Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/28

 "The Head"—four across the bay, and the rest of the distance through the inlets connecting Port Royal harbor with St. Helena Sound. Extensive plantations with large mansions and scattered live-oaks and palmetto trees were visible on both sides of our course. Beaufort did not belie its renown as the favorite pleasure-resort of the South Carolina slaveholding aristocracy. The town consisted of one grand, broad avenue, two hundred and fifty feet wide, lined with great evergreen oaks, behind which the stately homes of the cotton lords stood, separated from each other by gardens filled with a variety of brilliant flowers, indicative of the mildness of the winter climate. The houses, while built of wood in a plain style, were nearly all three stories high and of generous proportions, and impressed one as both spacious and comfortable. Their owners, almost without exception, had abandoned them to the care of their slave servants. Several were made use of for various purposes by the Northern invaders. One was occupied by General Rufus Saxton, the Military Governor of the islands; another by the General Agency of the Freedmen's Bureau. Some served as boarding- and lodging-houses for the volunteer teachers of the freedmen from the North, and some for the schools in which colored adults and children received free instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as in sewing, cutting, cooking, and other domestic arts.

I paid my respects to General Saxton, whose marked personality proved very true to the descriptions I had heard given of him. He was a regular artillery officer, and one of the few outright abolitionists in the army. He had a slender, wiry figure of middle height, a small head with fiery black eyes, short-cropped black hair, and full beard. His intense zeal in the Union cause and the sincerity of his deep hatred of the Rebellion and what he considered its main support—slavery—made him seem at first a glowing zealot, like the martyred preachers of the Faith. But, while ardent and unflinching in his duty, he was at heart as gentle