the rebel ships and almost cut her in twain. The “Varuna” was rammed by the “Manassas” and another ship and went to the bottom in fifteen minutes. While she was going down she fired into one of her adversaries and so damaged her that she had to surrender to the “Oneida,” and she sent a shell into another rebel gunboat which exploded its boiler. All the time the remaining vessels of the first division were steaming by the forts, pouring tremendous volleys into them and receiving tremendous discharges in return. Farragut’s flag ship, the “Hartford,” led the second division of the fleet. She was a noble vessel, splendidly equipped; she steamed into the fight and was followed by the long line of ships in the second and third divisions. By this hour day was dawning, but heavy clouds of smoke hung over the river and no light from the east reached the battling ships. The cannonading which all along had been terrific was now growing sublime. Three hundred heavily shotted guns were flashing and roaring over the dark water. The Union ships advanced to the fray like the famous “Light Brigade,” with cannon to the right of them, to the left of them and before them. Probably it was the most picturesque naval battle in the world’s history. Thirty-four armed vessels and two great forts were struggling in the early morning. The sun seemed to stand still in the heavens. The light of the guns was brighter than the orb of day, and Farragut’s gunners had to aim at the cannon flashes from the rebel forts. The forts themselves were not visible. The vessels of the enemy were not visible. Our ships were striking great blows in the dark and they always struck with deadly effect. From points above the rebels pushed great fire barges loaded with blazing pitch and cotton into the stream. These rafts came floating down and when they did not ignite our ships they illuminated them for the Confederate marksmen. A flaming fire raft was hurled against the “Hartford” and flames ran from the water’s edge to the mast top. The well trained crew extinguished the fire and within five minutes the “Hartford” destroyed a rebel steamer filled with boarding parties. The “Brooklyn,” another Union ship, encountered a fire raft and for a time lay helpless before the merciless guns of Fort Jackson. Disentangling herself, she steamed up to the fort and poured such withering broadsides into it that its guns were silenced for a time, and the gunners were seen by the ship’s crew as they peered through the cannon-lighted portholes, to be fleeing from their guns. At this time the vessels which had passed the forts were doing good work, and the stream was filled with wrecked and burning Confederate gunboats. Fire rafts and wrecks came drifting down side by side, and frequently one of the latter would explode with a loud report. The low, curved iron rams glided about like gigantic serpents of the sea. Boarding parties were overrunning some vessels and being repulsed from others. It was an awful, dazzling and furiously shifting panorama. The last ship to pass the forts on that memorable morning was the “Penola.” In the light of a blazing raft she received the discharge of the forty guns of St. Philip, and passed on to join the victorious fleet above. “And thus,” says Farragut’s son, “was accomplished a feat in naval warfare which had no precedent, and which is still without a parallel except the one furnished by Farragut himself two years later at Mobile.”

On the morning of the next day the fleet moved up to New Orleans. At noon Captain Bailey was sent to demand of the mayor of the city its unconditional surrender, and that the flag of Louisiana be removed from the City Hall. The mayor refused to haul down the flag or to make a formal surrender of the city. While the officers and men of the fleet were attending divine service the next day, they were startled by the discharge of a howitzer from the main mast of the “Pensacola.” The watchman in the rigging had seen four men tear down the flag of the Union from the roof of the mint, and had at once fired the gun which was trained on the flag staff.

On the 28th the forts surrendered to Commander Porter, who had been pounding away at them with his mortars. May 1st, General Butler and his troops entered New Orleans, and Farragut turned the city over to him. His administration was vigorous, but was hateful to the citizens. He hanged Mumford, the leader of the mob which tore the Union flag from the mint; he issued his celebrated woman order which placed every female who insulted a Union soldier on the level of the street walker; he treated with severity a Mrs. Phillips, who jeered at the remains of a Union soldier. He is condemned for all of these things by very many people. Many dishonest things were done during his administration, but repose, vigor and security were the characteristics of it. General Butler was a just, efficient, straightforward tyrant, not cruel, but possessed of an inflexible determination to make his will the law and to make his cause succeed. After General Butler came General Banks. He endeavored to restore loyalty to the state by good treatment, but fell into the error of reposing trust in a type of men who could not understand freedom nor adopt even a business patriotism for the sake of their own prosperity.

By the census of 1880 New Orleans showed for three-quarters of a century of American rule a population of 216,000 people, of whom 175,000 are natives of the United States, and only 58,000 are colored people. New Orleans stood the tenth of American cities, with more than 36,000 houses, and more than 45,000 families. Although the manufactures of New Orleans were in their infancy they had an annual product of nineteen million dollars, and paid nearly four million dollars a year wages. Looking over the list of states to discover the origin of the people of New Orleans, the remarkable fact appears that of her 216,000 people more then 151,000 are natives of Louisiana. The neighboring state of Mississippi has not put thirty-eight hundred souls into New Orleans. Alabama, which is within two or three hours’ ride by cars, has not two thousand native children in New Orleans, but New York has over two thousand of her progeny settled in New Orleans, and Virginia has 4,300. Of the 41,000 foreign population, nearly 7,000 are natives of France, showing that there is a constant immigration, as in the days of Bienville, from old France to new France. Germany has contributed to New Orleans 14,000 emigrants. About the same number have come to New Orleans from Great Britain and Ireland. Spain has contributed about 800 of her natives, Italy about 2,000, Switzerland nearly 500, Mexico only 300, and the West Indies scarcely 400. These are suggestive figures, and show that since the great rebellion those elements go to the far South which have the most original emigrating spirit and the greater variety of self-sustaining trades and pursuits. A man who can do nothing, make nothing, improve nothing, has the least of all motives to emigrate. The debt of New Orleans was about seventeen million dollars at the last advices, considerably less than the debts of Baltimore and Washington, but some four millions more than the debt of Chicago. Railroads and other municipal improvements were responsible for a good deal of this debt.

Since the war New Orleans has been transformed from the likeness of a quiet old French city like Orleans which gave it name, to the appearance of a new French city with pretty relics here and there, and strong cosmopolitan attachments. The great river which sweeps in splendid curves past this city has compelled the streets to conform to some extent to its shores, but the consequence is a charming disposition of streets to both those who hate crooked streets, and those who hate straight ones. The town may be likened to the spokes of a wheel with streets laid out between the spokes in both directions, and conforming to them to some extent. In front of the city stretches the great bank called the levee, at the foot of which ride the majestic steamers which come from all portions of the Mississippi valley and are often like palaces in cardboard, and since the jetties have been made a success by Captain Eads and the United States engineers, you also see at New Orleans, riding cosily, the huge steamships from New York, Liverpool and Cuba. The chief maritime lines from New York to Texas now stop at New Orleans and the journey is continued by rail. This great levee, which is an artificial hill thrown up to keep the river back, is lined with the sugar hogsheads and cotton bales of the South, with coal and iron, plows and stoves, kegs of nails, merchandise assembled from all parts of the globe, and massive presses driven by steam to further compress the bales of cotton and reduce them in bulk for shipment. A canal runs through the city, and its other termination is on Lake Pontchartrain. At the lake is a beautiful new resort built in recent years, nearly as agreeable as Chautauqua Lake, and the peculiar Creole and negro cooking of New Orleans is to be found in perfection there, as well as at the Spanish fort, in the environs of the city. The shops of New Orleans are open to the air all winter long, and art of a local nature is taking root there. Whatever the Gulf produces is to be seen at the Creole capital, and a visit to it for even a few days is the next thing to a trip to Europe.