There was one striking feature in the contrabands which must not be omitted.  I did not hear a profane or vulgar word spoken by them during my superintendence, a remark which it will be difficult to make of any sixty-four white men taken together anywhere in our army.  Indeed, the greatest discomfort of a soldier, who desires to remain a gentleman in the camp, is the perpetual reiteration of language which no decent lips would utter in a sister’s presence.  But the negroes, so dogmatically pronounced unfit for freedom, were in this respect models for those who make high boasts of civility of manners and Christian culture.  Out of the sixty-four who worked for us, all but half a dozen were members of the Church, generally the Baptist.  Although without a pastor, they held religious meetings on the Sundays which we passed in Hampton, which were attended by about sixty colored persons and three hundred soldiers.  The devotions were decorously conducted, bating some loud shouting by one or two excitable brethren, which the better sense of the rest could not suppress.  Their prayers and exhortations were fervent, and marked by a simplicity which is not infrequently the richest eloquence.  The soldiers behaved with entire propriety, and two exhorted them with pious unction, as children of one Father, ransomed by the same Redeemer.

To this general propriety of conduct among the contrabands intrusted to me there was only one exception, and that was in the case of Joe ——­; his surname I have forgotten.  He was of a vagrant disposition, and an inveterate shirk.  He had a plausible speech and a distorted imagination, and might be called a demagogue among darkies.  He bore an ill physiognomy,—­that of one “fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”  He was disliked by the other contrabands, and had been refused admission to their Church, which he wished to join in order to get up a character.  Last, but not least, among his sins, he was accustomed to boat his wife, of which she accused him in my presence; whereupon he justified himself on the brazen assumption that all husbands did the same.  There was no good reason to believe that he had already been tampered with by Rebels; but his price could not be more than five dollars.  He would be a disturbing element among the laborers on the breastworks, and he was a dangerous person to be so near the lines; we therefore sent him to the fort.  The last I heard of him, he was at the Rip Raps, bemoaning his isolation, and the butt of our soldiers there, who charged him with being a “Secesh,” and confounded him by gravely asserting that they were such themselves and had seen him with the “Secesh” at Yorktown.  This was the single goat among the sheep.