Such is the character of the educated French Creole planters of
Louisiana--a people freer from the vices of the age, and fuller of the
virtues which ennoble man, than any it has fallen to my lot to find in
the peregrinations of threescore years and ten. The Creoles, and
especially the Creole planters, have had little communication with any
save their own people. The chivalry of character, in them so
distinguishing a trait, they have preserved as a heritage from their
ancestors, whose history reads more like a romance than the lives and
adventures of men, whose nobility of soul and mind was theirs from a
long line of ancestors, and brought with them to be planted on the
Mississippi in the character of their posterity.
Is it the blood, the rearing, or the religion of these people which
makes them what they are? They are full of passion; yet they are gentle
and forbearing toward every one whom they suppose does not desire to
wrong or offend them; they are generous and unexacting, abounding in
the charity of the heart, philanthropic, and seemingly from instinct
practising toward all the world all the Christian virtues.
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