ars. And then--in what state of repair I know not--it was
sold at an advance equal to a yearly increase of but six-sevenths of one
per cent, on the purchase price of the gaping ruin sold in 1837. There is
a certain poetry in notarial records. But we will not delve for it now.
Idle talk of strange sights and sounds crowded out of notice any true
history the house may have had in those twenty-five years, or until war
had destroyed that slavery to whose horridest possibilities the gloomy
pile, even when restored and renovated, stood a ghost-ridden monument. Yet
its days of dark romance were by no means ended.

V.

A NEW USE.

The era of political reconstruction came. The victorious national power
decreed that they who had once been master and slave should enter into
political partnership on terms of civil equality. The slaves grasped the
boon; but the masters, trained for generations in the conviction that
public safety and private purity were possible only by the subjection of
the black race under the white, loathed civil equality as but another name
for private companionship, and spurned, as dishonor and destruction in
one, the restoration of their sovereignty at the price of political
copartnership with the groveling race they had bought and sold and
subjected easily to the leash and lash.

What followed took every one by surprise. The negro came at once into a
larger share of power than it was ever intended he should or expected he
would attain. His master, related to him long and only under the imagined
necessities of plantation government, vowed the issue must and should be,
not How shall the two races share public self-government in prosperous
amity? but, Which race shall exclusively rule the other, race by race?

The necessities of national authority tipped the scale, and the powers of
legislation and government and the spoils of office tumbled, all together,
into the freedman's ragged lap. Thereupon there fell upon New Orleans,
never well governed at the best, a volcanic shower of corruption and
misrule.

And yet when history's calm summing-up and final judgment comes, there
must this be pointed out, which was very hard to see through the dust and
smoke of those days: that while plunder and fraud ran riot, yet no serious
attempt was ever made by the freedman or his allies to establish any
un-American principle of government, and for nothing else was he more
fiercely, bloodily opposed than for measure