But whatever their grade of capacity or intelligence, the negroes agreed in one thing. They were well satisfied to live on the plantations, without control of their former owners, so long as the crops of the present season would supply them with food. Their liberation they knew was owing to the success of the Union troops, and they showed a much more intelligent comprehension of the causes and probable results of the war than they had been supposed to possess. But as for doing anything themselves to help it on, that did not appear to form part of their calculations. They would work for their rations when destitute, would obey when commanded as they had been accustomed, and they would aid the Union cause whenever they could do so in a passive sort of way. But we soon found that we must not look to them for anything like energetic or spontaneous action. This seemed a strange indifference to a contest involving the freedom or servitude of their race, and no doubt accounted for much of the aversion afterward felt by our troops to the project of transforming some of them into soldiers.
But if we had remembered where the negroes came from, perhaps we should not have been so much surprised. Their ancestors had been brought to this country from the coast of Africa by slave-traders who had bought them there. They were slaves already, when they were taken on board ship. They had been captured in war, or seized by native marauders, who took them for the purpose of reducing them to slavery and selling them for profit. They were consequently from the least capable and least enterprising of the negro tribes in Africa; and their descendants in this country were of the same grade. If they could not resist being made slaves by other negroes, how could they be expected to take part in a war between whites, even to recover their own freedom?
Of course there were exceptions to this. In the month of May following, a boat's crew brought away from Charleston harbor the barge of the Confederate General Ripley, and escaped with it to the naval vessels outside; and not long afterward the negro pilot, Robert Smalls, and his companions ran the gauntlet of the forts in the night-time with the steam-tug _Planter_, and delivered her safely to the blockading fleet. But these were rare instances, and nothing of the kind happened at Hilton Head.