The rest of this extract is an expression--which will be followed later by many like it--of the sense that people in the North were getting too complacent a notion of what had been done and what could be done for the Sea Island negroes. Pierce's report[51] has too much sugar in it. His statements are facts, but facts with the silver lining out. The starving, naked condition of the blacks was much exaggerated when we started to come down here. _July 25._ On the whole, affairs conduct themselves pretty quietly and regularly. The cases of discipline are the most vexing and amusing. It is a peculiar experience to be detective, policeman, judge, jury, and jailer,--all at once,--sometimes in cases of assault and battery, and general, plantation _squows_,--then in a divorce case,--last Sunday in a whiskey-selling affair; a calf-murder is still on the docket. The next letter is the first from C. P. W., who went to Port Royal early in July, on the same steamer with Charles F. Folsom of Harvard, '62, who is often mentioned in the letters that follow, and with several other young Massachusetts men who had volunteered as superintendents. FROM C. P. W. _Beaufort, July 7._ We got our luggage into the Mayflower and started for this place [from Hilton Head] about six o'clock. It was droll enough to find a party of Boston men taking a sail in the old Hingham boat up Beaufort River under United States passes, to superintend South Carolina plantations. _July 15. Coffin's Point._ The nearest of my five plantations is three miles distant, along the shore road, and the four on that road extend about two miles; my fifth is on the upper road, to Beaufort, about four and a half miles from the Point. The roads are mere tracks worn in the fields, sometimes through woods, like our wood roads, only more sandy. In front of my plantations there are bushes on the right-hand side, for some distance, the field being bounded on the other side by woods. Fields usually very long, sometimes three quarters of a mile, divided across the road by fences, gates occurring at every passage from one to another; the plantation houses and quarters at an average of one third of a mile from the road, paths through cotton-fields leading to them. Imagine a perfectly flat country, relieved by belts of trees, and intersected by rows of brush, single trees standing here and there in the bare, hot fields. Very little fresh water either in brooks or pools. Salt-water creeks are to be crossed on the shore roads; the richest lands in the adjoining meadows. A cotton-field looks not unlike a potato-field, the rows higher and more distinct, the plants further apart, usually two feet; the rows five feet. Corn planted on rows like cotton. You would be surprised to see the soil in which these flourish; beach sand, in many places, is the principal ingredient. The fields are very much the colour of the sea-beach.