nd congratulation that
the presence of the soldiers has not produced a greater demoralization
among the negroes than we find to be the case.

Five of the plantations were bought by the freedmen themselves, who are
now carrying them on as independent cultivators. Everywhere the
freedmen, on hearing that the lands were to be sold, were eager to buy,
and it was found in many cases that they had saved considerable sums of
money from their earnings of the previous year. This almost universal
desire of the negroes to become landowners, is a complete refutation of
the charge that sudden emancipation from forced labor opens the door for
the return of the blacks to barbarism.

The conditions under which the trial of free labor is now carried on in
South Carolina, are unparalleled in history. Those who are familiar with
the results of emancipation in the French and English colonies, will
find few points of comparison between those results and the present
workings of freedom on the Sea Islands. Consider that at no previous
time, and in no other country, has there ever been an immediate and
unconditional abolition of slavery. France, in the frenzy of the
Revolution, declared that slavery was abolished, but was forced to
reestablish it under the Consulate; and, during the half century which
followed before the complete and final emancipation of the slaves in
1848, we find continually acts and measures adopted which gradually
paved the way to this ultimate success. England, too, after the
abolition of the slave trade, made repeated efforts to ameliorate the
condition of the slave population of her colonies, and when, in 1833,
the Act of Emancipation was passed, it was found that, while declaring
all slaves on English soil to be instantly free, it made provisions for
transforming them into apprenticed laborers. In South Carolina,
emancipation, proclaimed by the guns of Admiral Du Pont, was instant,
unlooked for, and without conditions. However ardently it may have been
desired by the slaves themselves, they surely could not have expected
it, at a time when the belief universally prevailed among the planters
that the forts which defended their islands were impregnable.

In the colonies of France and England, there was no civil war, bringing
into the midst of the plantations the demoralizing influences of the
camp, harassing the simple-minded freedmen with constant fear of
reverses, which would consign them to a worse bondage than the