The total number of Negro enlistments and reënlistments on the Federal side was between 189,000 and 190,000. When it is considered that this embraced all the soldier element of the Negroes in the North and of the refugee element in the South, who were induced to enter the army, either by persuasion of bounties or under stress of compulsion, whether of military draft or of “belly-pinching,” the number does not appear large. After midsummer, 1863, the North occupied the States of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, half of Virginia, of Tennessee, of Louisiana, of Arkansas, of Mississippi, and considerable portions of the Carolinas and Alabamas. That is, she occupied a third, and nearer a half, of the entire slave-holding territory of the South, while the penetration of her raiding parties into the regions occupied by the Southern troops furnished, at times, opportunity to, possibly, a fourth of the young men of that section to escape from bondage had they been moved by the passion of freedom. It is at once a refutation of the charge of the cruelty of slavery, so commonly accepted, and an evidence of the easy-going amiability and docility of the Negro race that, under all the excitement and through all the opportunities and temptations surrounding them, they should not only have remained faithful to their masters, but that the stress of the time should have appeared to weld the bond between them. That there was a wild and adventurous element among them is well known. It was to be expected, and was an element in whom the instincts of wild life in the jungle and the forests survived. Every large plantation had one or more who had the runaway spirit keenly alive. There were several on our place. They ran away when they were crossed in love or in any other desire of their hearts. They ran away if they were whipped, and, as they were the shirkers and loafers on the plantations, if anyone was whipped, it was likely to be one of them. Yet, curiously enough, if a runaway was caught and was whipped, he was very unlikely to run off again until the spirit seized him, when nothing on earth could stop him.[61] One other class was likely to furnish the element that went off, and this was the “pampered class.” House-servants were more likely to go than field-hands. Their ears were somehow more attuned to the song of the siren.[62] Against those who availed themselves of the opportunities offered them to escape from the bondage of domestic slavery may be put the great body of the Negro race who, whether from inability to grasp the vastness of the boon of liberty held out to them, or from fear of the ills they knew not of, or from sheer content with a life where the toil was not drudgery and the flesh-pots overbalanced the idea of freedom, not only held fast to their masters, but took sides with them with a quickened feeling and a deepened affection. For every one who fled to freedom, possibly one hundred stood by their masters’ wives and children.