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[27]
republican institutions.
The tyranny would be undisguised, and Louisiana governed like the Duchy of Warsaw.
Yet the citizens preferred a man of iron to a carpet-bagger; anything being better than adventurers having no other hold on the country than the support of an alien soldiery and a Negro mob.
A resolution was carried that five citizens should proceed to the State House, in St. Louis Street, and in the name of a free and sovereign people, request William P. Kellogg, as a stranger in their city, to retire.
Kellogg shut himself in his apartments, with his Negro guard, but sent out Billings and an officer of his staff to parley with his visitors.
“You ask the Governor to retire!”
said Billings, “He refuses to hear a message from a body of armed men, accompanied by a menace.”
The crowd in Canal Street were not armed, as Kellogg and Billings knew.
An hour later, Packard telegraphed to Attorney-general Williams:
“The people assembled at the meeting were generally unarmed.”
This talk about armed men was meant for Washington and New York, not for New Orleans.
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