MISSOURI.
St. Louis, 10th Hay. "Ti the visitor at St. Louis," writes the local handbook, " should chance to be benevolent, or literary, or educational, he will, perhaps, like to look at"—a number of institutions, which I grieve to say I have not been to see. It is an unpleasing reflection that I do not fall under any one of the above three categories, and must rank among the vulgar herd for whom the guide-book adds, by way of consolation, that "let them seek their pleasure as they will, here are the opportunities to find it."
I confess that I have sought and found my pleasure wandering about the streets of St. Louis. The place itself is a constant marvel to me. I am here between eleven and twelve hundred miles from New York. Travelling night and day by express trains, you reach this city from the Atlantic in forty-five hours—more than twice the time, and at about the same rate of travelling, than you take in going express from Boulogne to Marseilles; and yet there are not two points in Europe separated by a couple of hundred miles, which are not far more unlike each other than New York and St. Louis. It is the capital city of the great West, the frontier town between the prairie and the settled country. Westwards the railroads only reach as yet a distance of a hundred and odd miles. The great over- land caravans for the Pacific Ocean start from here during their short summer season, beginning in another week, and ending in the middle of August. The Indians still come here at times to barter; and furs and peltries are still stock articles of St. Louis commerce, Yet even in the far West, on the edge of the Prairie land, I find myself in a vast city, as civilized and as luxurious as any city of the New World. The story of its growth reads fabulous. Thirty years ago it had about 6000 inhabitants. Twenty years afterwards it had upwards of 100,000, and to-day its numbers are supposed to be some 30,000 more. It is worthy, indeed, of the river on which it stands. The praise is not a low one, for, to my mind, the rivers of America are the one grand picture about its scenery. Here, 1200 miles from the sea, the Mississippi is as noble a river as one can wish to see, and yet, for 2000 miles above St. Louis, you can sail up the Missouri, the true parent stream of the Mississippi river.
When once you have seen the Mississippi you understand the feeling of the Western States about the possession of the river. -Union men and Secessionists, Abolitionists and Slaveowners, are all agreed on this one point, that come what may or rule who may, the West must go with the Mississippi. You might as well ask Liver- pool to allow the month of the Mersey to be held by a foreign power as propose any arrangement or compromise to the West by which the command of the Mississippi should pass from its hands. If the Father of Waters had poured into the Atlantic where the Potomac does, the Confederacy might have been a possibility; but the mere possession of the Mississippi has proved fatal to the South. The waters of the Western rivers are higher than they have been for years, and for miles before you reach the Mississippi the railroad passes through flooded fields,. and swamps expanded for the time into vast shallow lagoons. The river is full of great trunks of trees torn up by the roots, and broken-down fences, and dismembered rafts. The steamer ferry that carries you across, lands you at the long quays, lined with stores and warehouses. There is hardly a sailing vessel on the wharfs, for the current is too rapid for sailing craft to ascend the river ; but for a mile in length the wharf is lined with the huge river steam-boats. Trade is slack here now, as everywhere along the Mississippi, but still there are boats enough coming and going constantly, to make the scene a lively one. Pp the long slope of the hill-side, on the -western bank, the city rises in long broad streets parallel to the quay, and when it has reached the hill's brow, stretches away far on the other side across the prairie of the " Champ des Noyers," as the place still is named, in memory of the early French settlers. There is no look left of a newly-settled city. The hotels are as handsome and as luxurious as in any of the older States. The shop-windows are filled with all the evidences of an old civilization. In the book-shops you see not single copies, but whole piles of the last Blackwood's, and Edinburgh's, and Westminster Reviews; rows upon rows, too, of handsomely bound library books, such as Humboldt's Cosmos, and Macaulay and Prescott's Histories. There are numbers of foreign book stores, where, if you like, you could buy Varnhagen von Elise's Correspondence, or Les Miserable. of Victor Hugo. Eight or nine daily newspapers (three of them, by the way, German, and one French), are hawked about the streets. The street railroads stretch over the town in every direction, but yet there are crowds of handsome carriages standing about for hire. You may ride for miles and miles in the suburbs through streets of handsome private dwelling-houses, the owners of which in England (where on the whole living is cheaper than here) could not possess less than 5001. to 10001. a year. All the private houses here are detached, two stories high, and built of Dutch-looking brick. The door stands in the middle of the house, not on one side, and the windows are high, narrow, and numerous, as in our own houses of the ante-Pitt era. In all Western cities the streets are so broad, and the houses so frequently detached, standing on their own plots of ground, that a Western city of one hundred thousand inhabitants covers perhaps three times the space it would in Europe. There may be poverty here, but there is no poor, densely populated quarter. In Missouri, the smokeless anthracite coal is not to be had, and therefore the great factories by the river-side cover the lower part of St. Louis with an English-looking haze of smoke ; but the sun is so powerful and the sky so blue, that not even factory smoke can make the place look dismal. Of all the slave cities I have seen St. Louis is the only one where you cannot see the outward effects of the peculiar institution. It is true, that the number of slaves in the city is small, that it is almost surrounded by Free States, and that the German population is im- mensely large ; still, to admit the truth, St. Louis is, in spite of slavery, one of the most prosperous cities I have travelled through in the States. A resident in Missouri told me, and I have no doubt with truth, that the result of the existence of slavery had been to check the rapidity of St. Louis's growth, as emigrants always settled in a free State in preference to a slave : but, though an abolitionist himself, Ile said he was glad of this result, for otherwise the State would have been altogether overrun by foreign emigrants. Certainly there is already a foreign look about St. Louis. The climate in the first place is too hot, even at this early period of the year, for men to bustle about as they do in Northern cities. The shops thrown open to the air, the people sitting about the door-steps beneath the shade, and the closed lattice shutters of the houses, are signs of the South. But, more than this, the actual proportion of foreigners is immensely large. In the names of the suburbs, such as the " Caron- delet," there are traces of the French settlers, but the German emigra- tion has swallowed up every other. In the streets one hears more Ger- man spoken than English. In talking to the class of persons, waiters, servants, shopmen, and porters, whom a traveller chiefly comes across, it is quite as well to speak in German as in English. Bock bier, lager beer, and mai-wein are advertized for sale at every turning. Americans drink freely, and Germans-drink copiously; and when thejoint thirstiness of Americans and Germans is developed by a Southern sun, it is astonishing the quantity of liquor that can be consumed. I should think, without exaggeration, that one-tenth of all the shops in St. Louis must be establishments where, in some form or other, liquor is drank on the premises. I know in the main street I counted that out of a line of fifty houses I Look at hazard twenty were bar-rooms or wine-stores or lager-saloons. German habits, too, have been imported here. Even in the lower American theatres the audience smoke and drink beer, handed them by German waitresses. There are public "lust gartens " about the town, where German bands play at night, and where whole families, fathers, mothers, children and babies, come and sit for hours, to drink beer and listen to the music. Let me add, that having. been in several of these places of entertainment, the audience is, as far as I saw, as well behaved, though not as quiet, as it would have been in Germany. At one of these summer theatres, by the way, there was a troop of Nigger minstrels, who sung a patriotic song, of which the chorus was, " The Union for ever, and freedom for all !" Considering that Missouri is a Slave State, and the singers were, or were believed to be, negroes, there was a sort of bathos about the performance which it required an American education "not" to appreciate. I recollect when "Father Prout" was in Rome, acting as correspondent of an English newspaper, he was in- vited to an American dinner in honour of Washington's birthday. He was said to have been amazed at finding he was expected to give an account of the festivities ; at any rate, he closed his report with the following incident, which the other guests did not happen to re- member: "The chairman then proposed the toast of the evening, ' Hail, Columbia, the land of freedom P and called upon the vice to acknowledge the toast by singing a negro melody." The story was "ben (mato," but here it was more than verified. It is a curious illustration of popular feeling that the great comic song of the even- ing was one sung by a negro, and called, "What shall a poor nigger do ?" One verse, I recollect, was loudly cheered, and ran as follows :
" Den dere's de dam' Secessionists, And dare's de dam' Tolitionists, But neider's on 'em right, For dey spoil de Union, both on 'em, And set de country in a fight, Den what shall a poor nigger do ?"
It is possible the negro minstrels, in spite of their professions, were artificial negroes. One curious circumstance I noted also, and that was that the leader of the theatrical orchestra, most of whom were Germans, was an undoubted indubitable negro, a thing which would not be tolerated in the Northern States.
The town, moreover, is crowded, like a Bavarian or Papal one, with the offices of the State lottery. It shows the working of the American constitution, when you consider that the United States Government has no more power to hinder every State in the Union from establishing lotteries than we have to require Belgium to suppress the gaming-tables at Spa; and it shows, too, the wise action of the State Governments, that in only three out of the thirty-six States, and those all border Slave States, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri, are lotteries permitted by the local law. The system is even more iniquitous for the players than the Papal one, a thing which, beforehand, I thought impossible. There are 78 numbers, of which 13 are drawn. It is easy enough to see that the chances of your guessing one, two, or _three of the numbers drawn are within a fraction 6, 39, and 273 to 1, yet, if you do happen to win, you only get once, twice and a half, and twenty-five times your stake respectively, and from these winnings 15 per cent. is de- ducted for commission. The lottery is drawn twice a day, instead of once a week, as it is in Rome, and you can stake any amount you please, from a shilling upwards. From the number of offices about., the business must be a thriving one ; and this fact will account both for the State taxes being very light in Missouri, and for there also being a great deal of poverty. As yet the manufacturing element of St. Louis is little developed. There are great beds of iron ore in the State, and coal mines are within easy access by river. Had it not been for the political troubles, large iron factories would have been set up in the city by this time,
i
but for the moment their progress is suspended. Still, in a few years' time, St. Louis will probably be the great iron manufacturing city of the West and South, if not of the whole Union. For the present, its great trade is as a depot of agricultural produce. In 1860, the last year during which the river was open, the shipments from St. Louis by the New Orleans boats alone, not to mention the shipment by railroad, were :
Indian corn 1,209,078 sacks Wheat 26,518 „ Oats 456,016 „ Pork 112,271 barrels Whisky 25,383 Potatoes . . . . 182,737 bushels I only take the six principal articles of export out of a list of some four-and-twenty. St. Louis, too, is the starting-point and depot of the Prairie carrying trade, in which over three millions sterling are said to be invested annually. In 1860 there were employed on this trade during its short season 11,691 men, 844 horses, 7574 mules, 67,930 oxen, and 6922 waggons to transport about 18,000 tons of freight. The greater portion of the freight is conveyed to, and the means of transport supplied at, St. Louis.
Political feeling, as far as I can learn, runs extremely high in Mis- souri ever since the war broke out. This State has been a battle- field between North and South, and has suffered fearfully. To the present day, the southern part of the State is more or less in the hands of the Confederates, and is devastated by rival bands of guerillas. Amongst the native settlers, the Secession party is very strong, as in all Slave States. The chief St. Louis paper, the Missouri Republican, was in favour of neutrality and compro- mise till after the fall of Fort Sumter. To the present day, though a staunch advocate of the Union, it obviously dislikes the Abolitionists far more than it does the Secessionists, and keeps hinting constantly its desire for such a compromise as would bring the South back with its institutions unimpaired. It deprecates strongly bitter language being used towards the Southerners, and throws doubts (and I believe with truth) on the Northern stories of the atrocities committed by the Confederate soldiery. On the other hand, the party represented by the Republican is not the most powerful numerically, though the most influential one. The Germans, who command the elections in St. Louis, are Black Republicans, followers of Fremont and Carl Schurz and Sigel. Their Abolitionism is not dic- tated by moral feelings, like that of the New England States, but is founded more on a practical conviction that slavery is a vicious system of labour, than on any absolute regard for the negro. To do them justice, however, they have much less antipathy to the coloured race than the native Americans, and are, to a man, opposed to the legislation which seeks to exclude free negroes from the State. Moreover, though their Union feeling is very strong, their reverence for the constitution is small, and their love for State rights still less. I see even the republican papers are shocked at the irreverence with which their German colleagues speak of the constitution, and implore them not to broach the heresy, that if the constitution does not work it must be changed forthwith. It is easy to see how this different "stand-point," to use a German word, is beginning to work practically in electoral matters. In August the election for members of Congress comes on in Missouri, and already the electoral campaign is beginning. Mr. Blair, who is supposed to represent President Lincoln's views in Congress, offers himself for re-election, and the native Republican party support him strongly. He is, and has been for years, an Abolitionist, and lie is also, and still more, the staunchest of constitutional Union men. The Germans, however, are dissatisfied with him. They state, not without reason, that his abolitionism is of no practical service, as lie is not willing to interfere with the states, or their rights of deciding the question, and that the scheme of deportation, of which he is supposed to be the chief advocate with the President, is not only impracticable, but unjust, both on the taxpayer and on the negro. Mr. Blair has written a letter to the Germans at St. Louis to try and justify his opinions, but without effect as yet, and the notion is that some more revolutionary candidate will be elected.
Till recently St. Louis was under military, not martial, law ; and Secession partizans were supposed to be very numerous and active. In all the bar-rooms you still see notices that the license has been granted by the Provost Marshal, subject to the holder taking an oath that he is and will be faithful to the Union for ever ; and that any breach of the oath may be punished by death. At the same time, the evidences of a strong Union feeling are numerous, and St. Louis is the only city I have yet seen where the Federal flag is frequently hung out of private dwellings. I observe, also, that here there is far more anxiety about, rather than for, the speedy suppression of the insurrection than there is at the North. People here are much more alive to the influence of a Southern climate in summer, and 1 see there is a very general fear that if the insurgents can procrastinate their defeat for another month they will have a new lease of life throughout the summer. In truth, anybody who feels what the heat is here at the first week of May cannot doubt that farther South the time for fighting must be very limited. I suspect already that the amount of sickness in the army before Corinth must be very considerable. It is more than a fortnight since General Halleck officially announced that all the wounded had been removed from Pittsburg Landing ; but though there has been no fighting of any consequence since then, steam-boats are constantly coming up the river with sick and disabled soldiers.
AN ENGLISII TJt,&VELLER.
Previous page
