AND THE FREEDMEN Reminiscences of the Civil War WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK FOR THE CONTRABANDS AND FREEDMEN BY JOHN EATON, PH.D., LL.D. Brigadier-General; General Superintendent of Freedmen, Department of U. S. Superintendent of Schools, Porto Rico IN COLLABORATION WITH ETHEL OSGOOD MASON WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILES LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK JUCKSCH COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, & Co. All rights reserved THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. E453 PREFACE N preparing this volume of reminiscences for publication I have found myself led by two motives more or less related. My wish in the first place is to give a faithful picture of the great President and the great General who guided us through the most tragic period of our National life. I do not pretend to write in any general sense of the military career of Grant or the political life of Lincoln, but only of those incidents in connection with which I came into personal contact with these two men, and, above all, of the character and standards of each as I saw them. One of the strongest safeguards to American life is devotion to our heroes and reverence for the ideals to which they pledged themselves. Grant and Lincoln were pre-eminent among those who sacrificed the personal to the National life, and we can never look too closely to the examples which they prepared for us. My second wish was to preserve, in a form available to the general reader, a record of the efforts made by the Union army to succor the Negro during the progress of the war and to secure justice to him and to the communities in which he found himself. Here, again, no attempt has been made to give a history of this work in any adequate or general sense. Although I have the keenest recognition of the labors of other men who were detailed to special service among the contrabands and freedmen, I have been obliged to refer only sparingly to their efforts. I have confined myself to presenting as faithfully as I might a record 19 of the work for the Negro in the Mississippi Valley, where I acted as Superintendent of Feedmen for the Department of the Tennessee and State of Arkansas, under the direct authority of General Grant- and later of the War Department - and in more or less close personal touch with President Lincoln. The superintendency established by the Union over the welfare of the Negro during the height of the conflict was one of the most important efforts made by our Government to meet the threatening race problem which was then presented unequivocally to the Nation, and which is still one of the great issues our country has to face. Under that supervision the Negro's status changed from that of slave to freeman, and the record of the transformation should at least be available to all who have an interest in the Negro question as it confronts us to-day. Unfortunately no one of the superintendents intrusted with this work before the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau has given us any history of it save what may be drawn from the somewhat inaccessible official reports. Hence the literature of the subject is inadequate. Yet the Negro can never be understood or our relation to him determined until all the elements in his history are recognized. It is in the hope, then, of preserving data which are in danger of being wholly overlooked that these personal recollections are offered. In the preparation of this volume I have had the collaboration of Miss Ethel Osgood Mason, daughter of my college classmate and life-long friend Dr. Osgood Mason. Such readable quality as the narrative may possess is in no small measure due to her literary instinct joined with a fidelity in research that has assured the accuracy of all documentary and special references. JOHN EATON. |