Call us what you may, but we southerners are a romantic lot. Perhaps it is because so many of us hailed from the hinterlands - Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or Ireland - that we're drawn to the turf and the sound of thundering hooves and the sight of thoroughbreds pounding around a track. November 12 was the 18th running of the Charleston Cup, a steeplechase race hosted by the South Carolina Jockey Club at Stono Ferry. As this column is being written, the Colonial Cup is being run on the famed Springdale course in Camden and preparations are already being made for the Aiken and Elloree Trials in March 2012. Though horseracing is still popular throughout the South, it's Kentucky's Keeneland and Churchill Downs that attract national interest today. However, in the 19th century it was the Crescent City, New Orleans, that captivated French Impressionist and noted equine artist, Edgar Degas. The canvasses painted by Degas during his Louisiana sojourn will forever be trademarks of Southern culture.

The horse has been a theme of artists since classical times, and Degas, along with fellow Frenchman, Eug<0x00E8>ne Delacroix, featured Europe's finest bloodlines in scenes that celebrated their fleet-footed dominance of the turf. "Race Horses" is a famous canvas that has been reproduced numerous times for jockey clubs around the Western world, and so has his "At the Races," and his "Jockey in Blue on a Chestnut Horse." Southerners who to this day believe the old adage that,"A horse without a rider is still a horse, but that a man without a horse is only a man," have almost spiritual reverence for Degas' depiction of the noble creatures so cherished by warriors and sportsmen alike.

Artists argue among themselves about which school influenced Degas more - the Impressionists, the Realists or the Romantics. When we view his 1873 painting entitled "Portraits in a New Orleans Cotton Office," we are drawn to gentlemen factors grading cotton on long tables in the New Orleans Cotton Exchange - a scene common to southern cities from Nashville to Mobile to Charleston. Top hat, cigar, fine horses and bourbon completed the Southern gentleman's equipage as he speculated on the futures market. No one could foresee the demise of the "Cotton Republic" after its rebirth in the wake of the failed Confederacy - nothing seemed able to dethrone "King Cotton" except that insidious insect known as the boll weevil. Degas captured the essence of post-Civil War New Orleans 50 years before the boll weevil plague cast a pall across the Old South.

Degas was one of us, for his mother and grandmother were New Orleans ladies - Creoles born a half mile from the Mississippi River. When Degas arrived in New Orleans in 1872, the 38-year-old artist embraced the sultry, sinful city as if were his native Paris. There was a similarity if one used some imagination - the dampness of New Orleans and its occasional floods bore resemblance to Paris where workmen occasionally built levees to contain the Seine at Quai d' Orsay just as New Orleans citizens did near Canal Street. Then, too, New Orleans bore marks of the recent war and it was a city under occupation by Federal Troops while Degas was in residence. Ironically, the artist's beloved Paris was occupied by Prussian soldiers following the defeat of his country in the Franco-Prussian War. An air of "bowed, but unbeaten" prevailed then in both cities.

Edgar Degas had been a rifleman in Patrice de Mac-Mahon, Duke of Magenta's I Corps, in the four-month siege of Paris in 1870, a mere two years prior to his arrival in New Orleans. He'd just experienced the turbulent period known as the Paris Commune where unemployed workers called themselves Communards and followed the leadership of socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui. Blanqui was a popular leader who advocated that government endorse a more equitable distribution of wealth. The commerce that Degas witnessed from Chartres Street to Peters Street in New Orleans made him optimistic that his uncle, Rene de Gas (the old aristocratic spelling shunned by the artist) would regain his prewar prominence in the city.

In the celebrated painting that Degas did of his uncle's cotton exchange, Rene de Gas is portrayed in the upper left leaning nonchalantly against the window frame. In the foreground is New Orleans cotton merchant Michel Musson as he is depicted sitting in a chair pulling a boll of cotton fiber apart with his fingers. At the time that Degas painted this canvas, Michel Musson was the head of the "Council of One-Hundred," a society similar to Wade Hampton's Red Shirts in Reconstruction Era South Carolina. Musson was engaged in open negotiations with the Federal government over the removal of occupation forces from New Orleans and the reopening of the port to international commerce. Clandestinely, Musson was organizing a vigilante force similar to Hampton's for the purpose of confronting the carpetbagger regime.

Opposing Musson's overt acts of reconciliation and deal making with the Federal authorities was a much more radical White League that advocated, among other things, a renewal of hostilities between the citizens of Louisiana and the Federal government. A medical doctor, John Dickson Bruns, who had just moved to New Orleans from Charleston, became a member of the Musson inner-circle of conspirators.

John Dickson Bruns, M.D., became acquainted with Edgar Degas through Michel Musson's connection with the de Gas brother's Cotton Exchange in the French Quarter. Both Degas and Bruns were about the same age, and both shared an interest in fine cuisine, beautiful Creole women and Cuban cigars. Like Degas, Bruns had served in the Army as a surgeon for the Confederacy. And, like Degas, Bruns had had an aristocratic upbringing in a time of opulence and political stability. Now both men faced uncertainty in their own futures. Both were cast adrift in a new place and each doubted, in the wake of catastrophic defeat, the restoration of his native country to its former glory.

Bruns had been educated at the College of Charleston and at the Medical College here. Among Bruns wide circle of acquaintances was the poet, Henry Timrod. Bruns's classical education at the College induced him to write verse in the spare time that he had when he was not seeing patients, conducting research and editing the Charleston Medical Journal. When Fort Sumter shattered the Union, Bruns enlisted in the service of his state and served as a surgeon throughout the war in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Musson collaborated with New Orleans native and fellow carpetbag opponent, P.G.T. Beauregard, the famed Confederate general and victor at Fort Sumter in 1861. Degas would have moved in a circle of Creole elites, including Beauregard, in 1872, and Doctor Bruns was part of that clique. Beauregard had been hired by the city of New Orleans as city engineer in charge of levees and dikes. Edgar Degas appears not to have been anymore than passively engaged in anti-Federal activities while he lived two years in the Crescent City. He spent much time amusing himself at the horse races and socializing in the French Quarter with the vast circle of his uncle's customers and friends.

New Orleans was America's most sensual city in the 19th century, far surpassing New York, Baltimore and Charleston for that dubious distinction. After dusk fell upon the gas lit streets, there was "casual commingling of a all races in the most shocking manner," wrote Fanny Wright, an English woman traveling through America. The postwar literary circle of this delta city included poets, novelists, artists and illustrators, and Dr. John Bruns gained immediate entree because of his friendship with the widely acclaimed South Carolina poet Henry Timrod. Bruns penned 40 lines entitled "The Foe At The Gates" as the Confederacy prepared in January of 1865 for the bitter end. His poem closes with the line:

So, dying, ye shall win a high renown,

If not in life, at least by death, set free;

And send her fame through endless ages down -

The last grand holocaust of Liberty.

In those heady times when New Orleans resonated with disunionists, conspirators and Cuban filibusterers, the Medoc wine flowed freely from the Bordeaux region and the Creole girls danced seductively in the shadows as their lovers puffed away on Havana cigars - or segars, as they spelled it. George Washington Cable was a young, aspiring poet and novelist who was in Bruns's medical practice at the time of Degas' sojourn in New Orleans.

Through the five surviving letters from New Orleans that Edgar Degas mailed home, it is clear that the young artist's life revolved around hours spent at the De Gas Cotton Exchange where he interacted with his kinsmen and dangerous political men such as Michel Musson and the new Fair Grounds Race Track that was 11 blocks away. However, Degas also notes a close-knit circle of writers and artists with whom he associates, and that would be the coterie of poets, writers and painters known to John Dickson Bruns, formerly of Charleston.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).