Our steamer for the voyage was to be the revenue cutter “Wayanda,” a trim, beautifully-modeled, ocean-going propeller, carrying six guns, and manned with a capital crew. While Captain Merryman was making his final preparation for a cruise, much longer than he had expected when the telegraph hurried his vessel around from New York, we retained the little “Northerner” for a trip up to Norfolk—only delaying long enough at the Fortress to drive out and see a great negro school, established by General Butler.

The wharves were crowded by the usual curious throng of idle spectators, laborers taking care of supplies, soldiers on duty, and a very sparse sprinkling of ladies. Rebel soldiers by scores were mixed in the groups, or could be seen trudging along the sidewalks toward the Commissary’s.

Everywhere were negroes—on the sidewalks—driving the wagons—in the huts that lined the road. All the slaves of the adjoining counties seem to have established themselves at the Fortress. As we crossed the long, narrow isthmus, contracting at last to an attenuated causeway, which separates the Fortress from the main land, and came out into the ancient village of Hampton, the negro huts thickened into swarms, and fairly covered the sites of the old aristocratic residences which the Rebels fired early in the war when compelled to evacuate the place. Bricks, two centuries old, imported by the early colonists from Great Britain, for the mansions of the first families, were built up into little outside chimneys for these cabins of the Freedmen; and here and there one noticed an antique Elizabethan chair, of like age and origin, converted to the uses of a portly negress.

To our right, down on the water’s edge, rose a high, narrow residence—the former home of John Tyler; near it was another, somewhat less pretentious, as well as less uncouth, which had formerly been occupied by S. R. Mallory. Both find loyal and benevolent uses now at the hands of the Government. Near them was a long colonnade, with spacious piazzas, fronting a many-windowed brick hospital, which one of our party was observed closely scrutinizing. “Upon my word,” he exclaimed, after a moment’s reflection, “that is the old Chesapeake Female College, of which I have been, from the foundation, one of the Trustees.” Pale-faced men in blue occupied the chambers of the boarding-school misses; and sentries, pacing to and fro, kept a stricter guard than strictest duenna of boarding-school ever achieved.

To our left extended a stretch of marshy meadows and half-cultivated fields. In their midst was one little field cultivated above all the rest. White boards, with a trifle of modest lettering on each, dotted its surface, and the grass grew greenest over long, carefully-smoothed hillocks. A file of slow-paced soldiers, with arms reversed, was entering the inclosure; behind them followed an army wagon, with five rude pine boxes piled upon it; beyond, quietly, and, as one loved to think, even sadly, regarding the scene, was a group of paroled Rebel soldiers; while, as we turned, in passing, to catch a last glimpse of the mourners in blue by the open graves, there was seen away behind us, rippling in the breeze above the fort, the old flag for which these dead had died, and against which these Rebels had fought.

We found the school-house (a barn-like frame structure), a little removed from the cluster of negro huts, and took the school fairly by surprise. Passing up a long hall, wide enough for double rows of desks, in the center, with seats for about ten or twelve boys in each, and an aisle on either side, with benches for the class recitations against the walls, we came to an elevated platform, from which led off, in opposite directions, two other precisely similar halls. The fourth, completing the cross, was designed for girls, and was yet unfinished. Down these three long halls were ranged row after row of cleanly-clad negro boys, from the ages of six and seven up to sixteen or seventeen.

All seemed attentive; and though the teachers complained that the sudden entrance of visitors always led to more confusion than usual, there was certainly no more than one would expect from any school of equal extent anywhere, or under any management. The rolls contained the names of three hundred and seventy-four pupils, of whom about two hundred were present. The Superintendent, who seemed an earnest, simple-minded man, enthusiastically convinced that he had a “mission” here, spoke of this as about the average attendance. The parents, he said, were themselves so uncertain, and so little accustomed, as yet, to habits of regularity, that they could not well bring up this average to a better point. It seemed to me surely not so far behind our ordinary public schools at the North as to suggest any unfavorable contrasts.

These children had all been slaves, and nearly all had accompanied their parents on their escape from the plantations of the Peninsula, and of the upper counties of North Carolina, to the Fortress. The parents had generally been field hands, and one noticed among the children very few faces not of pure African descent. Such masses of little woolly heads, such rows of shining ivories, and flat noses and blubber lips, I had never seen collected before, unless in a state of filth utterly unbearable. The teachers were all convalescent soldiers from the hospitals, moving noiselessly about among the benches in their hospital slippers and cheap calico wrappers—as they themselves had often seen moving about among their hospital cots the angels of mercy from the North. Who shall say they were not doing as beneficent a work, or that the little negroes might not well follow them with as longing and affectionate a gaze?

Several classes were called up to exhibit their proficiency. Doubtless the teachers selected their best scholars for the test—I think even Northern schools sometimes do that—but there can be little opportunity for deception in the reading of an unlearned lesson in a book, or in answers to questions in mental arithmetic, propounded by the visitors themselves. It was strange to see boys of fourteen or fifteen reading in the First Reader; but stranger to observe how intelligently scholars in the First Reader went about their work, and with what comparative rapidity they learned. I passed among the forms and conversed with a good many of the soldier-teachers. They all united in saying that on an average the raw negro boys admitted to the school would learn their letters and be able to read well in the First Reader in three months; while some of them, who were originally bright, and who were kept in regular attendance, made considerably more rapid progress.

An advanced class, composed of the little negro “monitors” who had been longest in the school, was summoned to the platform to read a lesson in the Fourth Reader. One or two of them read very badly; one or two quite well, and with an evident understanding of what was said. The best reader in the class was the smallest boy, an ebony-faced urchin, whose head looked as a six-pound round shot, coated with curled hair from a mattress, might. The Superintendent exhibited his manner of calling out the classes through the whole school to recite, the military style in which the boys were required to march to their places at the word of command, and the general adherence to military forms, even in such minutiæ as distributing slates, removing the stools for the monitors, returning books to their places, and the like.

Then came a little address from the Dominie of our party, a former South Carolina lawyer and heavy slaveholder; and we finally took our leave, the little urchins eagerly handing up their slates, as we passed, to have us see their penmanship; and laboriously tracing out, in school-boy characters, their oddly-sounding names, to show us how readily they could write.

This school is kept up at little or no expense to the Government, save the original cost of erecting the rough board structure in which it is held. The parents of the children have been, to a considerable extent, employed by the Government as laborers in the Quartermaster’s Department; and, meantime, the convalescents from the hospitals have prepared the sons, in some measure, for the new order of things. Still there is more dependence on charity than could be desired, especially among the parents. Negroes need to be taught—just as slaves of any race or color would need to be taught—that liberty means, not idleness, but merely work for themselves instead of work for others; and that, in any event, it means always work. To teach them this, do not gather them in colonies at military posts, and feed them on Government rations; but throw them in the water and have them learn to swim by finding the necessity of swimming. For the present, these collections of negroes are an inevitable result of the war; and that would be a barbarous Government indeed which would not help in time of distress the men whose friendship to it has brought them into distress; but it must be the first care of the authorities to diminish the charity, and leave the negroes, just as it would leave the white men—to take care of themselves.

On arriving at Norfolk, we were met, at the shabby-looking old wharf, by General Gordon, commanding the post. Carriages were in waiting, and we were rapidly whirled past the tumble-down warehouses, through streets of stores from which every former proprietor had gone, by the old English brick church, whence the former pastor had departed, past elegant residences of prominent rebels, in whose parlors sat the wives of Yankee officers, and through whose superb gardens we were invited to wander, and pluck at will great bending bunches of flowers that, at Washington, were still scarce in the hot-houses.

From the gardens we turned toward the country to see the old line of fortifications (planned, curiously enough, by a nephew of one of our party), by which the Virginians, in the first months of the war, had been confident they could hold Norfolk forever against the Yankee scum. Negro soldiers manned the lines the rebel engineer had traced; but wild flowers covered the embankments, and we plucked azalias of exquisite fragrance from the crumbling embrasures. It was not less strange that another member of our party, then foremost in the Cabinet, had undertaken the search hereabouts for a landing for our troops, after the officers had given it up; and had actually chosen the point where they were safely debarked, and whence they had turned these long lines, and reduced Norfolk—“Merrimac” and all—without a blow.

The wild flowers filled the moist evening air with their perfume as we drove back through the negro quarter. Every hut exhibited the tender tokens of mourning for the good, dead President, which were missing on many aristocratic residences. There were no evidences of suffering or destitution among these people; and it was not from their windows that the lowering glances were turned upon the General, and the well-known features of the anti-slavery leader by his side.

Norfolk ought to do, and will do a fine business—whenever it has any country to do business for. It must always be the great shipping point for the Virginia and North Carolina coast; the heaviest vessels can lie by its wharves, and between it and Hampton Roads is room for the navies of the world. But, thus far, there is scarcely any business, save what the army has brought, and what the impoverished inhabitants who remain are themselves able to support. Sutlers have sat in the high places until they have amassed fortunes; but the merchants whose deserted store rooms they are occupying are paroled and ruined Rebel officers. No trade comes or can come from the interior. The people have no produce to spare, and no money with which to buy. And the very number of able-bodied men in the country has been sadly reduced.^[1]

Everything is controlled by the military authority; and while there may be a genuine Union sentiment that warranted the attempted elections of Congressmen, one may still be permitted a quiet suspicion of the independent and disinterested patriotism of the voters. Just as we were pushing off, Mr. Chandler, a nervous, restless, black-haired Virginian, came hobbling out from his carriage. He was a claimant for a seat in the last House, which was refused; and was the leader of the Virginia delegation to the Baltimore Convention, whose admission to that body his fluent and impassioned rhetoric secured. Naturally he is a warm supporter of the Pierpoint State Government, believes that “the loyal men of the State constitute the State,” and doesn’t see why the fact that they are few in numbers should prevent their exercising all the powers of the State. Just now he and the few really loyal men, like him, are very bitter against the Rebels, whom they wish to have excluded from any participation in the ready-made State Government, which they hope soon to have transferred from Alexandria to Richmond, and extended over the State. But they frankly admit themselves to be in a very small minority; and it remains to be seen how long a minority, however loyal, can govern, in a republican country.