a
subject race; but in vain will you attempt to study it until the burden
is lifted. The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while the
bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She soothes us with her
deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing in pain,
is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the
spirit the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not
even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the
capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
transmuted to a man.

* * * * *

My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It
was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their
posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen,
and to note the progress they had made. There were interesting scenes to
fill the days. I saw an aged negro, Caesar by name, not less than one
hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.
The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,--a free savage in the
wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long
years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the
President,--his life covering an historic century. A faithful and
industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival,
rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of
pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don Carlos,
whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon
Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last
hours,--now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a
slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the
daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston. He talked
intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and
accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion
of their preparatory studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C.
Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private
tutor.

Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,--an old woman, with much
power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had
formerly been. The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If
you're as long b