love of liberty and
their dread of returning to the rule of their late masters,"
adding: "The General Commanding expects to form a pretty
correct judgment of the comparative efficiency of the
different superintendents and the amount of influence for
good they are capable of exerting over their people, by the
proportion of the whole number subject to draft which they
are able to bring in without the aid of physical force."
Referring to this last sentence as a "mean insinuation," C.
P. W. goes on:

For my people, I know there is about as much use in asking them to
enlist as in requesting my horse, a very intelligent animal, to drink
salt water. I hope they will draft, they may possibly enlist, the
loafers at Hilton Head and Beaufort, and those whose proximity to
camps, or general worthless character, prevents them from taking much
interest in their crops. But these men, who have been paid up in full
for last year's crop, and have seen that their crop, slim as it was,
brought them a fair compensation, are bound to show _a crop_ this
year. Crop-raising is their business, their trade, and they intend to
show what they can do at it this year for the Government, which
protects them, for me, who "see them justice" (they have a vague idea
that I reap a certain percentage from their crop--they say, "You will
have a bigger crop of cotton than Mr. Philbrick, sir"--they also think
that if I "overlook" four hundred hands, I ought to get more pay than
a man who only sees to two hundred), and last, and principally, for
themselves. They have not been learning cotton-raising, perforce, all
these years for nothing. Now their enforced knowledge comes out in
tending a crop of which they are to own a share, and the little tricks
of the trade, which had to be watchfully enforced in the old time, are
now skillfully produced, especially in the food crops, which are more
evidently their own. I let them go ahead very much as they choose; I
make regulations for the good of all, as in the matter of carts, oxen,
etc., but the minutiae I do not meddle with, except as a matter of
curiosity and acquirement of knowledge. They work well, some of them
harder than in the old time; the lazy ones are stimulated to exertion
for their own benefit, the energetic ones _race like sixty_.

FROM H. W.

_March 13._ I had the sick people to visit, and C. was going over to
the _Kingfisher_, our blockader, for coal-tar to plant