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During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different occasions, to note carefully Colonel T.W.  Higginson’s colored regiment, known as the First Regiment of South-Carolina Volunteers.  Major-General Hunter’s first regiment was mainly made up of conscripts, drafted May 12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months afterwards, there being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going home to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds.  On the 10th of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent authority to raise five thousand colored troops, began to recruit a regiment.  His authority from the War Department bore date August 25th, and the order conferring it states the object to be “to guard the plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder.”  This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise a negro regiment in this war.  There were, indeed, some ambiguous words in the instructions of Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the original expedition went to Port Royal, authorizing him to organize the negroes into companies and squads for such services as they might be fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for military service.  Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to General Hunter’s regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the payment of the regiment.  The first regiment, as raised by General Saxton, numbered four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson took command of it on the 1st of December; and on the 19th of January, 1863, it had increased to eight hundred and forty-nine.  It has made three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,—­one before Colonel Higginson assumed the command, described in Mrs. Stowe’s letter to the women of England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in January up the St. Mary’s, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which it occupied for a few days until an evacuation was ordered from head-quarters.  The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies.  Their drill is good, and their time excellent.  They have borne themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white regiments in skirmishing.  In morale they seemed very much like white men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent soldiers.  Some I saw of the finest metal, like Robert Sutton, whom Higginson describes in his report as “the real conductor of the whole expedition at the St. Mary’s,” and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter, capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen.  Another said, addressing a meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights, thinking of the war and of his people,—­that, when he heard of the regiment being formed, he felt that his time to act had come, and that it was his duty to enlist,—­that he did not fight for his rations and pay, but for wife, children, and people.