Carolina I have seen outrages persistently practised among the freedmen
by civilians, for which a military officer could have been cashiered in
a month. I have oftener been appealed to for redress against civilians
than against officers or soldiers. I have been compelled to post
sentinels to keep superintendents away from their own plantations, to
prevent disturbance. I have been a member of a military commission which
sentenced to the pillory an eminent Sunday-school teacher who had been
convicted of the unlawful sale of whiskey,--and this in a community into
which the majority of the civilians had come with professedly benevolent
intent.

The truth is, that abuses, acts of oppression towards the freedmen, do
not proceed from mere antecedent prejudice in the army or anywhere else.
They proceed from the temptations of power, and from that impatience
which one is apt to restrain among his equals and to indulge among his
inferiors. The irritability of an Abolitionist may lead him to outrages
as great as those which spring from the selfishness of a mere soldier.
It is becoming almost proverbial, in colored regiments, that radical
anti-slavery men make the best and the worst officers: the best, because
of their higher motives and more elevated standard; the worst, because
they are often ungoverned, insubordinate, impatient, and will sometimes
venture on high-handed acts, under the fervor of their zeal, such as a
mere soldier would not venture to commit. Yet in an army such
aberrations, like all others, yield to discipline. But on a solitary
plantation the temptations and immunities of the slave-driver recur; and
I have seen men yield to these, who had safely passed the ordeal of
persecution and mobs at home.

It was thus, perhaps, that General Sherman and his advisers felt
justified in adopting the theory of absolute separation, on the Sea
Islands,--seeing that the companionship of Southern white men would be
an evil, and that of Northern men by no means an unmixed good. Yet it
seems altogether likely that the system is so far wrong, and will be
modified. Separation is better than "preparation," and is a good
antidote to it. It is better to assume the freedmen too self-reliant
than too feeble,--better to exclude white men than to give them the
monopoly of power. Nevertheless, the principle of exclusion is wrong,
though it is happily a wrong not fundamental to the system, and hence
easily corrected. If the people of any v