On the 12th day of January, 1861, we left Freeport, Illinois, with our family, for Galveston, Texas; making that port on the Gulf of Mexico the 23d of the same month, eleven days on the passage. Galveston lies in north latitude, twenty-nine degrees, while Freeport is nearly forty-three degrees north, making about fourteen degrees difference, or one thousand miles. The distance traveled by us was about eighteen hundred miles. Just before leaving Freeport the thermometer had registered thirty degrees below zero. In Galveston it was as much above zero. A stiff norther' was blowing the day we landed, and while it was pleasant to us, just from a high northern clime, we observed that the Galvestonians, as they were passing on the streets, had overcoats on, and were muffled to the ears, hurrying to their business places and homes with the same shivering rapidity that would characterize people in a climate where the cold ranged twenty to thirty degrees below zero, and a stiff wester' or nor'wester' were beating cold music out of the icy keys of the weather.
We took the Illinois Central Railroad to Cairo, thence the fine steamer "Champion," Captain Moore. She was afterward transferred to the war service of the United States. We landed at New Orleans on the 21st of the month, which was the day before the vote on Secession was to be taken in the State of Louisiana. When time is not an important consideration with the traveler, we know of no more delightful voyage than by a first-class steamboat down the "Father of Waters" to the Crescent City--a palace on the waters, in a delicious climate, through a magnificent country in the "Sunny South," sweeping from thirty-seven to thirty degrees north latitude, but ten hundred and forty miles by the meandering river.
But the times lent an increased and somewhat fearful enchantment to the novel voyage, in January, 1861. Standing as we did, for the first time in our life, on the Ohio levee at Cairo, and still on free soil, though in sight of slave territory, just across the river in old Kentucky, where the great Henry Clay lived, and whence radiated his greatness over the world, the steamer standing at her wharf with a capacity of two thousand tons, her state-rooms taken by Southern-bound travelers, and having on board eighteen thousand bushels of corn from Egypt, we confess, as we stood there, at the hour of seven in the morning, ready with our company to take passage, and be borne away from all our free-soil associations, imagination stood on strained wing for a thousand miles down the river, essaying to divine the possible events of the next few days, and of that novel trip.