Strange True Stories of Louisiana Part 15

Scarcely at any time since has the New Orleans bar, in proportion to its numbers, had so many brilliant lights. Edward Livingston, of world-wide fame, was there in his prime. John R. Grymes, who died a few years before the opening of the late civil war, was the most successful man with juries who ever plead in Louisiana courts. We must meet him in the court-room by and by, and may as well make his acquaintance now. He was emphatically a man of the world. Many anecdotes of him remain, ill.u.s.trative rather of intrepid shrewdness than of chivalry. He had been counsel for the pirate brothers Lafitte in their entanglements with the custom-house and courts, and was believed to have received a hundred thousand dollars from them as fees. Only old men remember him now. They say he never lifted his voice, but in tones that grew softer and lower the more the thought behind them grew intense would hang a glamour of truth over the veriest sophistries that intellectual ingenuity could frame. It is well to remember that this is only tradition, which can sometimes be as unjust as daily gossip. It is sure that he could entertain most showily. The young Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was once his guest. In his book of travels in America (1825-26) he says:

My first excursion [in New Orleans] was to visit Mr. Grymes, who here inhabits a large, ma.s.sive, and splendidly furnished house.... In the evening we paid our visit to the governor of the State.... After this we went to several coffee-houses where the lower cla.s.ses amuse themselves....

Mr. Grymes took me to the masked ball, which is held every evening during the carnival at the French theater.... The dress of the ladies I observed to be very elegant, but understood that most of those dancing did not belong to the better cla.s.s of society.... At a dinner, which Mr. Grymes gave me with the greatest display of magnificence,... we withdrew from the first table, and seated ourselves at the second, in the same order in which we had partaken of the first. As the variety of wines began to set the tongues of the guests at liberty, the ladies rose, retired to another apartment, and resorted to music. Some of the gentlemen remained with the bottle, while others, among whom I was one, followed the ladies.... We had waltzing until 10 o'clock, when we went to the masquerade in the theater in St. Philip street.... The female company at the theater consisted of quadroons, who, however, were masked.

Such is one aspect given us by history of the New Orleans towards which that company of emigrants, first of the three that had left the other side, were toiling across the waters.

IV.

SOLD INTO BONDAGE.

They were fever-struck and famine-wasted. But February was near its end, and they were in the Gulf of Mexico. At that time of year its storms have lulled and its airs are the perfection of spring; March is a kind of May.

And March came.

They saw other s.h.i.+ps now every day; many of them going their way. The sight cheered them; the pa.s.sage had been lonely as well as stormy. Their own vessels, of course,--the other two,--they had not expected to see, and had not seen. They did not know whether they were on the sea or under it.

At length pilot-boats began to appear. One came to them and put a pilot on board. Then the blue water turned green, and by and by yellow. A fringe of low land was almost right ahead. Other vessels were making for the same lighthouse towards which they were headed, and so drew constantly nearer to one another. The emigrants line the bulwarks, watching the nearest sails. One s.h.i.+p is so close that some can see the play of waters about her bows. And now it is plain that her bulwarks, too, are lined with emigrants who gaze across at them. She glides nearer, and just as the cry of recognition bursts from this whole company the other one yonder suddenly waves caps and kerchiefs and sends up a cheer. Their s.h.i.+p is the _Johanna_.

Do we dare draw upon fancy? We must not. The companies did meet on the water, near the Mississippi's mouth, though whether first inside or outside the stream I do not certainly gather. But they met; not the two vessels only, but the three. They were towed up the river side by side, the _Johanna_ here, the _Captain Grone_ there, and the other s.h.i.+p between them. Wagner, who had sailed on the galiot, was still alive. Many years afterwards he testified:

"We all arrived at the Balize [the river's mouth] the same day. The s.h.i.+ps were so close we could speak to each other from on board our respective s.h.i.+ps. We inquired of one another of those who had died and of those who still remained."

Madame Fleikener said the same:

"We hailed each other from the s.h.i.+ps and asked who lived and who had died.

The father and mother of Madame Schuber [Kropp and his wife] told me Daniel Muller and family were on board."

But they had suffered loss. Of the _Johanna's_ 700 souls only 430 were left alive. Henry Muller's wife was dead. Daniel Muller's wife, Dorothea, had been sick almost from the start; she was gone, with the babe at her bosom. Henry was left with his two boys, and Daniel with his one and his little Dorothea and Salome. Grandsteiner, the supercargo, had lived; but of 1800 homeless poor whom the Dutch king's gilders had paid him to bring to America, foul s.h.i.+ps and lack of food and water had buried 1200 in the sea.

The vessels reached port and the pa.s.sengers prepared to step ash.o.r.e, when to their amazement and dismay Grandsteiner laid the hand of the law upon them and told them they were "redemptioners." A redemptioner was an emigrant whose services for a certain period were liable to be sold to the highest bidder for the payment of his pa.s.sage to America. It seems that in fact a large number of those on board the _Johanna_ had in some way really become so liable; but it is equally certain that of others, the Kropps, the Schultzheimers, the Koelhoffers, the Mullers, and so on, the transportation had been paid for in advance, once by themselves and again by the Government of Holland. Yet Daniel Muller and his children were among those held for their pa.s.sage money.

Some influential German residents heard of these troubles and came to the rescue. Suits were brought against Grandsteiner, the emigrants remaining meanwhile on the s.h.i.+ps. Mr. Grymes was secured as counsel in their cause; but on some account not now remembered by survivors scarce a week had pa.s.sed before they were being sold as redemptioners. At least many were, including Daniel Muller and his children.

Then the dispersion began. The people were bound out before notaries and justices of the peace, singly and in groups, some to one, some to two years' service, according to age. "They were scattered,"--so testified Frank Schuber twenty-five years afterwards,--"scattered about like young birds leaving a nest, without knowing anything of each other." They were "taken from the s.h.i.+ps," says, the jungfrau Hemin, "and went here and there so that one scarcely knew where the other went."

Many went no farther than New Orleans or its suburbs, but settled, some in and about the old rue Chartres--the Thomas family, for example; others in the then new faubourg Marigny, where Eva Kropp's daughter, Salome's young cousin Eva, for one, seems to have gone into domestic service. Others, again, were taken out to plantations near the city; Madame Fleikener to the well-known estate of Maunsell White, Madame Schultzheimer to the locally famous Hopkins plantation, and so on.

But others were carried far away; some, it is said, even to Alabama.

Madame Hemin was taken a hundred miles up the river, to Baton Rouge, and Henry Muller and his two little boys went on to Bayou Sara, and so up beyond the State's border and a short way into Mississippi.

When all his relatives were gone Daniel Muller was still in the s.h.i.+p with his little son and daughters. Certainly he was not a very salable redemptioner with his three little motherless children about his knees.

But at length, some fifteen days after the arrival of the s.h.i.+ps, Frank Schuber met him on the old customhouse wharf with his little ones and was told by him that he, Muller, was going to Attakapas. About the same time, or a little later, Muller came to the house where young Eva Kropp, afterwards Schuber's wife, dwelt, to tell her good-bye. She begged to be allowed to keep Salome. During the sickness of the little one's mother and after the mother's death she had taken constant maternal care of the pretty, black-eyed, olive-skinned G.o.dchild. But Muller would not leave her behind.

V.

THE LOST ORPHANS.

The prospective journey was the same that we saw Suzanne and Francoise, Joseph and Alix, take with toil and danger, yet with so much pleasure, in 1795. The early company went in a flatboat; these went in a round-bottom boat. The journey of the latter was probably the shorter. Its adventures have never been told, save one line. When several weeks afterwards the boat returned, it brought word that Daniel Muller had one day dropped dead on the deck and that his little son had fallen overboard and was drowned.

The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination by whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence.

Besides, the children's kindred were bound as redemptioners.

Those were days of rapid change in New Orleans. The redemptioners worked their way out of bondage into liberty. At the end of a year or two those who had been taken to plantations near by returned to the city. The town was growing, but the upper part of the river front in faubourg Ste. Marie, now in the heart of the city, was still lined with brick-yards, and thitherward cheap houses and opportunities for market gardening drew the emigrants. They did not colonize, however, but merged into the community about them, and only now and then, casually, met one another. Young Schuber was an exception; he throve as a butcher in the old French market, and courted and married the young Eva Kropp. When the fellow-emigrants occasionally met, their talk was often of poor shoemaker Muller and his lost children.

No clear tidings of them came. Once the children of some Germans who had driven cattle from Attakapas to sell them in the shambles at New Orleans corroborated to Frank Schuber the death of the father; but where Salome and Dorothea were they could not say, except that they were in Attakapas.

Frank and Eva were specially diligent inquirers after Eva's lost G.o.dchild; as also was Henry Muller up in or near Woodville, Mississippi. He and his boys were, in their small German way, prospering. He made such effort as he could to find the lost children. One day in the winter of 1820-21 he somehow heard that there were two orphan children named Miller--the Mullers were commonly called Miller--in the town of Natchez, some thirty-five miles away on the Mississippi. He bought a horse and wagon, and, leaving his own children, set out to rescue those of his dead brother. About midway on the road from Woodville to Natchez the h.o.m.ochitto Creek runs through a swamp which in winter overflows. In here Muller lost his horse. But, nothing daunted, he pressed on, only to find in Natchez the trail totally disappear.

Again, in the early spring of 1824, a man driving cattle from Attakapas to Bayou Sara told him of two little girls named Muller living in Attakapas.

He was planning another and bolder journey in search of them, when he fell ill; and at length, without telling his sons, if he knew, where to find their lost cousins, he too died.

Years pa.s.sed away. Once at least in nearly every year young Daniel Miller--the "u" was dropped--of Woodville came down to New Orleans. At such times he would seek out his relatives and his father's and uncle's old friends and inquire for tidings of the lost children. But all in vain.

Frank and Eva Schuber too kept up the inquiry in his absence, but no breath of tidings came. On the city's south side sprung up the new city of Lafayette, now the Fourth District of New Orleans, and many of the aforetime redemptioners moved thither. Its streets near the river became almost a German quarter. Other German immigrants, hundreds and hundreds, landed among them and in the earlier years many of these were redemptioners. Among them one whose name will always be inseparable from the history of New Orleans has a permanent place in this story.

VI.

CHRISTIAN ROSELIUS.

One morning many years ago, when some business had brought me into a corridor of one of the old court buildings facing the Place d'Armes, a loud voice from within one of the court-rooms arrested my own and the general ear. At once from all directions men came with decorous haste towards the spot whence it proceeded. I pushed in through a green door into a closely crowded room and found the Supreme Court of the State in session. A short, broad, big-browed man of an iron sort, with silver hair close shorn from a Roman head, had just begun his argument in the final trial of a great case that had been before the court for many years, and the privileged seats were filled with the highest legal talent, sitting to hear him. It was a famous will case[26], and I remember that he was quoting from "King Lear" as I entered.

"Who is that?" I asked of a man packed against me in the press.

"Roselius," he whispered; and the name confirmed my conjecture: the speaker looked like all I had once heard about him. Christian Roselius came from Brunswick, Germany, a youth of seventeen, something more than two years later than Salome Muller and her friends. Like them he came an emigrant under the Dutch flag, and like them his pa.s.sage was paid in New Orleans by his sale as a redemptioner. A printer bought his services for two years and a half. His story is the good old one of courage, self-imposed privations, and rapid development of talents. From printing he rose to journalism, and from journalism pa.s.sed to the bar. By 1836, at thirty-three years of age, he stood in the front rank of that brilliant group where Grymes was still at his best. Before he was forty he had been made attorney-general of the State. Punctuality, application, energy, temperance, probity, bounty, were the strong features of his character. It was a common thing for him to give his best services free in the cause of the weak against the strong. As an adversary he was decorous and amiable, but thunderous, heavy-handed, derisive if need be, and inexorable. A time came for these weapons to be drawn in defense of Salome Muller.

FOOTNOTES: [26] The will of R.D. Shepherd.

VII.

MILLER _versus_ BELMONTI.

In 1843 Frank and Eva Schuber had moved to a house on the corner of Jackson and Annunciation streets.[27] They had brought up sons, two at least, who were now old enough to be their father's mainstay in his enlarged business of "farming" (leasing and subletting) the Poydras market. The father and mother and their kindred and companions in long past misfortunes and sorrows had grown to wealth and standing among the German-Americans of New Orleans and Lafayette. The little girl cousin of Salome Muller, who as a child of the same age had been her playmate on s.h.i.+pboard at the Helder and in crossing the Atlantic, and who looked so much like Salome, was a woman of thirty, the wife of Karl Rouff.

One summer day she was on some account down near the lower limits of New Orleans on or near the river front, where the population was almost wholly a lower cla.s.s of Spanish people. Pa.s.sing an open door her eye was suddenly arrested by a woman of about her own age engaged in some humble service within with her face towards the door.

Madame Karl paused in astonishment. The place was a small drinking-house, a mere _cabaret_; but the woman! It was as if her aunt Dorothea, who had died on the s.h.i.+p twenty-five years before, stood face to face with her alive and well. There were her black hair and eyes, her olive skin, and the old, familiar expression of countenance that belonged so distinctly to all the Hillsler family. Madame Karl went in.