8th May (Friday).—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 McClellan 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 over-elated 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 River 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.
I heard much talk at his house about the late Federal raid into Mississippi,[3] which seems to be a copy of John Morgan’s operations, except that the Federal raid was made in a thinly populated country, bereft of its male inhabitants.
[1] Called by the Yankees “Bull Run.”
[2] I believe this is a mistake of Governor Moore. I have always understood Cairo was Eden.
[3] Grierson’s raid
