I never found it needful to give any elementary instructions in courage to Fanny's husband, you may be sure.
There was another family of brothers in the regiment named Miller.

Their grandmother, a fine-looking old woman, nearly seventy, I should think, but erect as a pine-tree, used sometimes to come and visit them.

She and her husband had once tried to escape from a plantation near Savannah.
They had failed, and had been brought back; the husband had received five hundred lashes, and while the white men on the plantation were viewing the punishment, she was collecting her children and grandchildren, to the number of twenty-two, in a neighboring marsh, preparatory to another attempt that night.

They found a flat-boat which had been rejected as unseaworthy, got on board,--still under the old woman's orders,--and drifted forty miles down the river to our lines.
Trowbridge happened to be on board the gunboat which picked them up, and he said that when the "flat" touched the side of the vessel, the grandmother rose to her full height, with her youngest grandchild in her arms, and said only, "My God! are we free ?" By one of those coincidences of which life is full, her husband escaped also, after his punishment, and was taken up by the same gunboat.
I hardly need point out that my young lieutenants did not have to teach the principles of courage to this woman's grandchildren.
I often asked myself why it was that, with this capacity of daring and endurance, they had not kept the land in a perpetual flame of insurrection; why, especially since the opening of the war, they had kept so still.

The answer was to be found in the peculiar temperament of the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of patience that centuries had fortified.