In natural tact and the faculty of getting a livelihood the contrabands are inferior to the Yankees, but quite equal to the mass of the Southern population.  It is not easy to see why they would be less industrious, if free, than the whites, particularly as they would have the encouragement of wages.  There would be transient difficulties at the outset, but no more than a bad system lasting for ages might be expected to leave behind.  The first generation might be unfitted for the active duties and responsibilities of citizenship; but this difficulty, under generous provisions for education, would not pass to the next.  Even now they are not so much behind the masses of the whites.  Of the Virginians who took the oath of allegiance at Hampton, not more than one in fifteen could write his name, and the rolls captured at Hatteras disclose an equally deplorable ignorance.  The contrabands might be less addicted than the now dominant race to bowie-knives and duels, think less of the value of bludgeons as forensic arguments, be less inhospitable to innocent sojourners from Free States, and have far inferior skill in robbing forts and arsenals, plundering the Treasury, and betraying the country at whose crib they had fattened; but mankind would forgive them for not acquiring these accomplishments of modern treason.  As a race, they may be less vigorous and thrifty than the Saxon, but they are more social, docile, and affectionate, fulfilling the theory which Channing held in relation to them, if advanced to freedom and civilization.

If in the progress of the war they should be called to bear arms, there need be no reasonable apprehension that they would exhibit the ferocity of savage races.  Unlike such, they have been subordinated to civilized life.  They are by nature a religious people.  They have received an education in the Christian faith from devout teachers of their own and of the dominant race.  Some have been taught (let us believe it) by the precepts of Christian masters, and some by the children of those masters, repeating the lessons of the Sabbath-school.  The slaveholders assure us that they have all been well treated.  If that be so, they have no wrongs to avenge.  Associated with our army, they would conform to the stronger and more disciplined race.  Nor is this view disproved by servile insurrections.  In those cases, the insurgents, without arms, without allies, without discipline, but throwing themselves against society, against government, against everything, saw no other escape than to devastate and destroy without mercy in order to get a foothold.  If they exterminated, it was because extermination was threatened against them.  In the Revolution, in the army at Cambridge, from the beginning to the close of the war, against the protests of South Carolina by the voice of Edward Rutledge, but with the express sanction of Washington,—­ever just, ever grateful for patriotism, whencesoever it came,—­the negroes fought in the ranks with