Negroes are already beginning to congregate here from the surrounding country. They do not wish to trust their old masters on the plantations; and, without any definite purpose or plan, they have a blind, but touching instinct, that wherever the flag is floating it is a good place for friendless negroes to go. Others are hunting up children or wives, from whom they have long been separated. Quite a number have been located on plantations, and these are working better than could be expected; but the uncertainty of their tenure of the land, the constant return of the old proprietors, and the general confusion and uncertainty as to the ownership of real estate, under the confiscation and abandoned-property laws, combine to unsettle both them and the Superintendents of Freedmen, who are trying to care for them. The native negroes of Wilmington, however, are doing well. They are of a much higher order of intelligence than those from the country; are generally in comfortable circumstances, and already find time to look into politics. They have a Union League formed among themselves, the object of which is to stimulate to industry and education, and to secure combined effort for suffrage, without which they insist that they will soon be practically enslaved again. A delegation of them waited on Mr. Chase; and certainly looked as well and talked as lucidly as any of the poor whites would have done. There are a very few of the whites who encourage them; but, in general, the bitterest prejudice against these black Unionists, is still among those who have been the only white Unionists—the often-described poor white trash. The Wilmington negroes have no faith in the ready assent to the proposition that slavery is dead, which all the old slaveholders give. They say—and the negro refugees, all, and some of the whites bear them out in it—that in the country slavery still practically exists. The masters tell them that slavery is to be restored as soon as the army is removed; that the Government is already mustering the army out of service; that next year, when the State is reorganized, the State authorities will control slavery. Meantime, the negroes are worked as hard as ever—in some cases a little harder—and they have no more protection from the cruelty of the whites than ever.[9] “I tell you, sah” said a very intelligent negro, who had been reciting the present troubles of his people, “we ain’t noways safe, ‘long as dem people makes de laws we’s got to be governed by. We’s got to hab a voice in de ‘pintin’ of de law-makers. Den we knows our frens, and whose hans we’s safe in.”