When it came they accepted it.

Insurrection on their part would at once have divided the Northern sentiment; and a large part of our army would have joined with the Southern army to hunt them down.
By their waiting till we needed them, their freedom was secured.
Two things chiefly surprised me in their feeling toward their former masters,--the absence of affection and the absence of revenge.

I expected to find a good deal of the patriarchal feeling.

It always seemed to me a very ill-applied emotion, as connected with the facts and laws of American slavery,--still I expected to find it.

I suppose that my men and their families and visitors may have had as much of it as the mass of freed slaves; but certainly they had not a particle.