Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[524] midnight, at the foot of the bluff on which the town stands, and whchi was then crowned with the ruins of the cotton warehouses and other buildings, fired by Forrest.¹ We spent a greater part of the next day there. It, too, must have been a beautiful city in its best estate before the war. It was growing rapidly, being the great coal and cotton depot of that region. Its streets were broad, and many of them shaded; and, in all parts of the town, we noticed ever and full-flowing fountains of water, rising from artesian wells, one of which forms the tail-piece of this chapter. It received its title from Senator King of Alabama, the Vice-President elected with President Pierce. The name may be found in the poems of Ossian.

We left Selma toward evening, and at sunset our vessel was moored a few minutes at Cahawba, to land a passenger whose name has been mentioned, as the entertainer of Wilson and Forrest.² Our voyage to Mobile did not end until the morning of the third day, when we had traveled, from Montgomery, nearly four hundred miles. In that fine City of the Gulf we spent sufficient time to make brief visits to places of most

Ruins at the Landing place, Selma.

historic interest, within and around it. Its suburbs were very beautiful before they were scarred by the implements of war; but the hand of nature was rapidly covering up the foot-prints of the destroyer. Although it had been only a year since the lines of fortifications were occupied by troops, the embankments were covered with verdure and the fort or redoubt, delineated on page 507, was white with the blossoms of the blackberry shrub, when the writer sketched it.

It was at a little past noon , on a warm April day, when we left Mobile for New Orleans, in the fine new steamer, Frances. We passed the various batteries indicated on the map on page 507, as we went out of the harbor into the open waters of the bay. A little below Choctaw Point, and between it and Battery Gladden,³ lay a half-sunken iron-clad floating battery, with a cannon on its top. The voyage down the bay was very delightful. We saw the

Floating Battery.

battered light-house at Fort Morgan,⁴ in the far distance, to the left, as we turned into Grant's Pass,⁵ and took the inner passage. The waters of the Gulf were smooth; and at dawn the next morning, we were moored at the railway wharf on the western sidle of Lake Pontchartrain. We were at the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, in time for an early break-fast;