My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th.  It was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen, and to note the progress they had made.  There were interesting scenes to fill the days.  I saw an aged negro, Caesar by name, not less than one hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.  The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,—­a free savage in the wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the President,—­his life covering an historic century.  A faithful and industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival, rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs.  I had an interview with Don Carlos, whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last hours,—­now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston.  He talked intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate.  He had known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion of their preparatory studies.  Pierpont was a classmate of John C. Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private tutor.

Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,—­an old woman, with much power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had formerly been.  The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, “If you’re as long beating Secesh everywhere as you have been in taking the town, guess it’ll take you some time!” Indeed, the negroes had somewhat less confidence in our power than at first, on account of our not having followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head.  The same quaint old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, “They thought God was dead!”

I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of Trescot, formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom Russell describes in his “Diary.”  But the mansion is not now as when Russell saw it.  Its large library is deposited in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington.  Its spacious rooms in the first and second stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families of negro refugees.  From this point, looking across the water, we could see a cavalry-picket of the Rebels.  The superintendent who had charge of the plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name, linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.