Portsmouth, Va., May 11th, 1863.
For a week we heard, without anxiety, the booming of the
guns at Suffolk, and we begged to be allowed to remain on the Island (Craney
Island), but the Doctor was decided, and General Viele and other officers urged
the necessity of his sending us North. To that we demurred; but in spite of our
unwillingness, we were kept for a week in durance vile at the Hygeia Hotel. We
then returned to our work, though the authorities considered it unsafe so to
do; and knowing we should soon be taken from the Island, we worked, for a week,
ten or twelve hours a day; our pupils striving cheerfully all the while to keep
pace with us. In that week, many to whom on Monday we gave their first writing
lessons, learned to write me letters. Writing from memory, excited them amazingly,
and writing “Newport News,” “Hampton,” and their other homes of refuge, was a
delight to them. I don't tell you about my sister, but her work tells here all
the while. We want primers — one thousand of them. Out of date books can be
spared, I doubt not, from many Northern book stores. You desire us to make our
wants known to you. Can you help us in this instance, and that speedily?
Dr. Brown has six hundred and forty-five negroes upon the
farms which he directly superintends – from one to five hundred upon each farm.
He still has forty farms. Of fourteen a third of the produce is confiscated, and
of those he has no oversight. He himself is cultivating two thousand four hundred
acres, with grain, vegetables, cotton and tobacco.
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. 11-2