One Saturday evening one of them asked me to call and see him at his home the next morning.  I did so, and he handed me a Bible belonging to his mistress, who had died a few days before, and whose bier I had helped to carry to the family vault.  He wanted me to read to him the eleventh chapter of Daniel.  It seemed, that, as one of the means of keeping them quiet, the white clergymen during the winter and spring had read them some verses from it to show that the South would prevail, enforcing passages which ascribed great dominion to “the king of the South,” and suppressing those which subsequently give the supremacy to “the king of the North.”  A colored man who could read had found the latter passages and made them known.  The chapter is dark with mystery, and my auditor, quite perplexed as I read on, remarked, “The Bible is a very mysterious book.”  I read to him also the thirty-fourth chapter of Jeremiah, wherein the sad prophet of Israel records the denunciations by Jehovah of sword, pestilence, and famine against the Jews for not proclaiming liberty to their servants and handmaids.  He had not known before that there were such passages in the Bible.

The conversations of the contrabands on their title to be regarded as freemen showed reflection.  When asked if they thought themselves fit for freedom, and if the darkies were not lazy, their answer was, “Who but the darkies cleared all the land round here?  Yes, there are lazy darkies, but there are more lazy whites.”  When told that the free blacks had not succeeded, they answered that the free blacks have not had a fair chance under the laws,—­that they don’t dare to enforce their claims against white men,—­that a free colored blacksmith had a thousand dollars due to him from white men, but he was afraid to sue for any portion of it.  One man, when asked why he ought to be free, replied,—­“I feed and clothe myself and pay my master one hundred and twenty dollars a year; and the one hundred and twenty dollars is just so much taken from me, which ought to be used to make me and my children comfortable.”  Indeed, broken as was their speech and limited as was their knowledge, they reasoned abstractly on their rights as well as white men.  Locke or Channing might have fortified the argument for universal liberty from their simple talk.  So true is it that the best thoughts which the human intellect has produced have come, not from affluent learning or ornate speech, but from the original elements of our nature, common to all races of men and all conditions in life; and genius the highest and most cultured may bend with profit to catch the lowliest of human utterances.

There was a very general desire among the contrabands to know how to read.  A few had learned; and these, in every instance where we inquired as to their teacher, had been taught on the sly in their childhood by their white playmates.  Others knew their letters, but could not “put them together,” as they said.  I remember of a summer’s afternoon seeing a young married woman, perhaps twenty-five years old, seated on a door-step with her primer before her, trying to make progress.