This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
Chapter
47
: freedmen's aid societies and an act of congress creating a Bureau of refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands
Chapter
55
:
first
appropriation by congress for the bureau; the reconstruction Act,
March
2
,
1867
; increase of educational work
Chapter
60
: opposition to Bureau and reconstruction work became personal; the
Congregational Church of
Washington
Chapter
62
: life in
Washington, D. C.
,
1866
to
1874
; assigned to duty in regular army as commander,
Department of the Columbia
Chapter
63
: in the
Northwest
, among the
Indians
; trip to
Alaska
; life in
Portland, Ore.
;
1874
to
1881
Chapter
64
: superintendent of the
United States military Academy
; commanding
Department of the Platte
,
Omaha, Neb.
Chapter
68
:
French
army maneuvers,
1884
; promotion to
Major General
,
United States army
,
San Francisco
1886
-
88
[183] of forgiveness on his tongue and hope in his face the lad died. The murderer could not be found. His comrades covered him and his crime. The death of this colored youth made a deep impression in our camp. Evidently on account of his color he was slain. Friendly voices murmured against the crime, and with set teeth echoed the settled thought: “Slavery must go!” On January 1, 1863, Mr. Lincoln's promised proclamation was issued. It exceeded the preliminary one in intrinsic force and immediate positive effect. On the coast of South Carolina our officers, under the Confiscation Act, had already enrolled large numbers of able-bodied fugitives as soldiers. Near one encampment were standing, scattered here and there, immense live oaks. Their lateral branches often covered a circuit of from seventy-five to a hundred feet, and innumerable birds lived and sang among the restless leaves. Not far from Beaufort under the shade of these magnificent trees the first tidings of the grand proclamation were read to a regiment of negroes. Their joy and enthusiasm were unbounded. Even before the close of 1862 many thousands of blacks of all ages, clad in rags, with no possessions except the nondescript bundles of all sizes which the adults carried on their backs, had come together at Norfolk, Hampton, Alexandria, and Washington. Sickness, want of food and shelter, sometimes resulting in crime, appealed to the sympathies of every feeling heart. Landless, homeless, helpless families in multitudes, including a proportion of wretched white people, were flocking northward from Tennessee and Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. They were, it is true, for a time not only relieved by army rations,
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.