With Commodore Dupont's capture, on November 7, 1861, of two earth
forts which the rebels had recently thrown up at Hilton Head and Bay
Point, South Carolina, the Sea Island region became Union territory.
The planters and their families having fled precipitately, the United
States Government found itself in possession of almost everything that
had been theirs, the two chief items being the largest cotton crop
ever yet raised there, nearly ready for exporting, and several hundred
demoralized, destitute slaves, the number of whom was daily being
increased by refugees and returned fugitives. The negroes were plainly
a burdensome problem, the cotton a valuable piece of property. The
first thing to do was obvious, and fortunately the same
"cotton-agents" who were despatched by the authorities at Washington
to collect and ship the property were able, by employing negroes for
the purpose, to make a beginning towards solving the problem.
In another month the next step was taken; the Secretary of the
Treasury sent down Edward L. Pierce, of Milton, Massachusetts, as a
special agent charged with the duty of getting under way some method
of managing the negroes and starting a cotton crop for 1862. Mr.
Pierce, who the summer before had had charge of the contrabands at
Fortress Monroe, did his work quickly and well, and his suggestions
for organization were promptly adopted and put into practice by the
Government. Meanwhile he had written to "benevolent persons in
Boston," setting forth the instant need of the negroes for clothing
and for teachers, meaning by the term "teachers" quite as much
superintendents of labor as instructors in the rudiments of learning.
The response to this appeal was immediate. An "Educational Commission
for Freedmen"[1] was organized in Boston, New York and Philadelphia
were quick to follow, and on March 3, 1862, there set sail from New
York for Port Royal[2] a party of men and women who were almost
without exception inspired purely by the desire to help those who had
been slaves. Government made them an allowance of transportation,
subsistence, and quarters; and, since few could afford to give their
services, the Commissions paid them salaries of from $25 to $50 a
month.
There was a good deal of courage in what these people did. The climate
of the Sea Islands is unwholesome; the rebels were more than likely,
from across the narrow Coosaw River, to invade the territory held by
Northern troops; it was not improbable that the negroes might refuse
utterly to work; it was not impossible that they might wreak vengeance
for their wrongs on every white man who should try to control them.
Furthermore, as a rule these men and women knew little of any kind of
agriculture, and still less of the local conditions under which they
were to do their work, or of the people with whom they were to deal.
They had, in fact, no other guides to action than enthusiasm and good
sense, and of the latter, in particular, they carried widely differing
amounts. Some, who went supplied with too little of either, were back
in their Northern homes before summer was under way; the majority,
making what they could of the means, or lack of means, at their
disposal, had within the same period of time got about thirty-eight
hundred laborers at steady work on fifteen thousand acres of corn,
potatoes, and cotton. For the first time in our history educated
Northern men had taken charge of the Southern negro, had learned to
know his nature, his status, his history, first-hand, in the cabin and
the field. And though subsequently other Southern territory was put
into the hands of Northern men and women to manage in much the same
fashion, it was not in the nature of things that these conditions
should ever be exactly reproduced. The question whether or not the
freedman would work without the incentive of the lash was settled once
for all by the "Port Royal Experiment."
Of the many thousand letters that must have been written by these
people to their Northern homes, those of one small group only are
represented by the extracts here printed. The writers were New
Englanders and ardent anti-slavery people; W. C. G. and C. P. W. were
Harvard men just out of college, H. W. was a sister of the latter. A
few of the later letters were written by two other Massachusetts men,
T. E. R., a Yale graduate of 1859, and F. H., who remained on the
islands longer than the three just mentioned. All five are still
living. Richard Soule, Jr., now dead for many years was an older man,
a teacher, a person of great loveliness of character and justice of
mind. The principal figure in the letters, Edward S. Philbrick of
Brookline, who died in 1889, was in one sense the principal figure in
the Sea Island situation. He began by contributing a thousand dollars
to the work and volunteering his services on the ground, where he was
given charge by Mr. Pierce of three plantations, including the largest
on the islands; being a person of some means, with an established
reputation as an engineer and a very considerable business experience,
he was from the first prominent among the volunteers. When, in the
following year, he became personally and financially responsible for a
dozen plantations, this prominence was increased a hundredfold. Thus
he found himself the victim of the vituperation hurled by many
Northern friends of the blacks at the "professed philanthropists" who
went to Port Royal to "make their fortunes" out of the labor of the
"poor negro." The integrity of Mr. Philbrick's motives stands out in
his letters beyond the possibility of misinterpretation. This record
is a witness of what sort of thing he and his kind were ready to do to
redress the wrongs of slavery.
The extracts have been arranged in chronological order, except in a
few cases where chronology has seemed less important than
subject-matter. They tell a complete story, the greater part of which
falls within the period of the Civil War. They give a vivid notion of
the life from the midst of which they were written; of the flat,
marsh-riddled country, in which few Northerners saw any lasting charm;
of the untidy, down-at-the-heels plantations; of the "people," wards
of the nation, childish, irritating, endlessly amusing; of the daily
toil of Northern men in managing farms and of Northern women in
managing households under Southern and war-time conditions; of the
universal preoccupation with negro needs; of the friendly interchange
of primitive hospitality; of the underlying sense in the writers'
minds of romantic contrast between their own to-day and the yesterday
of the planters,--or a possible to-morrow of the planters. It is not
with matters military or political that these letters deal. They
record the day to day experiences of the housekeeper, the teacher, the
superintendent of labor, and the landowner. For this reason they form
a new contribution to the history of the Port Royal Experiment.
[Illustration: THE SEA ISLANDS OF SOUTH CAROLINA.]
KEY TO MAP OF THE SEA ISLANDS OF
SOUTH CAROLINA