Edward L. Pierce

“ The enterprise for their aid, begun in doubt, is no longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a consummation. The negroes will work for a living. They will fight for their freedom. They are adapted to civil society. As a people, they are not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity, nor from the vices which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said to take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it may not be possible in a single generation to restore the pristine manhood. ”

“ On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first’ delegation of superintendents and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were women, left the harbor of New York, on board the United States steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on the 9th. It was a voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange, and it was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store for us and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal to our responsibilities. ”

“ These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing, are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead. There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African origin, which the teachers had detected, such as, a belief in hats as evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can cure. ”

“ When these people can no longer be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of them as freemen. Your Irishman, who now works as a daylaborer, honestly thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have no objection to going South and selling him groceries and household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New York prices, or to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system, readily accommodate themselves to our interests ”

“ But there is no article of household-furniture or wearing apparel, used by persons of moderate means among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South would open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops astir. Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters. Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. ”

“ They have planted and are cultivating sixty-three acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes, with as many more to be planted, four and a half of cow-peas, three of pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These facts are most significant. The instinct for land — to have one spot on earth where a man may stand, and whence no human being can of right drive him — is one of the most conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any fair degree will never be nomads or vagabonds. ”

“ One who expects to find in emancipated slaves perfect men and women, or to realize in them some fair dream of an ideal race, will meet disappointment; but there is nothing in their nature or condition to daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to cheer and fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and aspirations ”

“ The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject race, more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The native African was of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and untamable. The master was obliged to abate something of usual rigor in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner, now at Port Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native African belonging to his fat her, though a faithful man, would perpetually insist on doing his work in his own way, and being asked the threatening question, “A’n’t you going to mind?” ”

“ The laborers have collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of their masters, the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and ginned the cotton on the promise of wages. Except upon plantations in the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more immediately remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the only penalty for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for the tenement and land adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not exceeded two dollars per month. ”

“ A public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be found base enough to turn its back upon them. ”

“ All the elements of human nature must be appealed to, physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religions. Imperfect indeed is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers wages, but does not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment ±ether three dollars or thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to bind both parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties. ”

“ This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness of rights, and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed by white men. The former slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a resident of New York when the war broke out, have generally left the plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying that they will not be his bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if they remain on it. ”

“ The characteristic trees are the live oak, its wood almost as heavy as lignum-vitae, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them, — and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and coat of arms to the State. ”

“ The laborers, during their first year under the new system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same thing. The notion that they were to raise no more cotton has passed away, since work upon it is found to be remunerative, and connected with the proprietorship of land. ”

“ Its spacious rooms in the first and second stories together with the attics, are all filled with the families of negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see a cavalry picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Pollen, an inherited name, linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.
The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees, perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced. ”

“ Helena village, and who had cleared and fenced patches for gardens, felling the trees for that purpose.
The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they do; but they do about as much as he himself would do, after a residence of a few years in the same climate, and when be had ceased to work under the influence of Northern habits. Northern men have sometimes been unjust to the South, when comparing the results of labor in the different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing latitude. ”

“ No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Yandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture. ”

“ Those on the plantations, designed for the planters or overseers, were, with a few exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving mechanic in New England would turn his hack on them as unfit to live in. Their yards are without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of orange trees. One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed, they are not well enough built to last long. The estates upon Edisto Island are of a more patrician character, and are occasionally surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees fancifully trimmed. ”

“ Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the comforts and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society, for the purpose of maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St. Helena Island, which is under the charge of Friend Hunn, of the good fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in Delaware three thousand dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he now harbors and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of the world’s people. ”

“ The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies. Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white regiments in skirmishing. In morale they seemed very much like white men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent soldiers. ”

“ Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are fortunate slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides, there was less labor exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely managed plantations of the Sea Islands than in other districts where slave-labor was better and more profitably organized and directed. ”

“ Like all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world as we find it, and try this people accordingly. ”

“ The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated. They could read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not bounded by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and east by the sea, with urn visions of New York on this planet or some other, — about their conception of geography when we found them. They are acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of life. ”

“ Both the Government and private individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land by the recent tax-sales, pay twenty five cents for a standard day’s-work, which may, by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by noon; and the same was the ease with the tasks under the slave-system on very many of the plantations. ”

“ Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must be addressed. ”

“ And what inferences might not one draw, discreditable to all traders and manufacturers, from the universal adulteration of articles of food! These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood in order to get rations and small benefits, — a natural vice which comes with slavery, and too often attends on poverty without slavery. ”

“ At one meeting of the Boston society action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people, when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. ”

“ To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to ordinary humanity. ”

“ The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by fiats and boats to the buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of ginned cotton to the acre, — quite different from the plantations in Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one finds but little turf. ”

“ These things occurred at an early period of our struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they deserve, and let others of better natures, who were then blind, but now see, not be taunted with their inconsiderate acts. ”