ridge-Taylor made it immortal and Gottschalk
wrote his Negro dance. Camp street and Julia
street took their names from the old Negro field
and from the woman who owned land along the
Canal. Americans and Spanish both tried to get
the support and sympathy of the free Negroes.
The followers of Aaron Burr courted them.
“Writers describing the New Orleans of this period agree in presenting a picture of a continental city, most picturesque, most un-American, and as varied in color as a street of Cairo. There they saw French, Spaniards, English, Bohemians, Negroes, mulattoes, varied clothes, picturesque white dresses of the fairer women, brilliant cottons of the darker ones. The streets, banquettes, we should say, were bright with color, the nights filled with song and laughter. Through the scene, the people of color add the spice of color; in the life, they add the zest of romance.”[1]
Music is always back of this gay Negro spirit and the folk song which the Negro brought to America was developed not simply by white men but by the Negro himself. Musicians and artists sprung from the Louisiana group. There was Eugene Warburg who distinguished himself as a sculptor in Italy. There was Victor Sejour who became a poet and composer in France, Dubuclet
- ↑ Alice Dunbar-Nelson in Journal of Negro History, Vol. 2, p. 55.
