Showing posts with label St Helena Island. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St Helena Island. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Dr. Seth Rogers to his daughter Dolly, February 20, 1863—Evening

February 20, Evening.

Yesterday I visited Miss Murray's school on St. Helena Island. Miss Murray is assisted by Miss Towne and Miss Foster. Since the season for tilling the land has begun, the school has lessened in numbers from 200 to 125: both sexes and from three to fifteen years of age. Many of them have been under tuition several months and compare very favorably with Irish children after the same length of instruction, as I have seen them in N. E. From what I have seen in camp, I think the mode of receiving instruction is very different in the two races. Imitation and musical concert are the avenues to the minds of these children. Of course the habit of such dependence will be changed by education, but such is the beginning. After centuries of slavery, which utterly shut the avenues of thought, we should hardly expect rapid development of activity in the superior regions of thought. Only now and then, some genius, like Robert Sutton, can be left to prove the God-like relation. The simple fact is that use is less distructive than disuse.

I dined at Friend Hunn's and was accompanied by Miss Forten on a visit to Mr. Thorpe, who has charge of the Tripp plantation. “Edisto” [is] a meagre little confiscated creature from Edisto Island, with a saddle that must have been afloat since the flood; a bridle that left him comparatively unbridled and erratic in his ways, and a girth that could never gird his loins up to the scriptural injunction without breaking. He had neither sandals nor shoes to his feet nor speed to his body. You can imagine that our ride of four miles through the pine barrens was not so rapid as John Gilpin's. But the afternoon was like the last of June and full of sunshine and jasmine blossoms and the ground was covered with brown pine needles. I have seen none but the pitch pine here. The needles are often a foot long and now that they are enlivened by steady warmth, they sport graceful plumes against the sky.

But I have made my last visit to St. Helena Island. The fortunes of war uproot too suddenly, for my fancy, all the little fibres of local attachment just as they begin to take kindly to the soil. I have just got everything in good attitude towards my new hospital when all is to be abandoned and we are to pitch our tents (if the rebels permit) in another state. Being exactly what I want, I do not grumble at the fact.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 43, October, 1909—June, 1910: February 1910. p. 366

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Dr. Seth Rogers to his daughter Dolly, February 9, 1863

ST. HELENA ISLAND, February 9, 1863.

Yesterday afternoon I put my new saddle and bridle on the long-legged horse, claimed by the Colonel and Adjutant, and came over here to spend the night at the house of the Hunn's and Miss Forten. This is the first night I have slept in a house since the 18th day of December. It seems strange to find myself in the midst of civilization and buckwheat cakes. Just before leaving camp, I read Mr. Emerson's "Boston Hymn," to our regiment, while assembled for divine worship. I prefaced it with the remark that many white folks could not understand the poems of Mr. Emerson, but I had no apprehensions of that kind from those before me. It was enough that Robert Sutton's eyes were glistening before me as I read. I was standing on the veranda of the plantation house and the men were under a beautiful magnolia tree toward the river. Mr. Emerson would have trembled with joy to see how much these dark colored men drank in the religion of his poem. The chaplain was filled with emotion by it and straightway took the poem for his text and when I left, was enthusiastically speaking from it.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 43, October, 1909—June, 1910: February 1910. p. 358-9