Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/22

20 hundred white refugees, upon this limited area, while four out of five of the black refugees have found self-supporting employment?

My observation in this State has led me to the conclusion that, of those who are equally poor and equally destitute, the white person will be the one to sit down in forlorn and languid helplessness, and eat the bread of charity, while the negro will be tinkering at something, in his rude way, to hammer out a living. Carteret County, of which Beaufort is the shiretown, extends from Bogue Sound on the south to the Neuse river on the north. Several small streams which take their rise in this county flow northward into the Neuse; and among them are Adam's Creek and Clumfort's Creek. Along the course and near the mouth of these creeks, are settled nearly a thousand colored people, who have been free for years, and who are among the most active, intelligent, and enterprizing colored people I have seen in the South. Some of them own large tracts of land and are esteemed wealthy. They deal largely in turpentine. They are a people who have proved the value of freedom, even with such poor experience of it as they have known under a slave code, and in a State where it was a crime to teach a servant to read. Deeming one of these localities a good position for a school, efforts were made in that direction, and with good success. Within the shelter of the tall turpentine trees at Clumfort's Creek, far out in the wilderness, where no point of bayonet could guard it, rose the Puritan school-house. The American Missionary Association had posted its advanced picket here in the person of Rev. George W Greene, who had no sooner established this northern institution than it was entered and occupied by a cultured lady, whom the New England Freedmen's Aid Society sent out from Boston. This was Mrs. Carrie E. Croome. The rebels had slain her noble husband while in command of his battery at South Mountain, and she would avenge his untimely death by teaching the ignorant negroes how to throw off the yoke which those dastardly rebels had put upon their necks. This was the sublime retaliation of the gospel. But how was it met?

The sight of a "nigger school-house" was more than the