y individuals among the freedmen who have by profitable ventures
laid up twenty or thirty thousand dollars within three years, it seems
no extravagant ambition for a joint-stock company to aim at a rice-mill.

The Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where, from the very
beginning, under the limited authority of General Saxton, the most
favorable results of emancipation have been attained, are now to be the
scene of a larger experiment, still under the same wise care. The
objections urged by General Butler, with his usual acuteness, against
some details of the project of General Sherman, must not blind us to its
real importance. Its implied exclusions can easily be modified; but the
rights which it vests in the freedmen are a substantial fact, which,
when once established, it will require a revolution to overthrow. The
locality fixed for the experiment is singularly favorable. There is no
region of the country where a staple crop can be grown so profitably by
small landholders. There is no agricultural region so defensible, in a
military aspect. So difficult is the navigation of the muddy
tide-streams which endlessly intersect these islands,--so narrow are the
connecting causeways,--so completely is every plantation surrounded and
subdivided by hedges, ditches, and earthworks, long since made for
agricultural purposes, and now most available for defence,--that nothing
this side of the famous military region of La Vendee (which this
district much resembles) can be more easily held by peasant proprietors.

The mere accidents of the war have often led to the experiment of
leaving small bodies of colored settlers, in such favorable localities,
to support and defend themselves. This was successfully done, for
instance, on Barnwell Island, a tract two or three miles square, which
lies between Port Royal Island and the main, in the direction of
Pocotaligo, and is the site of the Rhett Plantation, described in Mr. W.
H. Russell's letters. This region was entirely beyond our picket lines,
and was separated from them by a navigable stream, while from the Rebel
lines it was divided only by a narrow creek that would have been
fordable at low water, but for the depth of mud beneath and around it.
On this island a colony of a hundred or thereabouts dwelt, in peace,
with no resident white man, and only an occasional visit from their
superintendent. There were some twenty able-bodied settlers who did
picket duty every night, by a