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perjured associates are retained to prove alibis, and ready bail is always procurable for the immediate use of those whom it is not immediately prudent to enlarge otherwise.
The electoral system is a farce and a fraud; the knife, the slungshot, the brass knuckles determining, while the sham is being enacted, who shall occupy and administer the offices of the municipality and the commonwealth.
Can our condition surprise any man?
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
We accept the reproach in the proclamation, as every Louisianian, alive to the honor and fair fame of his State and chief city, must accept it, with bowed heads and brows abashed.
The condition of peace, order, and quiet to which the city had been brought at this time, is also certified to by the New Orleans
Bee, another secession paper.
The
Bee of May 8 said:--
The federal soldiers do not seem to interfere with the private property of the citizens, and have done nothing that we are aware of to provoke difficulty.
The usual nightly reports of arrests for vagrancy, assaults, wounding, and killing, have unquestionably been diminished.
The city is as tranquil and peaceable as in the most quiet times.
About the fourth day after my proclamation, I drove out in a calash with my wife one morning to take a look at the condition of the city and its suburbs.
We took no guard save an orderly on the box.
General Kinsman of my staff was with us. We went up the river in a street parallel with it and about one hundred yards from it. A little way up the river we came upon the “basin,” a broad opening or pond for the reception of canal boats.
A canal extended from this point across to
Lake Pontchartrain.
As we approached the “basin,” the air seemed filled with the most noxious and offensive stenches possible, so noxious as almost to take away the power of breathing.
The whole surface of the canal and the pond was covered with a thick growth of green vegetable scum, variegated with dead cats and dogs or the remains of dead mules on the banking.
The sun shone excessively hot, and the thermometer might have been 120°. We turned to the right and went down along the canal as far as
Lake Pontchartrain, finding it all in the same condition until within a few rods of the lake.
We drove back by a very different route.
