Lewis C. Lockwood

“ Peake attached prime importance to the training of the rising generation, she felt that great improvement might be made among the adults. This view inspired her action from the first in Hampton, and with a blessed result, that is now apparent to all. She was accordingly very ready to gratify the desire of a number of adults for an evening school, notwithstanding her increasing infirmities. The result is, that several, who scarcely knew the alphabet before, now begin to read with considerable readiness. ”

“ In 1851, Mary was married to Thomas Peake, formerly a slave, but afterward a free man, light colored, intelligent, pious, and in every respect a congenial companion, with whom she lived happily till her decease. ”

“ Peake also considered singing an important part of a right education. Among the favorite hymns first learned and sung in her school were, "I want to be an angel," "There is a happy land," "Around the throne of God in heaven," "Here we meet to part again," "In heaven we part no more," and others of kindred spirit, so familiar in the Sabbath schools at the North. ”

“ Let Sabbath scholars, and children of pious parentage and Christian education, who from earliest years have not only been taught to lisp the Saviour's name, but to read it, pity the slave child, shut out from such advantages, and give heed to instruction, lest, having more given and unimproved, they be beaten with many stripes. ”

“ Many highly interesting facts have been communicated with regard to the freedmen—their natural endowments, their facility in acquiring knowledge in letters and arms, their industrial habits, their shrewdness in business transactions, their gratitude, their courage, their acquaintance with passing events, their confidence that the result of the rebellion will be the liberation of their people, and their piety. ”

“ Quite a large number of neat cottages have already been built. I encouraged the people to build these small tenements on lots belonging to the most decided rebels, hoping that, if not claimed by former owners, these homesteads would be given to the occupants by government. Thus Hampton is becoming quite a thriving, free settlement, supported by fishing, oystering, huckstering, artisanship, gardening, and farming. Colored people have settled on farms vacated by owners, and will do well in keeping dairies, and [Pg 28] cultivating the land, and gathering its fruit, if not molested. ”

“ Mary S. Peake was the first teacher employed. She continued to teach as long as her health permitted, and near to the time of her decease. Other teachers have been employed; chaplains in the army and pious soldiers have proffered their occasional services, and the religious meetings, Sabbath schools, and week-day schools, have been well attended. Mr. Lockwood labored there thirteen months, and then removed to another field. In his final report, he states that he had ministered to a congregation at Hampton, where the average attendance was four hundred ”

“ A young teacher at Hampton, Virginia, writes as follows: "When I first commenced the school here, I found the children such as slavery makes—quarrelsome, thievish, uncleanly in their persons and attire, and seemingly inclined to almost every species of wickedness ”

“ Mary's mother says that she delighted to visit the poor in Norfolk, and especially the aged. A very old man, in the suburbs, often came to her door, and never went empty away; and frequently at evening she would go and carry him warm tea, and in the winter she brought him wood in small armfuls. ”

“ Little Daisy, (Mrs. Peake's only child,) about five years old, was the acknowledged star of the evening. She sang very prettily in solo, and also in connection with the chorus. She sang alone the whole of the hymn, "I want to be an angel."
I spoke of the contrast between the present and the past. A year ago, white children in Hampton could enjoy a scene of this kind, but colored children were excluded. But now times have changed. [Pg 37] The white man's child is away, and the colored man's child is on the stage, and swells the choral song. ”

“ A deacon of the church on whom the writer called when recently in Norfolk, says she had a strong desire for the conversion of souls, and was often found exhorting them to repentance. Other members of the church bore the highest testimony to her uniform Christian deportment.
In 1847, Mary's mother was married to Thompson Walker, and bought a house in Hampton, where they resided until the town was burned by the rebels in 1861. Though sustaining herself by her needle, Mary found time for many labors of love. ”

“ In one of my visits, she told me that I must give her love to the committee in New York, and all the friends of the mission; that she had had a bright vision of her Saviour, and he had assured her that the cause would triumph; that we were sowing seed which would spring up and become a tree, to overspread the whole earth; that we should be a great blessing to this down-trodden people, and they would fulfill a glorious destiny. "Oh, yes," said she, "brother Lockwood, you [Pg 41] will succeed, for Jesus has told me so this morning." ”

“ After the mission had been established, one of the officers' wives remarked to another, "I do not miss my things nowadays."
Nearly all the church members had taken the temperance pledge.
"They have their vices," writes a northern physician on one of the plantations on Port Royal Island; "deception and petty thieving prevail. They are careless, indolent, and improvident. They have a miserable habit of scolding and using authoritative language to one another. All these vices are clearly the result of slave education, and will gradually disappear under improved conditions.... ”

“ This desire, or rather eagerness, to learn to read, is manifested by all. I have stopped by the wayside many a time, and have immediately collected a group of old and young about me, and have made them repeat the alphabet after me slowly, letter by letter. ”

“ May teachers gather from her example fresh inspiration, and the benevolent Christian fresh impulses in doing good. May they who enjoy advantages superior to those of her proscribed race, take heed lest the latter, by the better improvement of the little light enjoyed, rise up in the judgment and condemn them. ”

“ To see how a frail woman, [Pg 40] with an exquisitely nervous temperament, could deliberately and calmly bid farewell to family, pupils, and friends, and yield herself into her Father's hands, to pass through the ordeal of sickness and death, was a privilege and a blessing. ”

“ It will ever be a place about which precious memories will linger.
It was proposed that, on Christmas day, the children of the school should have a festival. All the week previous, they were busy, with their teacher, in preparations and rehearsals. A large room on the first floor of the seminary was decorated with evergreens for the occasion, and at one end a platform was constructed. At an early hour in the evening, the room was crowded [Pg 36] with colored children and adults, and soldiers and officers. ”

“ But with the beginning of spring, the progress of our arms opened Hampton to reoccupation. It was thought proper that those who, during the winter, had been confined in large houses, overcrowded, should at once [Pg 27] build up the ruins, and provide themselves homes. To this end, application was made for an appropriation of government lumber for past services. Some lumber was received in this way, and the evacuation of the camps by the soldiers, who had winter quarters here, furnished still more. ”

“ Who will lend to the Lord the capital needful to secure the harvest in season and well? For such there shall be untold riches laid up in heaven. And who will sustain those who bear the burden and heat of the day, by the buoyancy of prayer? This is a work thrice blessed to all concerned.
[Pg 53]
APPENDIX. MISSION TO THE FREEDMEN.
On the 8th of August, 1861, a letter was addressed to Major-General Butler, then in command at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, by the treasurer of the American Missionary Association, respecting the people whom he had denominated "contrabands." ”

“ Chaplain Fuller, of the sixteenth Massachusetts regiment, offered prayer—praying fervently for the bereaved mother and [Pg 48] husband, and for little Daisy, who would one day realize more than now a mother's worth by her loss. We then sung, according to her request, her favorite hymn, "The Christian's Home in Glory," or "Rest for the Weary." I selected for my text Hebrews 4:9—"There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God." At the conclusion of the sermon the children sang,—
"Here we suffer grief and pain ”

“ In this letter, the writer communicated to General Butler the wishes of some persons in the free states, that, as considerable embarrassment was felt by the public authorities with regard to the increasing numbers of colored persons who had fled and were fleeing for protection to the forts and camps of the United States, they should be sent into the free states to obtain employment. ”