Page:Extracts from letters of teachers and superintendents of the New-England Educational Commission for Freedmen.djvu/11

 subsistence raised upon the islands; and yet, with more diligence and increased husbandry the amount may be vastly increased. I see no reason why the natural resources of the islands may not be made to support entirely, at least twice, and perhaps three times their present population. This, of course, would require a more thorough and general superintendence, than has yet been rendered. The people need to be instructed, encouraged, and in many cases compelled to labor. The agent who comes here for pastime or the mere novelty of change, had better stay at home.The direction of labor is vastly important, but scarcely less so is the development of the social, mental and moral faculties of this long oppressed and neglected race. It seems to me there is at present a great lack of teachers, not merely of the alphabet, and more advanced education, but also of social and domestic duties.

11th, 1863. The cotton crop has done very fairly this year. The entire crop, from the private as well as Government plantations, will be about double that of last year, or even more than double. The Government will have this year about one hundred thousand pounds of ginned cotton. The first frost came last night, and that will cut off a good deal of cotton that would have ripened in the next fortnight if there had been no frost. The money paid out to the people for their labor on this cotton is very considerable, and makes the industrious ones very well to do.

Respecting Teachers, I am ready to assure you, from General Foster himself, that he will afford them military protection, government rations, and as good a dwelling place as the circumstances will allow. We have but one Newbern in the department. Here they will have a good house to live in. At Beaufort it would be much the same.But on Roanoke Island, and perhaps at Plymouth and Washington, certainly at Hatteras, we could not supply them so comfortably. I am confident there will be no trouble on this point. Still I wish that those who are sent may share largely in a missionary spirit, and come out here expecting to teach and to live in a log shanty, or even in a tent, if we can do no better for them. Let them aspire to emulate their brothers in self-denial, who have preceded them here in the regiments, and with the sword have cut a passage for the army of Educators to follow on.

27th, 1863. It is not yet a week since Mr. Doolittle opened the school of which Miss Ropes and myself have charge, and to-day we had 258 pupils in attendance, and managed to give to each a morsel of the food for which they are so hungry. The avidity with which they grasp at the least shadow of knowledge is intensly interesting. Once supplied with a book, and the work of school government is at an end. One of my "1st class" aged 25, can read with a good deal of readiness, and the only book he had ever seen until yesterday is a fragment of an old dictionary; and when I put into his hands a "Third Reader" (Wilson's Series) the strong man wept for joy. In our school the ages range from 5 to 45, and as far as I can judge at present, they will soon leave white pupils far behind. Every hour spend with them is a fresh surprise, and a new cause for gratitude that I am here. I suffer no inconvenience from the climate, and have but one regret in connection with being here, and that is that I have not a whole fresh life to give to this noble work.