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686.  DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.   JULY, 1862

CONTRABANDS AND THEIR SERVICES.

To the Editor of The N. Y. Tribune.

SIR:  A great deal has been said lately of the intelligence and usefulness of the 'contrabands,' and I wish to add my testimony to that of others, on that score, and also say a word as to the return that is made them for their services.  In Virginia and North Carolina, for the past year, I have had opportunities of observing large numbers of 'contraband' negroes, and my respect for the black race has been greatly increased thereby.  As a staff officer, I have frequently had occasion to obtain information of various kinds, relating to the roads, navigation, position, and defenses of the enemy, &c., and I have invariably found that obtained from the negroes to be most trustworthy.  Nor is the cause of this in their willingness to give information alone;  there is a ready wit and quickness of observation about them which many of their masters seem to lack.

I cannot think that the negro is capable of immediate cultivation equal to that of the white race, but that they are capable of a much higher cultivation than is generally believed, I am convinced.  They have a strong desire to learn, which will sometimes surmount the greatest obstacles.  Thus, they keep eyes and ears open to all that is going on around them, and in this way often learn much that is not intended for them to know.

Gov. Stanley has proclaimed to the world that the negro in North Carolina cannot be taught to read, and yet I know several negroes girls in Newbern who have taught themselves to read and write in spite of the law.  Strange and improbable as the statement may seem, it is nevertheless true, and I will, I think, be sustained by every man who has observed them, when I say that the slaves who have come into our camps here are, to every appearance, far more intelligent than the 'poor whites.'  I can account for this in no other way, except it be true that the superior race, when degraded, sinks below the inferior, and no one who has not been among them can know how miserable is the mental condition of the poor white man of the South.  When Slavery shall have gone, it will not be the negro alone who has been emancipated.  Much is said of the 'white slaves' of the North, but their condition is so far superior to the 'white slave' of the South as to be beyond comparison.  In the South education is monopolized by the few, as capital is in the North.  It is this, then, that makes the ignorant slave often appear superior in intelligence to his master.

In the operations of the Union armies the contrabands hav been of almost inestimable value.  They have obtained important information when white men could not;  they have acted as spies when white men could not be hired to risk their necks.

During the operations against Fort Macon it was found that the negroes were altogether the best and most trustworthy pilots about the harbor, and few harbors are more difficult of navigation than that of Beaufort, N. C.  It was necessary to send a steamer into Bogue Sound to transport the guns and mortars across to our siege batteries.  To get here then it was necessary to run by the fort at night and at flood tide.  This was a perilous undertaking, for the steamer once aground she would have been lost;  the receding tide would have left her high on the shoal, and entirely at the mercy of the fort when daylight made her visible.  No white man could be found willing to act as pilot;  $300 was offered to the man who should take her by the fort safely.  The man who did take her throughout without an accident, rendering Government a service equal to thousands of dollars, has never received a cent for his service, nor did he expect anything but his freedom

Gov. Stanley will, if he is allowed, or if he has not already done so, return this man, a slave to his master, a rabid Secessionist, living at Beaufort, who will give him a hearty thrashing, and perhaps throw him in jail, and this is the only return that he will receive for his devotion to a country that does not even recognize his existence as a man, born 'free and equal.'  And so it is, and will be with thousands of 'contrabands' here and elsewhere, who have rendered us every assistance in their power.  Does it not seem a stain upon us, that they who are the true Union men of the South, should be given up again to the mercies of their Rebel masters?  The officers and men of this department are justly indignant at the course adopted by Gov. Stanley.  Strange things are whispered, and he may be taught some day soon, as other despots have been, that it is dangerous to disregard the 'sentiment' of the people, even if those people are merely Union soldiers.
AN OFFICER.
Newbern, N. C., Jan. 3, 1862.


A SCENE IN WASHINGTON.

On Friday evening, while taking a leisure walk upon our great street, Pennsylvania avenue, I saw a white fiend pounce upon a young colored man, who, neatly dressed, was passing up the street with his young wife.  The first act of the officer was to knock the negro down or nearly so to prove the white man's superiority.  He then collared him every now and then shaking him as if he were a dog, instead of a man.  'I am not a slave!' cried the victim.  'Hold your tongue!' was the reply.– The poor wife followed crying, beseeching, 'Don't take off – he is not a slave.  Where are you taking him to!  Don't strike him in that way.  Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!'  Reply from the white brute:  'Keep still, now mind, will you?  I'll arrest you if you don't.'

That scene I witnessed while taking a walk after dinner upon the Broadway of the capital, and it was but one case out of a hundred that have made the last week one of horrors at a capital of a country professing to be Christian and free.  The shrieks of wretched slaves have ben heard night and morning, at noonday and at midnight, untill it has become too terrible for a man with ordinary sympathies to bear.

A few days since a Maryland slaveholder came here and got out a warrant for his fugitive slave.  He succeeded in capturing him, put manacles upon his wrists, and just a night started off with him for his somewhat distant home.  In the course of the evening the poor fellow escaped the second time, and the master being on horseback, failed to capture him.  After repeated struggles the captive broke his chains in twain, but the links still clung to his wrists.  When the next morning's sunlight fell upon the marble walls of the Capitol it revealed a sight to make a man ashamed of home, countr,y government – almost of his own race.  There sat the panting negro on the Capitol steps, the iron links of his manacles jingling against the marble column upon which he leaned.  Was he guilty of any crime?  Nothing.  He simply desired to own his own body and soul, and in attempting to assert this he fled to the American Capitol.  There was no protection for him there, and the wretched man was again recaptured and dragged off to mail.– Cor. N. Y. Independent.

The Battle of Cross Keys, on Sunday, between the forces of Jackson and Fremont, was a complete victory for the latter.  It was closed by the coming on of night, and during the darkness the Rebels pursued their retreat.  On Monday morning Fremont advanced in line of battle, but the enemy were missing, having left all their dead and many of their wounded on the field.  Five hundred dead bodies were found, and their wounded were in every house along the road towards Port Republic.  Ambulances, wagons, arms, and clothing strewed the field.  The 6th Louisiana lost all but thirty men.  On Monday morning Jackson crossed the South Branch of the Shenandoah at Port Republic, burning the bridge (for the possession of which he had the fight with General Shield's advance, reported in our paper of yesterday,) and hastened on towards the Blue Ridge.– He will have no rest until he has put that natural barrier between his army and the avenging forces of the Pathfinder.  It is not impossible, even if he succeeds in crossing the mountains, that he will find McDowell in his path, as it is comparatively easy to send up forces from Fredericksburg by way of Gordonsville.  In any event, Jackson has had about as lively a time since he left Winchester as the most enterprising Rebel could desire.  It cannot be denied that he has worked with tremendous energy, and fought bravely.  Gen Fremont's official dispatch speaks in high terms of the conduct of officers and men in the battle of Cross Keys.  He rates his killed at 125, and his wounded about 500.  His advance was just on the heels of Jackson's rear guard at Port Republic, so close that some of the Rebel officers left their horses as they ran across the bridge, which they had just fired.


THE EFFECT OF TAXATION ON THE WORKING CLASSES OF ENGLAND BY T. PERRONET THOMPSON.

SIR:  I feel desirous to add something on the subject of my last.  And that is to point out to the working classes, that they will be voluntary dupes if they give way to the intimations very likely to be pressed upon them, that they as a body are interested, or assisted or relieved by the expenditure of money raised by taxation of the public.  And I found a claim to their attention, on having been notoriously aiding and assisting in the removal of one great oppression on the Working Classes in common with every other branch of the commercial interest, and been subsequently ejected from what is called public life, for no visible or assignable cause but a suspicion of too exclusive devotion to the principles begun with.

Allow me then to state broadly and reservedly that there can be no pecuniary benefit to the working classes in the aggregate and in the long run, from the expenditure of what is raised from the public by taxation.  And this for the simple reason, that it would have been equally expended on the working classes or some of them, if it had been left in the hands of the tax payers.

Thus on the supposition of needless and wasteful expenditure on public buildings, as building palaces which crumble and fall down again, or are of no use in proportion to the expense if they remain, – it is a libel on the good sense of the working classes in the aggregate, to tell them to huzza for this as being the expenditure of the money on the working classes.  The masons and carpenters employed, may huzza for the expenditure on masons and carpenters.  But if they attempt to tell their story to the rest of the working classes, they will be asked whether every sixpence thus expended on masons and carpenters, was not taken from what would have been expended on something and somebody, if the money had been left in the hands of the owners.  They to a certainty would not have expended it on masons and carpenters;  but so surely as they would not have sewed it up in a bag and thrown it into the sea, they would have discovered somebody on whom they would have expended it with some satisfactory return to themselves.  It is a fraud of the same nature as was involved in the Corn Laws, and to be got over only as there, by men attending to their own interests, and not allowing their teeth to be taken out of their mouths without asking the reason why.

The same argument applies to that monster job War.  Not a word against war when it is necessary, any more than against cutting off a man's leg in the county hospital.  But let us have no legs cut off for amusement, nor to increase the revenues of the chirurgical profession.  If either of these things were done by law, it would be a mummery and a fraud to say it was good for trade, and visibly increased the demand for lint in the lint market.

But there is one supernumary excresence in the case of war, – an additional hump of deformity, which may be considered peculiar to itself.  And that is that money is raised for war by borrowing, or what the learned call 

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