ck was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had
demonstrated their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember
that such an unreasonable and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time
existed; but it is never worth while to suppress the truth of history.
This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free States; and one
of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston, on
the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the
Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of
negro soldiers which the Free States have sent to the war. On the day
previous, May 27th, a far different scene transpired on the banks of the
Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months before in
Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and
one with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge
on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass,
the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks
and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and
duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and
leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves and their
race.

I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson.
Devoting himself heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties,
and bearing his oppressive responsibility as the leader of a regiment in
which to a great extent are now involved the fortunes of a race, he adds
another honorable name to the true chivalry of our time.

* * * * *

Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again
among the familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that
Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the
Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly
pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished
women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two
good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing
the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with
implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had furnished.
Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early day