Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/32

30 projected, and will be built, it is hoped, during the present winter.

An attempt was made, early in the year, to give the colonists an idea of governing themselves. A "council" of fifteen leading individuals was appointed, and instructed to meet and consult for the common welfare, and be a medium through which the rules and orders of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs and of the military authorities might be communicated and enforced. This was intended to be the germ of a civil government. But the plan proved unsuccessful in the main. The "councillors" were too ignorant to keep records, or make and receive written communications, were jealous of one another, and too little raised in culture above the common people to command their respect, at least while the island is under military rule. To fit these people for republican self-government, education is the prime necessity. The sword to set them free, letters to make them citizens. The whites, who lived to the number of about four hundred on Roanoke Island previous to this rebellion, did not, for the most part, abandon their homes. They hastened, after the capture of the island, to take the oath of allegiance, which some of them have faithfully kept in its spirit, others only in "the letter which killeth." The truly loyal among them have appreciated the necessity which compelled the Government to take possession of their uncultivated lands for a negro settlement, and have accepted the fact with patriotic submission. But the other class, whose loyalty is so ill-disguised as to reveal the "copper," are loud in their complaints of the "nigger" and the "abolitioners." They would be glad to drive the colored people and their friends from the island. And this too, when, by their own confession, their estates are worth more by four or five hundred per cent, than they were before the war, and their island home has been lifted from an ignoble obscurity into honorable prominence and commercial importance. The average value of the wood and waste lands, on which the colony has been settled, was only two dollars (12.00) an acre before the war. The "nigger" will yet be the making of these poor people. The question is sometimes asked, whether the Freedmen's colony on Roanoke Island has proved a success? The answer may