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y had ever known, and tending, in the absence of all civil law and the restraints of a well-ordered society, to draw away the laborer from the cultivation of the soil. In South Carolina, moreover, no masters or overseers were left, as in the French and English colonies, to direct the negroes in their labor; and, in consequence, their guidance has been intrusted to a body of superintendents from the North, most of them young men, and all without experience, either in the management of the blacks or the culture of the cotton. This complete separation of the freedmen from their former masters, by reason of the flight and escape of all the planters, has been, in many respects, most favorable to their progress in liberty. Consider for a moment what would have been the result if, at any time during the past thirty years, it had been possible to effect the abolishment of slavery in these islands by an act of the General Government. Who can doubt that such an act, passed against the wills of the slaveholders, would have produced the most disastrous consequences, and that such an experiment of free labor as is now going on would have been utterly impossible? Those, at least, who have had opportunities for observing the bitter hate engendered toward the negroes, among those masters whom the proclamation of the 1st of January deprived of their former 'chattels,' cannot but regard with satisfaction such peaceful solutions of this fearful problem as that effected at Port Royal, where the shot and shell of our gunboats, in breaking the chains of the slave, at the same moment compelled the master to flight. RELIGION OF THE FREEDMEN. The religious condition of the South Carolina freedmen presents many peculiar and interesting features. Whether, like the negroes in the 'old North State,' they celebrated their new birth into freedom by services of praise and thanksgiving at the altar, I have been unable to learn; but certain it is, that the wonderful tranquillity of their sudden transition from bondage, and the good use which they have made of their liberty, are owing in great measure to their deep religious earnestness. This earnestness, it is evident, is not the result of conviction or enlightenment, so much as of the strong emotional nature of the blacks, intensified by sympathy, and kept alive to religious feeling by their frequent meetings for prayer and praise. Yet, to the careful observer, the blind and often superstitious wo
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