ill-applied emotion, as connected with the facts and
laws of American slavery,--still I expected to find it. I suppose that
my men and their families and visitors may have had as much of it as
the mass of freed slaves; but certainly they had not a particle. I
never could cajole one of them, in his most discontented moment, into
regretting "ole mas'r time" for a single instant. I never heard one
speak of the masters except as natural enemies. Yet they were perfectly
discriminating as to individuals; many of them claimed to have had kind
owners, and some expressed great gratitude to them for particular favors
received. It was not the individuals, but the ownership, of which they
complained. That they saw to be a wrong which no special kindnesses
could right. On this, as on all points connected with slavery, they
understood the matter as clearly as Garrison or Phillips; the wisest
philosophy could teach them nothing as to that, nor could any false
philosophy befog them. After all, personal experience is the best
logician.

Certainly this indifference did not proceed from any want of personal
affection, for they were the most affectionate people among whom I had
ever lived. They attached themselves to every officer who deserved love,
and to some who did not; and if they failed to show it to their masters,
it proved the wrongfulness of the mastery. On the other hand, they
rarely showed one gleam of revenge, and I shall never forget the
self-control with which one of our best sergeants pointed out to me, at
Jacksonville, the very place where one of his brothers had been hanged
by the whites for leading a party of fugitive slaves. He spoke of it as
a historic matter, without any bearing on the present issue.

But side by side with this faculty of patience, there was a certain
tropical element in the men, a sort of fiery ecstasy when aroused,
which seemed to link them by blood with the French Turcos, and made
them really resemble their natural enemies, the Celts, far more than
the Anglo-Saxon temperament. To balance this there were great individual
resources when alone,--a sort of Indian wiliness and subtlety of
resource. Their gregariousness and love of drill made them more easy to
keep in hand than white American troops, who rather like to straggle or
go in little squads, looking out for themselves, without being bothered
with officers. The blacks prefer organization.

The point of inferiority that I always feared, though