There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. Upon this point my inquiries were particular, and always with the same result. When we said to them, "You don't want to be free,--your masters say you don't,"--they manifested much indignation, answering, "We do want to be free,--we want to be for ourselves." We inquired further, "Do the house slaves who wear their master's clothes want to be free?" "We never heard of one who did not," was the instant reply. There might be, they said, some half-crazy one who did not care to be free, but they had never seen one. Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling. An intelligent Secessionist, Lowry by name, who was examined at head-quarters, admitted that a majority of the slaves wanted to be free. The more intelligent the slave and the better he had been used, the stronger this desire seemed to be. I remember one such particularly, the most intelligent one in Hampton, known as "an, influential darky" ("darky" being the familiar term applied by the contrabands to themselves). He could read, was an exhorter in the Church, and officiated in the absence of the minister. He would have made a competent juryman. His mistress, he said, had been kind to him, and had never spoken so harshly to him as a captain's orderly in the Naval Brigade had done, who assumed one day to give him orders. She had let him work where he pleased, and he was to bring her a fixed sum, and appropriate the surplus to his own use. She pleaded with him to go away with her from Hampton at the time of the exodus, but she would not force him to leave his family. Still he hated to be a slave, and he talked like a philosopher about his rights. No captive in the galleys of Algiers, not Lafayette in an Austrian dungeon, ever pined more for free air. He had saved eighteen hundred dollars of his surplus earnings in attending on visitors at Old Point, and had spent it all in litigation to secure the freedom of his wife and children, belonging to another master, whose will had emancipated them, but was contested on the ground of the insanity of the testator. He had won a verdict, but his lawyers told him they could not obtain a judgment upon it, as the judge was unfavorable to freedom.