Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/59

Rh amid inundations and hurricanes, and with small prospect of ever becoming that “crescent city” which it now is.

The population of Lousiana did not exceed fifty thousand souls, not reckoning the Indians, when it was incorporated with the United States. Seven years later the amount of its population was threefold. The new epoch, and new life, however, of both Louisiana and New Orleans, first commenced when, in the year 1812, the first steamboat came thither upon the Great River. This was soon followed by hundreds of other steamboats, and New Orleans rapidly increased to a city of the first rank among the cities of the south.

The whole of Louisiana is flat, in part swampy and under water, and in part rich and fertile country; sugar, cotton, maize, rice, indigo, are the products of Louisiana. In the northern portion, where the sand elevates itself into little hills, are forests, which abound in many kinds of trees, oak, chesnut, walnut, sassafras, magnolia and poplar. In the south the palmetto, mulberry, live-oak, cedar and pine, and everywhere an abundant growth of the wild vine. There are also many navigable rivers, tributaries of the Mississippi, which, as well as bogs and small lakes, abound in alligators. These alligators, though they do not venture to attack full-grown men, not unfrequently carry off little negro children. Louisiana is said to produce many poisonous plants, serpents, and other noxious creatures. It seems to me an undesirable place in every way. I would not live in it for all its sugar and cotton.

I must now tell something of the internal history of New Orleans, or rather a story which has struck me. That noble-minded Mr. Poinsett, the old ex-minister of South Carolina, told me that slavery seemed to operate still more prejudicially on women than on men, and that women not unfrequently were found to be the cruellest slave-owners. And, whether it was a mere accident or a