User:Jengod/Contraband

The accomplished officers who presided over the scenes daily enacted in this barracoon was the "Military Governor of Opelousas," Col. Chickering, of the 41st Massachusetts regiment, who occupied the most conspicuous residence, fronting the entrance of the church. From his eligible position he had, as from the royal box at the opera, the most comprehensive view of the scenes passing beneath. Morning and evening, as he promenaded his spacious gallery, in all the glitter of military button and strap, he passed in review the living panorama before him, which was to furnish such valuable acquisitions to the confiscated plantations on the Lafourche and the coast. The scenes which he so complacently surveyed will long live in the memory of the then inhabitants of the town. In one place groups of human beings, with melancholy faces, were crouched on the earth around some decaying embers; in another, men, women and children were moving in some African dance to the discordant chant of a hundred voices; in another, crowds were reclining in listless idleness on the ground, in every attitude that betrays the vacant mind; in another, half clad men and women were feasting and rioting amidst peals and shouts of unearthly merriments; in another, awkward field hands, grotesquely dressed, were being taken through the exercises of squad drill and the manual of arms, while in the midst of all these scenes blue-coated officers and men were seen in amorous dalliance with the colored Aspasias of the town, exhibiting, in their degradation, a contempt for the commonest decencies of life. Nor was the spectacle less humiliating in the church. From its sacred chancel a half-crazy negro, with the voice of a Stentor and the fire of Peter the Hermit, declaimed in a barbaric jargon to an auditory whose appreciation was manifested in wild shouts and screams. The declamation of the preacher, in which the name of God was connected with ideas of heathen superstition, seemed to light up in the minds of his hearers the dormant spark of African barbarism which had smouldered for generations.

The camp was moved to Port Barre on May 10, 1863.