3.
That New-Year's time was our second contribution to the great series of
historic days, beads upon the rosary of the human race, permanent
festivals of freedom. Its celebration was one beside whose simple
pageant the superb festivals of other lands might seem but glittering
counterfeits. Beneath a majestic grove of the great live-oaks which
glorify the South-Carolina soil a liberated people met to celebrate
their own peaceful emancipation. They came thronging, by land and water,
from plantations which their own self-imposed and exemplary industry was
beginning already to redeem. The military escort which surrounded them
had been organized out of their own numbers, and had furnished to the
nation the first proof of the capacity of their race to bear arms. The
key-note of the meeting was given by spontaneous voices, whose
unexpected anthem took the day from the management of well-meaning
patrons, and swept all away into the great currents of simple feeling.
It was a scene never to be forgotten: the moss-hung trees, with their
hundred-feet diameter of shade; the eager faces of women and children in
the foreground; the many-colored headdresses; the upraised hands; the
neat uniforms of the soldiers; the outer row of mounted officers and
ladies; and beyond all the blue river, with its swift, free tide. And at
the centre of all this great and joyous circle stood modestly the man on
whose personal integrity and energy, more than on any President or
Cabinet, the hopes of all that multitude appeared to rest,--who
commanded then among his subjects, and still commands, an allegiance
more absolute than any European potentate can claim,--whose name will be
forever illustrious as having first made a practical reality out of that
Proclamation which then was to the President only an autograph, and to
the Cabinet only a dream,--who, when the whole fate of the slaves and of
the Government hung trembling in the balance, decided it forever by
throwing into the scale the weight of one resolute man,--who personally
mustered in the first black regiment, and personally governed the
first community where emancipation was a success,--who taught the
relieved nation, in fine, that there was strength and safety
in those dusky millions who till then had been an incubus and a
terror,--Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, Military Governor of South
Carolina. The single career of this one man more than atones for all the
traitors whom West Point ever nurtur