Letters from Port Royal Part 24

[Footnote 18: Mrs. Philbrick.]

[Footnote 19: Miss Laura E. Towne of Philadelphia. She never returned to live in the North. The school she started in 1862 is still in existence, under the name of the Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School.]

[Footnote 20: Known as the Smith Plantation.]

[Footnote 21: The ferry to Ladies Island, across which ran the road to St. Helena Island and Mr. Philbrick's plantations.]

[Footnote 22: The plantation "praise-house," as the negroes' church was called, was often merely "a rather larger and nicer negro hut than the others. Here the master was an exemplary old Baptist Christian, who has left his house full of religious magazines and papers, and built his people quite a nice little house,--the best on this part of the Island."

(Letter of W. C. G., April 22, 1862.)]

[Footnote 23: Pine Grove was in this respect an exception among the Sea Island plantations.]

[Footnote 24: See p. 33.]

[Footnote 25: Mrs. Philbrick.]

[Footnote 26: "The true 'shout' takes place on Sundays or on 'praise'-nights through the week, and either in the praise-house or some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held. Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light-wood fire burns red before the door to the house and on the hearth.... The benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young, men and women, sprucely-dressed young men, grotesquely half-clad field-hands--the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts--boys with tattered s.h.i.+rts and men's trousers, young girls barefooted, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the 'sperichil' is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers.

But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to 'base' the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house." (New York _Nation_, May 30, 1867.)]

[Footnote 27: Miss Lucy McKim, in a letter to the Boston _Journal of Music_, November 8, 1862.]

[Footnote 28: This old woman Mr. Philbrick had found "keeping guard over her late master's household goods--_i. e._, selling them."]

[Footnote 29: A few weeks earlier than this, one of the drivers told Mr. Philbrick that Was.h.i.+ngton Fripp had just been shot near Charleston for refusing to enlist.]

[Footnote 30: A "t.i.tle" was a negro surname of whatever derivation.]

[Footnote 31: The following description of Limus and his subsequent doings is copied from a letter of W. C. G.'s (June 12, 1863), which was printed by the Educational Commission in one of a series of leaflets containing extracts from Port Royal letters:

"He is a black Yankee. Without a drop of white blood in him, he has the energy and _'cuteness_ and big eye for his own advantage of a born New Englander. He is not very moral or scrupulous, and the church-members will tell you 'not yet,' with a smile, if you ask whether he belongs to them. But he leads them all in enterprise, and his ambition and consequent prosperity make his example a very useful one on the plantation. Half the men on the island fenced in gardens last autumn, behind their houses, in which they now raise vegetables for themselves and the Hilton Head markets. Limus in his half-acre has quite a little farmyard besides. With poultry-houses, pig-pens, and corn-houses, the array is very imposing. He has even a stable, for he made out some t.i.tle to a horse, which was allowed; and then he begged a pair of wheels and makes a cart for his work; and not to leave the luxuries behind, he next rigs up a kind of sulky and bows to the white men from his carriage. As he keeps his table in corresponding style,--for he buys more sugar ... than any other two families,--of course the establishment is rather expensive. So, to provide the means, he has three permanent irons in the fire--his cotton, his Hilton Head express, and his seine. Before the fis.h.i.+ng season commenced, a pack of dogs for deer-hunting took the place of the net.

While other families 'carry' from three to six or seven acres of cotton, Limus says he must have _fourteen_. To help his wife and daughters keep this in good order, he went over to the rendezvous for refugees, and imported a family to the plantation, the men of which he hired at $8 a month.... With a large boat which he owns, he usually makes weekly trips to Hilton Head, twenty miles distant, carrying pa.s.sengers, produce and fish. These last he takes in an immense seine,--an abandoned chattel,--for the use of which he pays Government by furnis.h.i.+ng General Hunter and staff with the finer specimens, and then has ten to twenty bushels for sale. Apparently he is either dissatisfied with this arrangement or means to extend his operations, for he asks me to bring him another seine for which I am to pay $70. I presume his savings since 'the guns fired at Bay Point'--which is the native record of the capture of the island--amount to four or five hundred dollars. He is all ready to buy land, and I expect to see him in ten years a tolerably rich man. Limus has, it is true, but few equals on the islands, and yet there are many who follow not far behind him."]

[Footnote 32: Major-General David Hunter, who on March 31 had taken command of the newly created Department of the South, consisting of the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.]

[Footnote 33: Dr. Wakefield was physician for that end of St. Helena Island.]

[Footnote 34: On c.o.c.kspur Island, Georgia.]

[Footnote 35: As the quarter-acre "task," which was all that the planters had required of their slaves each day, had occupied about four or five hours only, it will be seen that the slaves on the Sea Islands had not been overworked, though they had been underfed. Like the "task," the "private patches" were also an inst.i.tution retained, at E. L. Pierce's suggestion, from slavery times, with the difference that their size was very much increased--often from a fraction of an acre to ten times that amount.]

[Footnote 36: By the rebels.]

[Footnote 37: He had already had sent down from the North a quant.i.ty of articles to sell to the negroes.]

[Footnote 38: Brigadier-General Isaac I. Stevens, then at Beaufort, commanding the Second Division.]

[Footnote 39: The "Brick Church" was a Baptist Church which had always been used by both blacks and whites. Less than a mile away stood the "White Church," Episcopalian,--closed since the flight of the planters.]

[Footnote 40: Issued May 9, and on May 19, nullified by President Lincoln.]

[Footnote 41: South Carolina corn is white flint corn.]

[Footnote 42: The cotton-agent who had been at Coffin's Point.]

[Footnote 43: The Government not only had made no definite promise of payment, but it was of course unable to bring to bear on the negroes any compulsion of any sort. They worked or not, as they liked, and when they liked.]

[Footnote 44: The old system of labor--the system in force in slavery times--had been the "gang system," the laborers working all together, so that no one had continuous responsibility for any one piece of land.]

[Footnote 45: For Coffin's Point.]

[Footnote 46: As a result of Lincoln's proclamation of May 19 (see p.

50 n.), the regiment, all but one company, was disbanded in August.]

[Footnote 47: This burying-place was "an unfenced quarter of an acre of perfectly wild, tangled woodland in the midst of the cotton-field, halfway between here [the 'white house'] and the quarters. Nothing ever marks the graves, but the place is entirely devoted to them."

(From a letter of H. W.'s, June 5, '62.)]

[Footnote 48: Saxton's first general order, announcing his arrival, is dated June 28.]

[Footnote 49: E. L. Pierce had changed his headquarters from "Pope's."]

[Footnote 50: From the first the anti-slavery Northerners at Port Royal had had no hesitation in telling their employees that they were freemen. Indeed, they had no choice but to do so, the tadpoles on these islands, as Mr. Philbrick said, having "virtually shed their tails in course of nature already."]

[Footnote 51: Pierce's second report to Secretary Chase on the Sea Islands, dated June 2, 1862.]

[Footnote 52: "We have to spend more than half our time," writes Mr.

Philbrick in September, "getting our limited supplies."]

[Footnote 53: Richard Soule, Jr., was General Superintendent of St.

Helena and Ladies Islands, and was living at Edgar Fripp's plantation.]

[Footnote 54: The first of many references to the frequent lack of sympathy shown by army officers.]

[Footnote 55: That is, the account had been taken before he came South.]

[Footnote 56: See page 37.]

[Footnote 57: The term "Hunting Island" was applied to several of the outside islands collectively.]

[Footnote 58: Thomas Astor Coffin, of Coffin's Point.]

[Footnote 59: The chief "hindrance" was, of course, the late date at which work on the cotton crop had been started; the land should have been prepared in February, and the planting begun at the end of March.]

[Footnote 60: The preliminary proclamation of emanc.i.p.ation, dated September 22, 1862.]

[Footnote 61: It will be seen that this excellent idea was not adopted by the authorities.]