Daily Ohio statesman. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1855-1870, 1864-03-02
THE CITY.
THE coNTRABANDs.
Negro philanthropy 49, Experiments
i'm the south.

i'm the south.
Mrs, Francis ID. Gage, a lady well know
i'll Ohio as an authoress and lecturer, an,
more recently connected with the expert
ments inaugurated by the Abolition philan
thropists Of New England and the North
at Beaufort and other Islands of Soutl
Carolina to. bring the negros to realizing
sense of the beauty and value of that free
dom to which they were elevated by th,
proclamation of the President, lectured or
the subject Of Contrabands last night in the
the Hall of the House of Representatives
which had been rendered by her friends fol
the purpose. The audience was large and
Z respectable, and, if the applause which was
expressed at the fine passages of the speak
3 er is to be taken as a criterion, was de-
lighted with the discourse. 1t is fair to saw,
however, that some disappointment was
felt by those who attended in the hope of
gaining valuable facts and information in
regard to the highly interesting and ex-
tremely novel subject of the lecture -the
African in the contraband state.
E Senator Howells, of Ashtabula, was call
- ed to the Chair, and he introduced Mrs.
Gage, and presided during the evening
The Speakers a prepossessing looking wo-
man, with a pleasant voice and an engag-
ing manner. She described the condition
. Of the contrabands at Beaufort upon her
arrival as being miserable and pitiable in
the extreme. Our forces in evacuating
Jacksonville, Florida, in 1862, brought with
them thousands Of negroes, chiefly the old
and decrepit slaves left by their masters
who had been driven away. The philan-
thropists read the proclamation of emanci-
patton to these people and set them to work.
Things were progressing smoothly and
with the promise of success, when along
came one of Father Abraham's conscrip-
tion proclamations, which carried all the
able bodied contrabands into the army,
and confused the arrangements of the
philanthropists to that degree that the
experiment of making the colony self sus-
tanning was abandoned for that year, and has
not since recovered from the effects; though
Mrs. Gage said they did raise corn enough
to feed the community and about one acre
Of cotton to each full hand. The white
soldiers she remarked, treated the expert
ment with contempt, and threatened to dis
band, having some idea about fighting for
the fag-as if that was anything else but
an idea; but before she left the army had
been brought to different opinion ofsthe
contraband. She had been frequently asked
whether the negroes were industrious,
whether they would work for themselves,
like white men; and she answered no, they
would not The reasons for this, however,
were to be traced to the effects of
slavery, which, by the way, is held
by the negro fanatics of the day
to be the all sufficient excuse
for the shortcomings of the African, while
by other people his shortcomings in many
respects are regarded as the original cause
of his being reduced to slavery. Mrs. S.
held that there could be no virtue expected |
in people held in bondage, that vice was
an absolute consequence and necessary con-
comitant to that condition though upon
this point she became tride inconsistent,
as she soon after said that when she went
there the contrabands neither used profane
language or got drunk-these immoralities |
being confined to the military officers
but since the white man was introduced and
the intercourse between the two races had
extended and become common the contra
band had arrived at remarkable state Of
accomplishment in the gentlemanly quail
fications of swearing and drinking whisky.
1t would be uncivil, probably, to suggest
that, If bondage and virtue are incompati-
BILE, 1t is somewat singular that SO virtuous
a document as the proclamation of free
dom, which is said and by some believed
to have originated with the Divinity, should
take with 1t whisky and immortality. to
people who before knew nothing of either.
She thought the negro could be taught dis
content, and that would be stimulant to
labor which the contraband does not now
possess or desire. He would then outstrip
the white man in the march of progress.
We conclude from the lecture, of which |
we have only attempted to convey an idea,
that it is but confirmation of previous re-
ports from the Beaufort experiment, that
the scheme is failure one of those philan-
thropic schemes of visionary enthusiasts
and inflated humbugs which are magnif- /
cent in imagination and wretched in the
reality splendid In prospective and con- II