Very particular.
Mr. John F. Munroe is the worshipful Secession Mayor of New Orleans; and although we cannot recognize any man as a public officer who has repudiated his allegiance to the United States, yet, as somebody must do the epistolizing on the insurgent side, Munroe is perhaps as good as another for the purpose. His exceedingly cool letter of the 20th ult. to Capt. Farragut shows that he does not by any means intend to be “diddled out of the sweets of his unfortunate situation.” He is quite ready to surrender the city, but he wishes to do it genteelly; like the unhappy man at the Old Bailey, who insisted upon being carried up the scaffold stairs, as he could not conscientiously in any way be a party to his own death. So Mayor, or Ex-Mayor, or Mock-Mayor Munroe is highly fastidious. As for pulling down the Secession flag, he cannot do it; for he says that his “hand would be paralyzed at the very thought of such an act.” Also “his heart.” This would seem to settle the matter; for, medically considered, paralysis of the heart is no joke, and is really a sort of complaint which it is not safe to indulge in oftener than three times a day, if so often. After this, Mayor Munroe begins to whimper in the following feeble style: “You have a gallant people to administrate during your occupancy of this city — a people sensitive to all that can in the least affect their dignity and self-respect. Pray, sir, do not fail to regard their susceptibilities.” [235] Oho! Sets the wind in that quarter? Will anybody learned in the black art tell us by what necromancy, thaumaturgy, prestidigitation, or whatever you may call it, the boot has been so rapidly and miraculously transferred to the other leg? How have the “susceptibilities” of Union men fared in New Orleans, or anywhere else, for that matter, in the revolted States? low in East Tennessee, for instance? In this very city of New Orleans, the putative Mayor of which now bawls for mercy, and shivers with guilty apprehension in his official robes, how safe has it been for any man — ay! or for any woman, to question the morality of treason, or the duty of dissolution, or the exceeding beauty of Slavery, or the omniscience of Davis, or the invincibility of Beauregard? Why, it was only the other day that we quoted from what was once a respectable New Orleans newspaper, ample evidence of the existence of a reign of terror in that city. Men who refused to take up arms in defence of the “Confederacy” were threatened with the direst penalties — imprisonment, confiscation, or even death! Mechanics of Northern birth, who remained loyal to their country, have been swindled out of their wages, locked up, or forced to march in the traitor ranks. Schoolmistresses have been treated in more than one instance with excessive cruelty. Clergymen, guilty only of fidelity to their ordination vows, have been haled from their pulpits and banished. But why do we thus dwell upon. special instances? Can any honest and intelligent reader deny that Secession, wickedly needless and unprovoked in [236] its beginning, has been coarse and blood-thirsty in its progress? and now, when our victorious arms are advancing once more to the establishment of law and order, this mincing Mayor, who would not have lifted one of his pens to save any Unionist from death at a lamp-post, trusts that the “susceptibilities” of Secessionists will be regarded! We thought that we knew something of magisterial impudence up this way, but we hereby renounce all laurels in that line. We have nobody here to compete with Mayor Munroe! Pray, why did n't he go just a little further? Why did n't he make a pension for life, a bonus of $100,000, a gold snuff-box, and a gift of five hundred “niggers,” the inexorable condition of his surrender? Why did n't he insist, while he was about it, upon having Capt. Farragut's sword? Why did n't he stipulate that the Secession banner should remain flung to the breeze — should not be pulled down at all — should still flaunt and flutter to soothe “the susceptibilities” of the late Mayor of New Orleans? Then there was one other thing which stirred up “the susceptibility” of this ill-treated gentleman. “The city is yours,” he writes, with indignation, “by the power of brutal force.” This is shameful. To be sure, we have never heard of besieged cities taken in any other way but “by the power of brutal force ;” but New Orleans, we suppose, should have been an exception. We should have captured it by some kind of human weakness. But Capt. Farragut did not see the matter exactly in that light. He went to work in the old-fashioned way, which was [237] certainly reprehensible. The truth is, when a city is taken, it is absolutely necessary that somebody should pull the flag down — it's a way they have in war. Another truth is, that if the Secessionists are so exceeding susceptible, they should secure the comfort of their own delicate nerves by setting us a good example. There is a certain guerrilla chief, Morgan by name, who is hanging Unionists at the West in rather a free and easy, not to say reckless way; and lately he varied his murderous performances by hanging a boy! There also seems to have been a good deal of unnecessary butchery of our wounded at Pittsburg Landing, and upon other fields. If the susceptible citizens of New Orleans will form a General Susceptible Society for the Promotion of Humanity and the Prevention of Scalping, with Albert Pike for President, perhaps the next time they are called upon to apprehend — not really feel — the miseries which have been inflicted on others, they will be just a trifle manlier in their appeals. Above all, they should suppress Mayor Munroe at once. He is evidently too “susceptible” for the wear and tear of public life.May 6, 1862.
