drop
the _d_. When the freedmen are lost in the mass of freemen, then the
work will be absolutely complete; and the retrospect of its successive
stages will be matter for the antiquary alone.

Corresponding with these verbal milestones, one may notice successive
stages of public sentiment as to the class thus variously designated. It
was usually considered that the "slaves" were a vast and almost hopeless
mass of imbruted humanity. It was generally feared that the
"contrabands" would prove a race of helpless paupers, whose support
would bankrupt the nation. It is almost universally admitted that the
"freedmen" are industrious, intelligent, self-supporting, soldierly,
eager for knowledge, and far more easily managed than an equal number of
white refugees.

There is no doubt that these last developments were in some degree a
surprise to Abolitionists, as well as to pro-slavery prophets. They
compelled the admission, either that slavery was less demoralizing than
had been supposed, or else that this particular type of human nature was
less easy to demoralize. It is but a few years since anti-slavery
advocates indignantly rejected the assertion that the English peasantry
were more degraded than the slaves of South Carolina. Yet no dweller on
the Sea Islands can now read a book like Kay's "Social Condition of the
English People," without perceiving that the families around him,
however fresh from slavery, have the best of the comparison. In the one
class the finer instincts of humanity seem dead; in the lowest specimens
of the other those instincts are but sleeping. I have seen men and women
collected from the rice-fields by the hundred, at the very instant of
transition from slavery to freedom. They were starved, squalid, ragged,
and ignorant to the last degree; but I could not call them degraded, for
they had the instincts of courtesy and the profoundest religious
emotions. There was none of that hard, stolid, besotted dulness which
seems to reduce the English peasant below the level of the brutes he
tends.

And what is surprising, above all, in the freedman's condition, is, not
that it shows a recuperative power, but that it has such a wonderful
suddenness in the recoil. It is not a growth, but a spring. It reverses
the _nihil per saltum_ of the philosophers. In watching them, one is
constantly reminded of those trances produced by some violent blow upon
the head, from which the patient suddenly recovers with powers in