Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/12

10 Many who were at first settled in this camp have left it to live in town, where they can better obtain work, or to reside upon farms, or to migrate northward. As many as could be induced to go North, and for whom places could be found as household servants, have been assisted to go. But they much prefer to live in the warmer climate of the South. At the time of the evacuation of Washington, this camp contained fully four thousand people. In September last, two hundred men were taken from it, at one time, and sent to labor in Virginia. This, with the gradual depletion alluded to above, leaves in it now but twenty-eight hundred residents. More than half of these belong to families of men working in the Quartermaster's or Engineer department, or laboring on their own account, and maintained at their own charges. Fully a thousand of them, however, ought to be sown thinly upon the soil. Let our army open the way, and we will do it in this neighborhood. If not, arrangements are in progress to do it elsewhere. To manage such a camp, and keep it orderly, tidy, and healthful, is very difficult, because it is against nature, opposed to the maxims of social economy, abnormal and unprofitable; yet it may be tolerated in disturbed times, while we fight and wait, and pray for peace, with enlargement and liberty. In the town of New Berne, within the rude triangle formed by the rivers Neuse and Trent on two sides, and our line of fortifications on the other, are 6,560 colored people. The town contained in 1860, 5,482 inhabitants, white and colored. Nearly the whole of the white population abandoned the place before our army entered it. The most valuable, active, and useful of the slaves were compelled to accompany their masters.

But the free blacks generally remained, not having the fear of "the Yankees" before their eyes. They are all self-supporting. Others have come in, and among them many mechanics and skilled laborers, so that New Berne has now a good supply of tradesmen, in nearly all the different branches essential to social prosperity. There are carpenters, caulkers, shipwrights, blacksmiths, masons, shoemakers, coopers, mill-wrights, engineers, carriage-makers, painters, barbers, tailors, draymen, grocers, cooks, hucksters, butchers, gardeners, fishermen, oyster-men, sailors, and boatmen, with the usual supply of doctors and