October 11th.—Mr. Mure, who has arrived here in wretched health from New Orleans, after a protracted and very unpleasant journey through country swarming with troops mixed with guerillas, tells me that I am more detested in New Orleans than I am in New York. This is ever the fate of the neutral, if the belligerents can get him between them. The Girondins and men of the juste milieu are ever fated to be ground to powder. The charges against me were disposed of by Mr. Mure, who says that what I wrote of in New Orleans was true, and has shown it to be so in his correspondence with the Governor, but, over and beyond that, I am disliked, because I do not praise the peculiar institution. He amused me by adding that the mayor of Jackson, with whom I sojourned, had published “a card,” denying point blank that he had ever breathed a word to indicate that the good citizens around him were not famous for the love of law, order, and life, and a scrupulous regard to personal liberty. I can easily fancy Jackson is not a place where a mayor suspected by the citizens would be exempted from difficulties now and then; and if this disclaimer does my friend any good, he is very heartily welcome to it and more. I have received several letters lately from the parents of minors, asking me to assist them in getting back their sons, who have enlisted illegally in the Federal army. My writ does not run any further than a Federal judge’s.
