William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[23] of good houses handed their tenements over to the State. All salaries, except the eighteen dollars paid each week to Kellogg's Negro senators, were in arrear. Teachers and professors went unpaid. Colleges and schools were closed. The river companies, unable to get their dues, stinted the supplies of water. Rich and poor were equally distressed. Some nights the streets were dark, the gasmen having stopped the mains. The streets of New Orleans are never safe at night, but in the darkness of that reign of anarchy, every evil thing came forth. Policemen levied black-mail on every shop. These servants of the public carried arms, and men with arms will never starve. Food rose in price. Fish grew scarce and mutton dear. The prisons and asylums were neglected, and their inmates, like those of Naples and Seville, were left to rot in filth and rags. Levees were broken through; and fertile fields lay under water. Weeds and mosses sprang up rich and rank. The cotton fields seemed wasting into jungle, the ramparts crumbling into the river, and streets and gardens rotting in a physical and moral blight.

Proud and beautiful New Orleans! Ruined in