CHAPTER 40

Castles and Culture

BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like

a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications,

no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol

grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge

snow-ball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want

distance on it, because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom

blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly

in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the

plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters

clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. And there was a

tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air.

And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence

to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars,

snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for

it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been

built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago,

with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the

debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes

and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still

survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the

wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories

and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy

humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a

whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine

within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever

have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more

pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and

perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let

dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this

restoration-money to the building of something genuine.

Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly

of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female

Institute' of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same

advertisement--

'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and

beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to

the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and

ivy-mantled porches.'

Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping

hotel in a castle.

By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;

but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age

romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and

infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has

seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake.

Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'

Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that

unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems

to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter,

and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at

all--

'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by

sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the

exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south.

Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this

continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the

southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and

propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and

solicit southern patronage.'

{footnote [Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes after ten

o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry,

Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday

afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to

kill him. This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that it

was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry then told O'Connor

he should not live. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not.

The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some

property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon Mabry sent word

to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This morning Major O'Connor

was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which

he was president. General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay

Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the

bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired.

Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fell O'Connor fired

again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached

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.