Everywhere one observed the same signs of reaction. The returning Rebel soldiers seemed to have called into active utterance all the hostility to Northerners that for nearly four years had lain latent. Men quoted the North Carolina proclamation, and thanked God that there had suddenly been found some sort of a breakwater against Northern fanaticism. There were whispers that Governor Wells (who had been nominated as Lieutenant-Governor on the ticket with Governor Hahn, under the Banks military reorganization, and who, on Hahn’s election as Senator, had succeeded to the Governorship), was about going over to the planting (that is, to the Rebel) party. He had got all he could out of the Free-State party; as his old friends returned, and as the North Carolina proclamation emboldened him, he naturally drifted to the side where his sympathies had always drawn him. But a day or two before, this sallow-faced little official, who, but for the necessities of the Banks reorganization, would never have risen from the obscurity of his remote Red River plantation,[31] had received a young Northern officer, settled in New Orleans, and an applicant for an office which he thought he could fill. The Governor had already begun the free appointment of Rebel officers, but a Northern officer who had been wounded on the loyal side—to the success of which side alone he owed his position—presented a different sort of a case. “The truth is, sir, that we’re very much obliged to you for all you Northern gentlemen have done; but now that you are successful, you had better go home. Louisiana must be governed by Louisianians!” The bubbling of the political caldron was at its hight. General Banks had removed Mr. Kennedy, the Mayor of the city. In turn, he had himself been superseded, and now it was rumored that the representations of his creature, the Governor, who had betrayed him, having been listened to at Washington, his humiliation was to be made complete by the restoration of Kennedy. Such was the reward already being reaped for the proscription of Durant, Flanders, and the other genuine Union men of the State, in the mongrel military reorganization.