Their particular spleen was vented now vindictively, now humorously, on the carpet-baggers: “Only call off the carpet-baggers and you are welcome to substitute an army of hand-organists in their stead. No sounds can punish our nerves, our patience, and our tympanums so much as the ‘base bawl’ of carpet-baggers.”[32] The host of traders, capitalists, and adventurers, who had come down during and just after the war to seek a new field for investment in the conquered country, were, naturally, regarded more or less as harpies. The number was formidable, for already by the fall of 1866, between five and ten thousand Union soldiers had settled in the State.[33] The exasperating feature was that they immediately undertook to run the government for the natives, securing office through negro votes.[34] Capital, energy, and talents were desired, but not men to tend to their politics.[35] Two great facts are to be remembered in the negro question in Louisiana. In the first place the negroes were in a slight majority. After the war the Southerner saw his former slaves avoiding him, careless, insolent, acquiring habits of vagrancy, manifesting little fear in indulging their propensity for theft, believing that under the guidance of disinterested councillors, they would soon become landed proprietors without labor, scholars without study, and the social equals of their former masters. For so many years the fear of a servile insurrection had hung over him that he instinctively tried to erect a defense against it. The officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau had also helped to complicate the situation. For the most part, indiscreet army officers, often bent on their own fortunes, the directors managed the work in such an inefficient manner that the planters found it an intolerable nuisance. In the general demoralization of labor, the Southerner turned in despair to the legislature for relief and its impolitic response was the so-called “Black Codes,” which subjected the negro to oppressive restrictions not imposed upon the whites and smacked strongly of the slave codes. But it is to be remembered that the extremely rigorous code of this State was passed before the dreaded holidays of 1865-6 when the negroes were confidently expecting Uncle Sam’s gift of “forty acres and a mule.”[36] In the second place, the Gulf States had an element of especially vicious negroes, due to the fact that before the war criminals for offenses less than murder were traditionally sold “South.” There were also more free colored persons in Louisiana than in all the other Southern States, negroes who were likely to have developed some leadership and initiative,[37] but were on the average less intelligent than in most of the former slave States.[38]