Francis Bacon to Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey
July 6th, 1863.
My present experiment is trying whether I am equal to that American standard of ability “to keep a hotel,”—the St. Louis Hotel, to wit. It is a fine building over in the French quarter of the city. Chocolate-colored old gentlemen with white moustaches, much given to wearing of nankeen and seersucker and twirling of bamboo sticks, (whom tortures could not compel to speak three words of English, nor a general conflagration drive across Canal street into the American region,) prowl thereabout, and scowl French detestation at the interloping Yankee as he passes in and out of their national hotel. The rattle of dominoes, upon marble tables in cafes all about, is incessant, and on Sundays rises almost to the sublime.
The St. Louis was a good hotel, but makes a bad hospital. I remonstrated as stoutly as I could against its being taken for the purpose, but, with a fixity of will which I would have preferred to see exercised in some other direction, the order came for the St. Louis to be a hospital, and for me to be Surgeon in charge. So now, making the best of it, though my rooms are mostly small and my passages narrow, I have a superb marble entrance with two big lions, one dormant, one couchant, “to comfort me on my entablature.” .
The labor of starting the Hospital has been immense, . . . for nothing about the house that could be disordered, from the steam-engine in the cellar to the water-tanks upon the roof, was in working order. . . . On the 16th I had to receive a steamboat load of patients, all of the poor fellows wounded, from Banks’ second assault of Port Hudson; hourly, for the past week, we have been painfully expecting another such arrival from his third. . . .
Thank Heaven, the patients have done well! I am going to send as many North on furloughs as possible, convalescence is so slow and uncertain in this climate.
How wonderfully cheerful these wounded men always are! You should see one of our pets, a young fellow about twenty-one years old, from a New York regiment, Kretzler by name. Right thigh amputated, right fore-arm the same, shell wound as big as my two hands in the left thigh, ugly wound under the jaw, scratches about left hand and arm. He never complains of anything, takes all the beefsteak and porter we can give him, insisting on helping himself to the latter and drinking it from the bottle. He sits up in his bed a large part of the time, smoking his pipe with an expression of perfect serenity. When I ask him how he does, it is always “bully,” with a triumphant air. Passing near his room the other day, I heard him singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a robust style, with the remark in conclusion, “There, guess them Rebs won’t like that much,” alluding thereby to a lot of hulking scoundrels of Texans, prisoners, wounded at Donaldsonville, and lying in a room within ear-shot of him, as well as to some female visitors of theirs, who, having no longer the salutary fear of Ben. Butler before their eyes, were making their sympathies a little too apparent. This kind of cats I pretty uniformly exclude now, and as a consequence, when they find themselves baffled, I have some highly dramatic interviews with them, almost at the risk of my eyes, I sometimes feel.
I reluctantly confess that I am subjugated and crushed by a woman who sings The Star-Spangled Banner copiously through all the wards of my hospital. . . . She weighs three hundred pounds. She comes every morning, early. She wears the Flag of our Country pinned across her heart. She comes into my room, my own office, unabashed by the fact that I am the Surgeon in charge, and that an orderly in white gloves stands at the door. She looks me in the eye with perfect calmness and intrepidity. She takes off her sunbonnet and mantilla and lays them upon my table, over my papers, as if they were rare and lovely flowers of the tropics. She knocks off three of my pens with her brown parasol, worn out in the joint, and begins to exude small parcels from every pocket. . . She nurses tenderly, and feeds and cries over the bad cases. Poor Martin Rosebush, a handsome, smooth-faced, good boy from New Hampshire, desperately wounded and delirious, would start up with a cry of joy when she came, and died with his arms around her neck, calling her his mammy.
Jerry Cammett, a peaceful giant, grown as they grow them in Maine, with pink cheeks, bright-yellow beard, and handsome blue eyes as free from guile as a baby’s, lies with his right thigh amputated. After each visit she makes him, I hear the effect it has upon Jerry in about three hours of steady quiet whistling to himself of funny, twiddling Methodist hymns.
Of course I do not encourage the visits of this creature with the Flag of our Country and the National Anthem. On the contrary, they encourage me.
So do those of “Olympe, sare, natif to ze citie.” She is a stately, sybilline old black, or rather brown woman, everything in her appearance indicating great age, except her intensely black and glittering eyes, which still show the fire of youth. She wears a most elaborate turban of Madras handkerchiefs, a dress of fine and exquisitely white muslin, handsome pearl drops in her ears, and around her wrinkled neck a string of large beads of that deep yellow, almost tawny gold, which comes with ivory and palm-oil from the African coast. She brings little parcels of extremely nice lint, small pots of jelly, and bottles of orange-flower syrup, all made, she would have me know, with her own hands in her own house; this she says with great dignity, and shows me how carefully she wraps them up so that the Confederate ladies, her neighbors, shall not know that she brings them to Union soldiers. I fancy that if one should sit down with this old lady, and, in French, talk oneself into her confidence, she would prove immensely entertaining and instructive.
Captain Charles Rockwell’s appearance was a very pleasant surprise to me. I hoped that he would be assigned to duty in the city here, but, the day after his arrival, he was ordered up to Port Hudson. . . .
July 10th.
P. S. Let us have a season of felicitation over Vicksburg and Port Hudson, from both of which we have got the good news since I stopped writing.
The rage and incredulity of the Secesh are really comical, and fill my soul with an infinite peace.
Now send us good news of what cometh to Lee of the wicked raid, and all may be well.
