they may with wise discrimination distribute WHAT MANUFACTURERS MAY DO FOR among them the gifts of their benefactors. By THE FREED-MEN. such practical charity we would have our The following list, carefully prepared teachers gather to themselves a cumulative shows at a glance the kind of articles needed power for good among these unfortunate ones, in the various departments, and in the different who know but little of Christian saympathy-kinds of labour in which the freedmen are true Christian love. Yours truly, J. M. WALDEN. LETTER FROM THE REV. W. G. HAWKINS, M. A. New York, Oct. 2d, 1865. Frederick Tomkins, D.C.L., 3, Tanfield Court, Inner Temple, London, E.C. Dear Friend, I enclose the circular of Miss Collins, which will be sent to all the Ladies' Societies in this country. I sent two letters to Mr. Leigh, which I suppose he showed you. You will find some quite important matter in the two last numbers of the "National Freed-man." have sent your journal regularly, but as yet have received only one copy of "The Freedman." I beg you will send us all the numbers. Had I time I would write you more on the condition of things. Upon the whole we have reason to be satisfied with the progress of reconstructions in the South. We shall want, this winter, all you can do for us. But little was produced this year, and thousands are this day without shelter or clothing. I think we shall be able to send from 150 to 200 Teachers. They are leaving now by every steamer going south. We are sending many more to Virginia. The district we occupy has Petersburg for a centre. We shall scatter them quite thickly along the track of Grant's and Lee's army, in the final retreat, as this was along the line of the railroad. I must refer you to our worthy journals for particulars of our operations. It is suggested that our journal shall be made the organ of all the Associations in this country. I trust this will be so. What we should all aim at is more consolidation of effort, and as catholic a spirit as may be. Most truly yours, W. G. HAWKINS. employed; IMPLEMEMTS. Ploughs, hoes, shovels, drills for sowing seeds, garden. rakes, ox-yokes. Nails, axes, hatchets, hammers, saws, chisels, augurs, gimlets, drawing-knives, planes, bits, locks for doors, padlocks, hasps and staples, butts, hinges, screws, files. And every thing in coarse carpentry. Leather, sole and upper, lasts, thread, pegs, shoe-knives, shoemakers' hammers, tacks, pincers, and findings generally. Palm-leaf hats for men and boys, and shaker's hoods. KITCHEN FURNITURE.-Stoves, pots, kettles, bake-ovens, frying-pans, saucepans, tin plates, coffee-pots, pans, basins, covered pails, dippers. CUTLERY.-Table knives and forks, coarse, heavy pocket-knives, iron spoons. Blacksmiths' bellows, anvils, hammers, tongs, vices, cold chisels, etc. Writing paper, small slates, slate pencils. WOODEN WARE.-Wash-tubs, pails, buckets, well-buckets, wooden trays or bowls, rollingpins, coarse baskets. Soap. Well rope, plough lines, bed cord. Shoes for women, children, girls, boys (largest sizes), and men, shoestrings. Cotton cloth, printed calico, cotton osnaburgs, heavy ginghams, plaids and stripes, hickory shirting, linseys, kerseys, spool cotton, sewing cotton, white and coloured, in hanks, cotton yarn, knitting cotton, woollen yarn. FOR INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.-Sewing machi. nes, buttons, hooks and eyes, pins, needles, shears, scissors, thimbles, spectacles for old people. Garden seeds of all kinds, turnip, onion, squash, beet, etc. Stoves and pipe for school-houses. ALL packages of goods intended for the Freed-men should be forwarded to Messrs. Johnson, Johnson & Co., Blomfield-street, E.C. A FREED-MAN TO HIS OLD MASTER.-The and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings Cincinnati Commercial publishes what it de- would amount to 11,680 dollars. Add to this clares to be a genuine letter from a freedman to the interest for the time our wages have been his former master, Col. P. H. Anderson, Big kept back, and deduct what you paid for our Spring, Tenn. It is is dated, Dayton, Ohio clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and August 7th, and runs as follows:-" Sir, I got pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance your letter, and was glad to find that you will show what we are in justice entitled to. had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted Please send the money by Adams' Express, in me to come back and live with you again, care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If promising to do better for me than any body you fail to pay us for faithful labours in the else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. past, we can have little faith in your promises I thought the Yankees would have hung you in the future. We trust the good Maker has long before this for harbouring rebels they opened your eyes to the wrongs which you found at your house. I suppose they never and your fathers have done to me and my heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill fathers, in making us toil for you for generathe Union soldier that was left by his company tions without recompense. Here I draw my in their stable. Although you shot at me twice wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee before I left you, I did not want to hear of your there was never any pay day for the negroes being hurt, and am glad you are still living. any more than for the horses and cows. It would do me good to go back to the dear Surely there will be a day of reckoning for old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss those who defraud the labourer of his hire." Martha, and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbours told me that Henry intended to shoot me, if he ever got a chance. I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well over here. I get twenty-five dollars a month with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks call her Mrs. Anderson) and the children. . . . Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide if it would be to my advantage to move back. As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the provostmarshal general of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly, and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forgive and forget old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me ... THOMAS W. CONWAY, writing from Montgomery, Alabama, under date of August 14th, says:--"Our Mammoth Sunday School continues to be a centre of attraction to all who are interested in this great and good work. We had one of the greatest celebrations on the occasion of onr first anniversary-last May-that ever made glad the hearts of a multitude of happy Sunday-school children. The exercises were much the same as usually characterizes such an occasion. The recitations and deolamations were such as would do honour to any school or colour, and the children and vast assemblage of white and coloured people knew and felt it too. The recital of the "Auction Block," The Passage of the Act of Emancipation," and the "Torch of Liberty," fairly made the blood tingle, and then the singing-why! it was enough to make one's heart leap-1,200 coloured children alive with song! Such a sight New Orleans never saw before." THE Committee of the Freed-men's Aid Printed by Arliss Andrews, of 7, Duke-street, THE FREED-MAN. AMERICAN RE-CONSTRUCTION. BY THOMAS HUGHES, ESQ., M.P. Our last batch of American papers contain several announcements which cannot but startle the friends of the Freed-men in this country. First in order stands the mustering out of service of 22 regiments of coloured infantry, a corps of pioneers, and another of artillery. It is not easy to keep count on this side, but I should doubt whether there are now 15,000 negro troops under arms in the United States. Then we get confirmation of the sense in which the Presidential Order No. 145 is being understood by the rebels; and, we fear we may add, interpreted and carried out even by General Howard, viz., that even the sea Islands are to be given up to their former owners. The loyalty and good faith of General Howard is absolutely beyond question, and he will make the best terms he can for the Freed-men: of that there can be no doubt. But, after the colonization of these islands by General Saxton four years ago by the order of Mr. Lincoln-after the steady progress of the Freed-men of the Islands during this time in diligence, intelligence, wealth, until they at last raised supplies enough to maintain the whole population and garrison, and to export largely, and saved money enough to buy from the government a great part of the soil on which they were living and working—it is useless to deny that one's faith, in justice to the Freed-men under Andrew Johnson's administration, "feels like giving out," as they would say in America, when one finds that the Sea Islands are in all likelihood going back into the hands of the old owners. General Howard is indeed to "endeavour to effect an arrangement mutually satisfactory to the Freed-men and the land owners;" but as the only arrangement that can possibly be satisfactory to the Freed-men is, that they shall have and hold the lands for which they have paid, and as this is just the one arrangement not within General Howard's power make, we may look forward to hearing in a mail or two that in this, the one place in the South where (thanks to General Saxton's righteous rule) the experiment of free labour had been fairly tried, and with marked success, the old lords of the soil are again installed, and the old southern ideas as to labour re viving. Again, the coloured soldiers are not to have their bounty at all, some of the papers assert; others, that the payment of it is only deferred. In either case there is a sad want of that honest and hearty recognition of the services of the negro troops, and of what as a matter of bare justice the United States owes to the black man, which six months ago one had hoped to see. In many of the southern states too, notably in Mississippi and South Carolina, the condition of the Freed-men seems rapidly growing worse. In the former state, notwithstanding the proclamation of the Governor directing that the testimony of negroes shall be received, many of the courts positively refuse to allow them to be called as witnesses. The teachers sent from the northern states are, it is said, closing their schools as the troops are withdrawn. In South Carolina the late rebels are regaining their houses, lands, and position, and with these their old ways. They are declaring everywhere that the negroes will not work or keep their contracts, as an excuse for breaking these contracts themselves, which they begin to do systematically and openly. Several planters have been imprisoned for short terms through the exertions of Officers of the Freed-men's Bureau, for resorting as of old to the benevolent whip. They have consequently taken to other punishments, especially to one known as thumb-tying, and to cheating their labourers in the issue of rations; and with a view to stopping at once this monstrous habit of imprisoning planters, both the southern press, and such northern papers as the "World," of New York, are urging that the time has come for the abolition of the Freed-men's Bureau altogether. "The Southern people," this journal urges, "are abundantly eager to deal with the new questions arising out of the abolition of slavery in a temper of justice and practical humanity. They feel that the liberation of the slave imposes on them new and most important duties; and nothing is more certain than that in fulfilling those duties they will be more hindered than helped by authoritative and contradictory interferences from without. As we do not propose either to pauperize the southern blacks or to exterminate the southern whites, it ought to be plain, in the light alike of reason and experience, that the sooner WE LEAVE BLACKS AND WHITES ALIKE AT THE SOUTH to re-adjust their reciprocal relations the sooner and more satisfactorily will those relations be adjusted." In those few sentences of the "World" the whole present aims and policy of the south and of that portion of the old democratic party which is still southern at heart, are gathered up. "Let us alone, do we not accept the Constitutional Amendment ?" cry the southerners, and their northern allies echo "Let them alone, they understand the negro, and their own business, and we do not. They are pledged to abolish slavery, let them alone." Our readers may not have seen the exact wording of the Constitutional Amendment, so we will give it here. It runs, "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." A good sound and radical amendment no doubt, going straight to the root of the matter. But can the South be trusted to act up to the spirit of it? Is there not a loop-hole in that exception which unscrupulous men will use? How long will it take a Southern legislature, elected as heretofore by white men alone, to find crimes for every negro? A strict vagrant law, a law of contracts which will construe the least breach on the part of a black man a crime, and in a month or two every negro in the South may be again in involuntary servitude, the Constitutional Amendment notwithstanding. So the anti-slavery press pleads vehemently, and I must own that one's common-sense goes wholly with their arguments that the experiment of re-construction according to President Johnson's plan, that is to say without insisting on negro suffrage and so giving the coloured people an important voice in making the laws which shall define crime, is a throwing up the cards just as the game is won, and leaving the South victorious, as Wendell Phillips has been declaring. And yet an Englishman who studies the question candidly, and with a real desire to get at the truth, cannot but be struck with the great weight of evidence on the other side. It is not that he finds such papers as the "New York Herald" and the "World," such men as the wire-pullers and moderate Democrats of the North, loud in praise of the President: he would know how to estimate this testimony well enough from past experience. But in the abolitionist camp, amongst the very staunchest anti-slavery men, he will find those who believe that President Johnson is making no mistake in his policy of re-construction. "Thus far," says the Rev. H.Ward Beecher, "I cannot lay my hand upon an act which does not seem apt, fitting, and most wise: with a clear eye, a skilful hand, he has gone on weaving most cleverly the robe which is to cover the entire brotherhood of the states of the Union: we believe that all measures for the relief of the blacks must have the cordial support and countenance of the South: nothing better than a generous and trustful spirit to those who have been in error can crown our victories." Senator Wilson of Massachusets has been speaking in the same sense in supporting General Barlow's canvass of New York. Mr. Seward, a good antislavery man, though the British public will not give him credit for it, has declared that the President's is the only feasible plan which can be adoptedadmitting of no substantial change or modification; and these men, be it remembered, are at the same time supporters of negro suffrage. Senator Wilson says, "We have heard a great deal about negro suffrage-I say here (in the Brooklyn Music Hall) I am for it. (Applause.) We will not ask the democrats as to the manner of our work: we do not ask the rebels as to re-construction, and we will not ask their sympathisers. We will pass the law: we have forty or fifty senators, and a hundred majority in the House, and the law will go through." (Loud applause.) Mr. Beecher says, too, in the sermon already quoted, which has drawn down such severe comments from the anti-slavery press, "I do not believe that this nation would put guns into the hands of 150,000 negroes and then deny them the right to vote. I believe with Sherman that the man who has carried a musket has a right to carry a ballot. Some people say, are we |