tion in the North, and led to attacks upon its author and the Administration by the Conservatives and Anti-War-Democrats, which moved President Lincoln to issue his well-known proclamation of May 19, 1862, in which, after affirming that the Government had no knowledge of, or part in, Hunter's act, he declared it null and void, and asserted his exclusive right to determine whether it was competent for him as Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy to declare slaves in any State or States free, and whether, at any time and in any case, it had become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the Government to exercise such a supposed power.
General Hunter, though repudiated, remained in command, and soon found occasion to try another military method of dealing with the slavery problem, which, while not at once practically successful, was not disowned by the Government, and was even subsequently adopted by the War Department, and contributed much to the ultimate triumph of the North. In other words, he was the first to attempt to form military organizations out of fugitive and abandoned slaves. The desertion of their plantations on the Sea Islands by the great slave-owners had left thousands of their human chattels without control or restraint of any sort, and, as was natural, their sudden, absolute freedom exposed them to the dangers of idleness, vagabondism, and general lawlessness. Even before General Hunter's advent, efforts had been inaugurated, under the leadership of Northern philanthropists, to take the blacks of the islands in hand, to systematize their labor, and to teach them frugal and industrious ways. There were then some fifty devoted men and women from the North engaged as teachers and overseers in that benevolent calling. They had come South under the leadership of Edward L. Pierce of Massachusetts, who had been put in charge, first, of the organization of the colored refugees flocking to Fortress Monroe into working parties, and now of the same task in South Carolina, at the instance of Secretary Chase,
