d by the contradictory
statements of our soldiers, some of whom, according to their wishes,
said the contest was for them, and others that it did not concern them
at all and they would remain as before. If it was explained to them,
that Lincoln was chosen by a party who were opposed to extending
slavery, but who were also opposed to interfering with it in
Virginia,--that Virginia and the South had rebelled, and we had come to
suppress the rebellion,--and although the object of the war was not to
emancipate them, yet that might be its result,--they answered, that they
understood the statement perfectly. They did not seem inclined to fight,
although willing to work. More could not be expected of them while
nothing is promised to them. What latent inspirations they may have
remains to be seen. They had at first a mysterious dread of fire-arms,
but familiarity is rapidly removing that.

The religious element of their life has been noticed. They said they
had prayed for this day, and God had sent Lincoln in answer to their
prayers. We used to overhear their family devotions, somewhat loud
according to their manner, in which they prayed earnestly for our
troops. They built their hopes of freedom on Scriptural examples,
regarding the deliverance of Daniel from the lions' den, and of the
Three Children from the furnace, as symbolic of their coming freedom.
One said to me, that masters, before they died, by their wills sometimes
freed their slaves, and he thought that a _type_ that they should become
free.

One Saturday evening one of them asked me to call and see him at his
home the next morning. I did so, and he handed me a Bible belonging
to his mistress, who had died a few days before, and whose bier I had
helped to carry to the family vault. He wanted me to read to him the
eleventh chapter of Daniel. It seemed, that, as one of the means of
keeping them quiet, the white clergymen during the winter and spring
had read them some verses from it to show that the South would prevail,
enforcing passages which ascribed great dominion to "the king of the
South," and suppressing those which subsequently give the supremacy to
"the king of the North." A colored man who could read had found the
latter passages and made them known. The chapter is dark with mystery,
and my auditor, quite perplexed as I read on, remarked, "The Bible is a
very mysterious book." I read to him also the thirty-fourth chapter of
Jeremiah, wherein the sad prop