Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/40

38 the Hammond and Mansfield General Hospitals with poor white people, mostly women and children, whose frail constitutions were completely prostrated under the hardships and discomforts of a forced removal from home. Among these refugees our teachers moved like ministering angels. They took by assignment a hospital ward each, and attended to those helpless patients, day and night, like sisters of mercy. Ignorant people, they could scarcely believe their own eyes when they saw the despised "nigger schoolma'am's" ministering so sedulously to themselves and their children. Some of them might have obtained here their first gleam of light, on the subject of a common brotherhood of man. Dr. Ballanger, of the Mansfield Hospital at Morehead, since deceased of yellow fever, testified in terms of warmest admiration to the fidelity and skill of our teachers while, as nurses ad interim, they sojourned with him.

At this point, although one of importance to us in a military point of view, there are so few colored people, that only an occasional visit has been necessary to give them all needed attention. A few hardy negroes are employed by the quartermaster to man the boats which put out to passing vessels, and a few are servants of officers at the fort. Less than one hundred colored people live on the Banks, all the way from Cape Hatteras to Ocracoke Inlet.

Most of those who resided there in 1861, have gone to other points since our military occupation of Eastern North Carolina. Having touched upon the principal matters of interest belonging to the several posts we occupy in this State, as they stand connected with negro affairs, I now present some facts and general considerations on the subject of

My earliest interest in the blacks of North Carolina had respect to their training in the elements of knowledge, and their instruction from the pulpit. Long before assuming my present charge, in the early days of the war, when the experiences of the Burnside Expedition were the staple of current news, my personal efforts in behalf of the negroes began.