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.

The most frequent question asked of one who has had any means of communication with the contrabands during the war is in relation to their knowledge of its cause and purposes, and their interest in it.  One thing was evident,—­indeed, you could not talk with a slave who did not without prompting give the same testimony,—­that their masters had been most industrious in their attempts to persuade them that the Yankees were coming down there only to get the land,—­that they would kill the negroes and manure the ground with them, or carry them off to Cuba or Hayti and sell them.  An intelligent man who had belonged to Colonel Joseph Segar—­almost the only Union man at heart in that region, and who for that reason, being in Washington at the time the war began, had not dared to return to Hampton—­served the staff of General Pierce.  He bore the highest testimony to the kindness of his master, who, he said, told him to remain,—­that the Yankees were the friends of his people, and would use them well.  “But,” said David,—­for that was his name,—­“I never heard of any other master who talked that way, but they all told the worst stories about the Yankees, and the mistresses were more furious even than the masters.”  David, I may add, spite of his good master, longed to be free.

The masters, in their desperation, had within a few months resorted to another device to secure the loyalty of their slaves.  The colored Baptist minister had been something of a pet among the whites, and had obtained subscriptions from some benevolent citizens to secure the freedom of a handsome daughter of his who was exposed to sale on an auction block, where her beauty inspired competition.  Some leading Secessionists, Lawyer Hope for one, working somewhat upon his gratitude and somewhat upon his vanity, persuaded