as well as I could what rights and duties their liberation had vested them with. Although I used the simplest possible language, I felt sure that I was not understood. Such an audience I never looked upon before or since. Most of the jet-black faces, with their protruding, glaring eyes, thick noses, heavy outturned lips, glittering teeth, low receding foreheads, and coarse twisted, matted hair, spoke plainly of the Niger and the Congo. It seemed to me that the efforts of the volunteer male and female teachers from the North to instil even a little rudimentary knowledge into the skulls of the adults were bound to prove futile, and so they did. Nothing else could be expected, indeed, from creatures who had been purposely kept in the condition of brutes.
Upon the first appearance of the Northern liberators, either the terror-stricken masters had sought safety in flight and left their slaves to shift for themselves as best they could, or the latter had taken refuge with them in the Confederate lines. This inevitably produced a state of entire disorder on the plantations. Most of the blacks abandoned their customary work, and took advantage of the indiscriminate distribution of free rations that was at first practised by our commanders. But the demoralizing influence of this system was soon recognized, and it was abolished after our occupation had been extended over the larger islands and the plantations taken possession of by Government agents. The plan had been adopted, and generally carried out, of letting the freedmen (as they came to be called) become cultivators of the soil on the estates to which they belonged, either as employees of the Government or for their own account. In the former case they were required to perform regular daily tasks, and were allowed in payment regular rations and small wages. In the latter, they were allotted a certain acreage near their cabins on which they could grow such crops as they chose. The first-mentioned mode of employment, according to the testimony of the agents, promised better results than the
