been, however, a corresponding increase in the number of blacks; and among these the pastor finds a wide field for labor. He loves to preach the blessed Gospel of Christ to these precious souls, who claim and receive a large measure of his time and strength. May his labors for the spiritual welfare of both classes be abundantly successful."

We have now followed our subject through the preliminary and preparatory stages of his life. We have seen him throughout a vigorous and prolonged course of training. He has developed well his brain, tongue, and pen, and all his splendid natural endowments; and so fitted himself to take a great part in the life of a great city and a vast section. He was to become in the new and larger arena not only a great religious leader, but in epochal movements the moral and political mouthpiece of the city, State, and section of his adoption. He was to be the leader of patriots, "the first citizen of Louisiana." He was to be "the public conscience," on moral matters the mouthpiece of God unto vast multitudes even of faiths differing widely from his own. Still he was to tower as a Christian minister higher than in any other role.

CHAPTER X.

THE ANTE-BELLUM PERIOD IN NEW ORLEANS.

(December, 1856-May, 1861.)

THE DR. PALMER OF DECEMBER, 1856.-THE NEW SPHERE INTO WHICH HE WENT: THE SOUTHWEST; NEW ORLEANS; AND THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.-THE BEGINNINGS IN HIS NEW PASTORATE.— HIS WORK AS A PREACHER AND TEACHER DURING THIS PERIOD.— HIS SKILL IN DEALING INDIVIDUALLY WITH MEN.-HIS WORK AS A PASTOR.-BEARING AS A MEMBER OF THE SESSION.-CARE OF THE NEGROES.-EFFORTS TO SECURE THE SPREAD OF PRESBYTERIANISM IN THE CITY. LABORS IN BEHALF OF THE CHURCH AT LARGE.-WRITINGS. OCCASIONAL SERMONS AND ADDRESSES.

THE

HE man who left Columbia, S. C., in early December, 1856, to become the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, was a striking looking man to a close observer. The superficial said, "He is an insignificant looking little fellow." He was rather under medium height, slender, agile as a cat, naturally as graceful as a leopard, simply but elegantly clad from his dainty little foot to the crown of his head. His abundant dark brown hair, cropped just below the ears, was thrown loosely back from no meanly shaped forehead. His piercing hazel eyes twinkled as he gazed penetratingly into your face. His nose was suggestive of discrimination, fastidiousness, and secretiveness; his huge mouth, when still, was clamped by strong jaws; his large lips were very mobile in speech. So strong was his chin that some observers were tempted to call him "dish-faced." He made a strong impression of alertness, and of indefinite reserve power. He made the impression of great kindness of heart and unobtrusive readiness to help his fellow men, whatever their relations.

Even to the shrewd and experienced observer, however, the casket in this case hardly appeared to be an adequate advertisement of the jewel within. The Presbyterians of New Orleans and the Southwest, in getting Dr. Palmer, got one of the first minds, and perhaps the first orator, of his day, in the great communion to which he belonged. They got him in his early prime. He had passed through the period of raw and callow youth in his brief pastorate at Savannah and in the

longer one at Columbia. Had he not been assiduous in the cultivation of his talents during those earlier pastorates, he had not been the man he was when he entered New Orleans. Perhaps he had never entered the city into which he now came. But pastorates and professorship had been extended university and seminary courses for him. He had given his splendid natural powers a splendid discipline. He had applied old acquisitions, he had been daily adding new acquisitions to the old, and applying and testing all. He was near to forty, thirtyeight, but the period of achievement was just to begin.

The commissioners from the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans had pressed the fact that the great Southwest, of which New Orleans was the metropolis, needed him there. The Southwest did need him. Newly acquired and imperial Texas needed him. The Indian Territory, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee needed him in the common beating heart of them all. They were all in the nascent state and needed such a man in New Orleans to help mould their coming civilizations for right and for God. He was wonderfully adapted to serve them in his new post. Aside from his commanding gifts and acquirements, he was a son of that South Carolina who had had so large a hand in mothering all the States just named, and had imposed her views on manners and government, so widely amongst them. When he went to them, he simply went into that greater South Carolina,—went amongst people, who in spite of very considerable differences, were substantially at one with South Carolina in regard to social and civil matters. His great sphere of influence was still within the South Carolina belt. Thus by the South Carolina spirit and character as well as by his singular and extraordinary endowments he was most happily adapted to labor in this quarter.

The State of Louisiana, as indeed some of the others, had not a little in its civilization to differentiate it from that of South Carolina. It had been settled by the French in 1682; and for upwards of four score years the French gave character to its civilization. Between 1762 and 1766 the territory passed to the possession of Spain, much to the chagrin of the colonists. During the last three and a quarter decades of the eighteenth century, Spain was making her contribution to the civilization already established. In 1801 the country was retroceded to France. In 1803 the United States purchased the

country, together with the whole vast territory to the northwest and lying westward from the Mississippi River, paying to France eighty millions of francs therefor. Meanwhile immigrants had been coming in from other sources, principally German and American; and after the purchase, Americans from the New England and the Eastern States, and especially from the Southern States flocked into the land. The population became cosmopolitan. The civilizations of the Latin European peoples and of the North Europeans were brought together, and produced a type not exactly paralleled in any of the sister States. The Latin civilization in both French and Spanish forms had been first on the ground and long remained the dominating factor. It furnished the code of laws, a modification and adaptation of the Code Napoleon, which the State has retained and applies down to this day. It furnished the dominant religion also, in Roman Catholicism, which up to the American purchase was the established religion. In these particulars are found differentiating marks of Louisiana civilization; others might be pointed out. The Louisiana type of Romanism had never been fanatical, it is true; the people had opposed, with horror and defiance, the attempt made during the Spanish regime, to institute the Spanish Inquisition amongst them; nor had they been wanting in a more positive sort of liberality. The modified Code Napoleon was a very superior system. The peculiarities of the Louisiana civilization demanded, indeed, of the minister who should go from elsewhere to labor in the Delta State, no small tact and a certain generous breadth of sympathies. These Dr. Palmer possessed in an unusual degree. He inherited them from his mother and from his mother State.

Moreover, in his possession of South Carolina courtesy, the South Carolina sense of honor in its noblest and Christian form, the South Carolina magnification of the rights of the State, and the South Carolina views of slavery, he was peculiarly fitted to accomplish a great work. In Louisiana, with all its peculiarities, he was still within the zone in which South Carolina theories prevailed.

The commercial heart of the Southwest and still more of Louisiana was New Orleans, where the people of his faith had risen and, like the man in the Macedonian vision which Paul saw, had cried, "Come over and help us." This city had been founded in 1718, by Jean Baptiste Lemoyne de Bienville,

a French Canadian, Governor of the French colony which in 1699 had been planted by his brother D'Iberville on the shores of the Gulf, along the eastern margin of the Bay of Biloxi.

The colony of Biloxi had grown but slowly. Bienville's new colony had made better progress; and in 1803, when the territory passed into political connection with the United States, its population numbered 10,000, being made up mostly of French Creoles and their slaves. The influx of American immigrants after the Purchase was very great. The dream of LaSalle, that by commanding the Mississippi River Frenchmen might command the commerce of China which he supposed would flow down the newly discovered channel, had been abandoned; but men believed in the vast promise of New Orleans. The Sage of Monticello, had predicted on purchasing Louisiana, that New Orleans would become "not only the greatest commercial city in America, but in the world;" and he gave very good reasons for the prediction. He pointed out, for instance, that it was the natural port of the Mississippi Valley, which he foresaw was to become "the seat of a great and populous empire, and that all the varied products of that valley would find their way to New Orleans by a thousand streams; while in the South lay Mexico, Cuba, and the tropics." The city sat at the gateway of the Continent and seemed the best place to handle the immense trade that must spring up between the Mississippi Valley and the tropics on the one hand, and Europe on the other. Between 1830 and 1840, no other city in the United States kept pace with this one in growth. When the census of 1840 was taken, it was found to be the fourth city in population, exceeded only by New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. It also stood "fourth amongst all the ports of the world, with only London, Liverpool and New York ahead." It was even ahead of New York in the export of domestic products.

The prosperity of New Orleans, which appeared inevitable in view of her natural advantages received three mighty blows: the building of the Erie Canal which furnished a cheap northern route from the great Northwest to the Eastern markets; the invention by Stephenson of the steam locomotive, and the building of railways, which annihilated the supreme importance of water-ways for commercial purposes; and the war between

'Norman Walker, in Richtor's History of New Orleans.