soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in
the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves
against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the
Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a
single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a
white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition
of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to
freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them,
especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments,
very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their
freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many
others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in
other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various
parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose
colored people.

I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or
report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless.
There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty
pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious
depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout
very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing,
and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But,
while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under
different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the
situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the
plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops
of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to
save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts
were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the