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Reminiscences of the Confederacy.
From the New Orleans, La., Picayune, October 27, 1907.
J. U. Payne, of New Orleans, La.—His devotion to, and sacrifices for, the Cause.
In the year 1892 I bought from
Mr. J. U. Payne, of New Orleans, his summer home, Rosehart,
Pass Christian, Miss.
It had been closed for some years.
The grounds were grown up with cane and weeds to a colossal height and were impenetrable.
The place fronts 250 feet on the
Shell Beach Boulevard, from which a beach lot sloped down to the
Gulf of Mexico.
From this lot a pier 1,080 feet long extended to the channels in the gulf.
At the end of it was an octagon house containing eight rooms, for tearooms and bathrooms, surrounded by a gallery.
About fifty yards beyond the bath-house was a dance platform in the lake.
In the olden times a negro band played on the platform.
In the evening the boats rowed up to the pier, which was lighted, and guests were received and entertained there.
During the yachting season yachts were anchored along the channels off the pier.
On the shore was an old boathouse, with some decayed boats as relics.
The house itself was built in three sections, having pavilions around an open square called the ‘Plazita.’
The central section was copied exactly in the building of
Beauvoir, which was for years the home of
ex-President Davis, and about sixteen miles east of Rosehart.
The gallery, about fifteen feet wide and fifteen feet high, extended around the central pavilion, which was on elevated pillars above the ground.
The two side pavilions contained bedrooms, kitchen, etc., a two-story gallery extending around them.
In the rear were a windmill and deep well, a laundry cottage and a bachelors' cottage, which was used for housing bachelors over Sunday, and for card games at night.
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Between the plazita and the bachelors' cottage was an orange grove containing seventy-five trees, from twenty to thirty feet high, yielding the luscious
Louisiana oranges, now nearly extinct, yet they were certainly the best oranges in the world.
These trees were in bloom nearly all the time, and we bitterly lamented their loss by the great freeze of 1896.
Back of these were the vegetable gardens and stables, and on Second Street, or Rear Road, were the long negro quarters.
Behind these quarters we owned a broad stretch of pine forest, extending back beyond a beautiful bayou.
We set the bayou in aquatic plants, and built among the solemn pines a log resthouse for our many invalid guests who needed ‘pine air.’
It took a large force of men many months to dig out, replant and put this place in order; but it made us a beautiful home for fourteen years and was beloved by us all. It had been built by educated slaves owned by
Mr. Payne, out of timber cut on his ground and thoroughly dried, in the year 1846, and the main part of the house remains as sound to-day as then, although, owing to the extremely damp climate, the life of lumber and timber there is short.
Mr. Payne had used this house as a summer house; I bought it for a winter home.
He was at that time eighty-four years old, and one of the most charming men I ever met. He told me it would require seventeen servants to properly run the place, as it had seventeen bedrooms.
We got along, however, very nicely with from seven to nine.
His winter home in New Orleans was one of the largest houses on this side of the ocean, containing a great number of large rooms, and was built of brick with ample grounds.
Prior to the war
Mr. Payne was a strong Union man. His most intimate and valued personal friend was
Jefferson Davis.
They disagreed as to secession.
Mr. Pavne at that time owned many sugar plantations in
Louisiana and cotton plantations in
Mississippi.
He also had offices and warehouses in New Orleans, and was the largest exporter of cotton and sugar and the greatest creator of foreign exchange.
He owned 300 or 400 slaves, who were well cared for, contented and happy.
He had a large capital invested in business, and hundreds of planters
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were indebted to him for the supply of corn, bacon and household articles, it being the custom to obtain these in advance from their merchants and to pay when they sold their crops of cotton and sugar.
Nearly all the great planters were thus in debt.
Mr. Payne himself carried a considerable debt, and also carried a very large cash balance.
When the seven States which first formed the
Confederacy at
Montgomery, Ala., had passed their secession ordinances and organized their Government by electing
Jefferson Davis President, they seem for the first time to have thought about finances.
There is nothing more astonishing now than to look back and see with what utter disregard of consequences and lack of plans for the future that war was entered upon by the
South.
The South had no store of arms and ammunition, except as nearly every individual was the owner of a rifle or shotgun.
They had few small factories capable of making cannons, guns or powder, and almost no clothing or shoe factories, and practically the
Southern States were given over to the growth of cotton.
Their leaders were highly intelligent people and held the ‘free trade’ doctrines taught by
Mill and others, and in forming their Constitution inserted a free trade clause, thus depriving themselves of the benefit of custom revenues.
They also, of course, maintained the doctrine of ‘State rights,’ and, therefore, did not authorize their newly-created Government to collect the direct tax necessary for carrying on the war; and when they had created a president and cabinet, these officers found themselves without any money or any provisions for setting in motion the wheels of the new Government.
Mr. Davis telegraphed from
Montgomery to
Mr. J. U. Payne, at New Orleans, announcing the formation of the
Government and saying: ‘Your State calls upon you to do your duty and to come at once to
Montgomery and bring with you all the money you can raise.’
Mr. Payne had been fortifying himself, owing to the ominous outlook, and succeeded in raising and took with him to
Montgomery a large sum in
gold coin, which he turned over to
Mr. Davis.
The latter insisted that he should have Government bonds for it, and there were accordingly printed at the old printing office in
Montgomery 750 bonds of $1,000 each, roughly gotten up and promising ‘to pay sixty days
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after the declaration of peace or recognition of the Southern Confederacy.’
These bonds remained in
Mr. Payne's hands, becoming, of course, entirely worthless, and long after the war he gave to his favorite granddaughter enough of them to paper her bedroom or boudoir.
What became of the rest I do not know.
Mr. Payne's export business was, of course, stopped at once by the
Federal blockade.
The planters who owed him were unable to pay. The Federal troops later on seized his plantations and destroyed most of the sugar, cotton press houses, and even the fences.
His great home in New Orleans, which was crowded with works of art and vertu accumulated by years of traveling and careful selections in
Europe, was seized by the
Federals and used as a residence by some of the officers.
Much of the silver, paintings and bric-a-brac was shipped to
New England by
Butler and other officers to their homes.
This is probably the origin of the story of
General Butler and the spoons.
They were never recovered, and it was many years before
Mr. Payne regained possession of his home in New Orleans.
Within the two years after the beginning of the war
Mr. Payne found himself stripped of every earthly possession of value and in debt over $700,000. He bravely went to work to pay this debt off, and after some sixteen or eighteen years of hard work he succeeded in paying it all. When I last saw him he was ninty-four or ninty-six years old, and was at his office and dealing in cotton every day. I went in to pay my respects, and told him I had come to New Orleans to buy a team of horses.
He at once jumped up and took his cane and, with the beautiful manner which he had, insisted on going with me to see that I fell into the hands of the right man and was properly treated.
He was a man of the purest life and most beautiful spirit, and his manners were quite perfect.
He died quietly in his own home in the care of his daughter at the age of ninty-seven, and out of debt.
He was probably at the outbreak of the war the second richest man in
America, certainly the richest man in the
Southern States, his slave property alone having been
Rosehart was named from a great heart-shaped rose bed between the house and the boulevard some seventy-eight feet in diameter and containing 300 rosebuds, in which we took great
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pride.
My wife, being a botanist, by extensively corresponding and exchanging with other rose-lovers in
Florida,
California, and even
Europe, contrived to restore and keep up the reputation of the place for roses, so that we had at one time 700 or 800 bushes in bloom.
The roses there are fragile and cannot be shipped, but are beautiful in texture, form and color, and all fragrant, quite in contrast to the
California roses.
Some of the rare roses we brought from
California, which were without fragrance in
California, later assumed that quality in Rosehart.
Mr. Payne retained his friendship for
Mr. Davis, who died in his New Orleans home; but, of course, like all other old Southerners, would have made great sacrifices for the old flag long before he died.
