Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/47

Rh to hold written documents instead of verbal promises, and to manage their own affairs. They form societies, leagues, combinations, meetings, with little of routine or record, but much of speech-making, and sage counsel. They almost adore the persons who have brought them deliverance. They are hero worshippers. The eternal progress of ideas they comprehend not, but Abraham Lincoln is to them the chiefest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely. They mingle his name with their prayers and their praises evermore. They have great reverence for the "head men" and for all in authority, and hence are easily governed. Even in their afflictions they retain this vanity. A message recently came to me that a colored man in a certain cabin across the river "had been under deep concern of mind, since last Friday, and wanted the General to come to see him, with the two head clergymen in the place." The delegate of some local society who has been to the front, and obtained an audience with Gen. Butler, or some other dignitary, will never have done rehearsing the circumstance. They are slow and shiftless workers. Seldom does one of them do a good day's work, when laboring for another party. Their own rude, bungling, slipshod style, seldom forsakes them. It almost gives one the backache to witness their labor. Not that they mean to be idle, but their habit is to strike a few blows, and then lean against a fence in the sun, and the last as much as the first. They never saw a gentleman work, until the Yankees came here, and before this time their only rule was to do as little as they could.

The ownership of real estate is their strongest incentive to industry. Give them a piece of mother earth, and a "scrip o' paper" to show for it, and they are as happy as kings. Be it swampy or scrubby, with roots and bushes, or sandy, or wooded, it matters not. Up goes a house, down sinks a well, and soon pigs and chickens appear on the scene, and the farm is inaugurated with a cornfield and a collard patch and rows of sweet potatoes between. They will do better in the society of whites than in separate communities. At least for the present and until the enterprising and thrifty among them have become wealthy and able to furnish occupation to the remainder, the more intelligent race must