previous next

[176] member of the Christian Commission, Vincent Colyer, Esq., of New York was set at work to care for these fugitives. He was designated in orders as Superintendent of t1he Poor.

In the ensuing March after New Berne had been captured, Colyer exercised the same functions there. The following was his method: He took a house for himself and his helpers and made it the center and store of active benevolence for his beneficiaries. For the able-bodied lie secured employment as carpenters, blacksmiths, longshoremen, and laborers on military works. Officers in command also received some negroes from him and used them as scouts, a few chosen fugitives being dispatched to go beyond the lines and return with information.

Evening schools were here opened for the freedmen. At New Berne alone nearly a thousand joyfully accepted the privilege of attending, while willing soldiers in most cases became their instructors. The eagerness of the negro men, women, and children for knowledge of books was a remarkable fact, here emphasized.

Later Chaplain Horace James of the Twenty-fifth Massachusetts Volunteers became Superintendent of Negro Affairs for North Carolina, and other officers were detailed to assist him. These covered the territory gradually opened by the advance of our armies in both Virginia and North Carolina. Becoming a quartermaster with the rank of captain in 1864, he, for upward of two years, superintended the poor, both white and black in that region. He grouped the fugitives in small villages, and diligently attended to their industries and to their schools. Enlisted men were his first teachers; then followed the best of lady

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
North Carolina (North Carolina, United States) (2)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Vincent Colyer (2)
Horace James (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1864 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: