Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/6

4 The census just completed shows them to be now located as follows:

A glance at these localities and figures reveals the fact that great changes have occurred during the year, and thereby indicates the nature of the difficulties with which we have to contend. The fact is that nothing can be relied on in this District, except the certainty of change. What with confederate troops, guerillas, small pox and yellow fever, the negroes (and poor whites as well) have been tossed upon a sea of troubles, and our care of them has assumed a new phase almost every month. Many of our friends at the North do not realize how little territory our army holds in North Carolina. We control, indeed, a broad area of navigable waters, and command the approaches from the sea, but have scarcely room enough on land to spread our tents upon. Our base is three hundred miles away, at Fort Monroe; or farther still, New York; and but for a bi-weekly transport and an occasional mail we should be nowhere.

The management of the Freedmen's affairs in North Carolina would have been more gratifying to their friends, and to ourselves also, if we could have operated upon a larger area. If land had been accessible on which to settle the negroes, it would have prevented huddling them together in the fortified towns and in temporary camps. But there was left us no alternative. Some of the more fearless among them did indeed venture to hire tracts of land a little way out of the towns, or on the "debatable territory" along the Railroad and the Neuse, and attempt the culture of cotton or corn, or the making of turpentine; but it was done at the risk of capture, and in some instances, the experiment cost the poor fellows their liberty, in others, their lives. Under all these disadvantages and discouragements, it is a marvel that