Showing posts with label Alpheus Hardy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alpheus Hardy. Show all posts

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Edward S. Philbrick to Alpheus Hardy, December 28, 1863

Beaufort, S. C, Dec. 28, 1863.
Alpheus Hardy, Treasurer:

Dear Sir,—Enclosed please find my draft for one hundred dollars, for the relief of the families of Freedmen, in response to your circular. Please state to your committee and to any other gentlemen interested in the question of free labor, that I have disbursed the sum of $20,000 during the past nine months among the Freedmen here, in the shape of wages, well earned, besides which they have now on hand ample provision to feed their families for twelve months to come, the fruit of their own toil.

I employ about 500 laborers — women and children, mostly, having a population of 920 on my lands. They have raised for me 73,000 pounds of clean Sea Island cotton this year, worth 50d. sterling in Liverpool, besides their own provision crops, above referred to. This has been done in hearing of Gen. Gilmore's big guns on Morris Island, surrounded by camps, with no civil law, and without the help of the able-bodied men, who were all pressed into the military service, leaving the plantations with none but old men, women and children. I have no paupers, all the old and infirm being fed and clothed by their friends and children.

I mention these things to show how easy it is to render the negroes a self-supporting and wealth-producing class with proper management; and I, at the same time, fully appreciate the duty imposed upon us as a nation, to extend the area of charity where the unsettled state of the country renders industry impossible until time is given to re-organize and force to protect it. We are more fortunately situated than the people of the Mississippi Valley, and have got the start of them.

Respectfully yours,
E. S. Philbrick.

SOURCE: New-England Educational Commission for Freedmen, Extracts from Letters of Teachers and Superintendents of the New-England Educational Commission for Freedmen, Fourth Series, January 1, 1864, p. 14