We reached Marshall at 3 A.M., and got four hours' sleep
there. We then got into a railroad for sixteen miles, after which we were
crammed into another stage.
Crossed the frontier into Louisiana at 11 A.M. I have
therefore been nearly a month getting through the single state of Texas.
Reached Shrieveport at 3 P.M., and after washing for the
first time in five days, I called on General Kirby Smith, who commands the
whole country on this side of the Mississippi.
He is a Floridian by birth, was educated at West Point, and
served in the United States cavalry. He is only thirty-eight years old; and he
owes his rapid rise to a lieutenant-general to the fortunate fact of his having
fallen, just at the very nick of time, upon the Yankee flank at the first
battle of Manassas.1
He is a remarkably active man, and of very agreeable
manners; he wears big spectacles and a black beard.
His wife is an extremely pretty woman, from Baltimore, but
she had cut her hair quite short like a man's. In the evening, she proposed
that we should go down to the river and fish for cray-fish. We did so, and were
most successful, the General displaying much energy on the occasion.
He told me that M'Clellan might probably have destroyed the
Southern army with the greatest ease during the first winter, and without
running much risk to himself, as the Southerners were so much overerated by
their easy triumph at Manassas, and their army had dwindled away.
I was introduced to Governor Moore, of Louisiana, to the
Lieutenant-Governor Hyams, and also to the exiled Governor of Missouri, Reynolds.
Governor Moore told me he had been on the Red Eiver since
1824, from which date until 1840 it had been very unhealthy. He thinks that
Dickens must have intended Shrieveport by “Eden.”2
Governor Reynolds, of Missouri, told me he found himself in
the unfortunate condition of a potentate exiled from his dominions; but he
showed me an address which he had issued to his Missourians, promising to be
with them at the head of an army to deliver them from their oppressors.
Shrieveport is rather a decent-looking place on the Red River.
It contains about 3000 inhabitants, and is at present the seat of the
Louisianian Legislature vice Baton Rouge. But only twenty-eight members
of the Lower House had arrived as yet, and business could not be commenced with
less than fifty.
The river now is broad and rapid, and it is navigated by
large steamers; its banks are low and very fertile, but reputed to be very
unhealthy.
General Kirby Smith advised me to go to Munroe, and try to
cross the Mississippi from thence; he was so uncertain as to Alexandria that he
was afraid to send a steamer so far.
_______________
1 Called by the Yankees "Bull Run."
2 I believe this is a mistake of Governor Moore.
I have always understood Cairo was Eden.
SOURCE: Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Three
Months in the Southern States: April-June, 1863, p. 80-3
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