There was a very general desire among the contrabands to know how to
read. A few had learned; and these, in every instance where we inquired
as to their teacher, had been taught on the sly in their childhood by
their white playmates. Others knew their letters, but could not "put
them together," as they said. I remember of a summer's afternoon seeing
a young married woman, perhaps twenty-five years old, seated on a
door-step with her primer before her, trying to make progress.
In natural tact and the faculty of getting a livelihood the contrabands
are inferior to the Yankees, but quite equal to the mass of the Southern
population. It is not easy to see why they would be less industrious, if
free, than the whites, particularly as they would have the encouragement
of wages. There would be transient difficulties at the outset, but no
more than a bad system lasting for ages might be expected to leave
behind. The first generation might be unfitted for the active duties and
responsibilities of citizenship; but this difficulty, under generous
provisions for education, would not pass to the next. Even now they are
not so much behind the masses of the whites. Of the Virginians who took
the oath of allegiance at Hampton, not more than one in fifteen could
write his name, and the rolls captured at Hatteras disclose an equally
deplorable ignorance.
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