ost a cent apiece, and the cattle were Secesh,
bestowed by General Saxby, as they all call him.

_December 1, 1862._

How absurd is the impression bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these
Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last
night, after a hard day's work, (our guns and the remainder of our tents
being just issued,) an order came from Beaufort that we should be ready
in the evening to unload a steamboat's cargo of boards, being some of
those captured by them a few weeks since, and now assigned for their
use. I wondered if the men would grumble at the night-work; but the
steamboat arrived by seven, and it was bright moonlight when they went
at it. Never have I beheld such a jolly scene of labor. Tugging these
wet and heavy boards over a bridge of boats ashore, then across the
slimy beach at low tide, then up a steep bank, and all in one great
uproar of merriment for two hours. Running most of the time, chattering
all the time, snatching the boards from each other's backs as if they
were some coveted treasure, getting up eager rivalries between different
companies, pouring great choruses of ridicule on the heads of all
shirkers, they made the whole scene so enlivening that I gladly stayed
out in the moonlight for the whole time to watch it. And all this
without any urging or any promised reward, but simply as the most
natural way of doing the thing. The steamboat-captain declared that they
unloaded the ten thousand feet of boards quicker than any white gang
could have done it; and they felt it so little, that, when, later in the
night, I reproached one whom I found sitting by a camp-fire, cooking a
surreptitious opossum, telling him that he ought to be asleep after such
a job of work, he answered, with the broadest grin,--

"Oh, no, Cunnel, da's no work at all, Cunnel; dat only jess enough _for
stretch we_."

_December 2, 1862._

I believe I have not yet enumerated the probable drawbacks to the
success of this regiment, if any. We are exposed to no direct annoyance
from the white regiments, being out of their way; and we have as yet no
discomforts or privations which we do not share with them. I do not as
yet see the slightest obstacle, in the nature of the blacks, to making
them good soldiers,--but rather the contrary. They take readily to
drill, and do not object to discipline; they are n