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