They were mostly of the pure Congo type; there was no mixture of white blood; intelligent mechanics and “smart niggers” generally were too valuable to be sent here; their masters were absent a great part of the year, and they were left to the humanizing control of the overseers; their provisions were, in many instances, grown elsewhere and sent to them, so that there was not even this diversion of a different culture from the never-ending monotony of the cotton and rice fields. They received, once a week, a peck of corn, and, once a month, a quart of salt, _and on this they lived_. When the hardest work was required, they received a little molasses and salt meat in addition; and, for a part of each year, a bushel of sweet-potatoes was allowed each week, _in place of_ the corn. Whatever more than this they received, they owed to the generosity of unusually kind masters. They herded together in cabins, twelve by eighteen or twenty feet, sometimes floored, but oftener floorless; they got enough of the coarse negro cloth to make, by close cutting, two suits a year, and at Christmas they had three days to themselves. The other three hundred and sixty-two were given to cotton and rice. Marriage was unknown among them; breeding was enjoined as the first of duties; purity, delicacy and education were alike impossible. If any system of compulsory labor could make brutes out of intelligent men, would not this do it? If any system could fail to make brutish men more brutish, surely it would _not_ be this one! When the “great confusion” (as they call the sudden flight of their masters on Dupont’s arrival at Hilton Head) came, the house servants, who, by contact with the whites, had necessarily gained some intelligence, were all taken off to the interior. This utterly debased cotton and rice-planting community of Congoes was left; and it is this community, almost unmixed, which now cultivates the sea islands under the supervision of General Saxton. There were some five thousand of them here before the war. I am told that not five hundred of the old stock are now missing from their accustomed places. The moral of what I have written is plain. If the “negro-elevation” effort of the Abolitionists is to fail anywhere, it would be likely to fail here. If it succeed among these degraded people, it would be likely to succeed anywhere. The experiment has been tried, amid constant uncertainties and discouragements, for three years. The results, whatever they may be, are of the first importance. * * * * *