Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/28

26 survey his home as a thing accomplished, and sit at night by its blazing firelight, and see the dark shadows of his wife and children dance upon the cabin wall. And this, too, in a Slave State! his old master living, perhaps, at the south end of the island! Listen to his song:

Major Gen. B. F. Butler, on succeeding to the command of the Department, issued that important order No 46, organizing the Department of Negro Affairs, confirming the doings of his predecessor, and providing, with a wonderful prescience, for all the exigencies likely to occur in the enrolment, employment, support and care of the colored people. Under this regime, the work at Roanoke prospered more and more. At one time, during the winter of 1863-4, there was a degree of suffering on the island from insufficient shelter. This was when a thousand or fifteen hundred persons at one time were sent there by Gen. Wild, now returned from the South, the result of a raid through the northern counties of the State. But the new comers were soon domiciliated, as comfortably as their predecessors had been before. The number of colored people now on the island, as ascertained by the recent census, is three thousand and ninety-one (3,091). Of these, 1,295 are males, and 1,796 females; 1,297 are children under fourteen years of age, of whom 710 are girls, and 587 boys; 1,794 are fourteen years of age or upwards, of whom 708 are males, and 1,086 females: of these 708 males, only 217 are between the years of 18 and 45, the proper military age, and the larger portion of these, even, are exempts on account of physical disability, showing that 491, or seventy per cent, of the adult males, are either in the immature period of youth, or in the decline of life. These statistics indicate, with sufficient clearness, what may be expected of these people, and what is, at present, their industrial force. If remunerative employment could be given to the women and older children, it would be a blessing to them. Household cares do not sit heavily upon people who live in almost primitive simplicity.