752 DR. CHARLES FOLLEN FOLSOM. 



the newly organized enterprise in behalf of the freedmen at Port Royal, 

 and was sent to the island of St. Helena, where he remained for the 

 next two years. The Port Royal enterprise, so far as the volunteer 

 element in it was concerned, was the outcome of the sense of responsi- 

 bility for the negroes on the part of Northern sympathizers with the 

 movement of abolition. Dr. Folsom's father was an ardent abolition- 

 ist and this move on his son's part had his warm encouragement; 

 there is some reason, indeed, to think that he suggested it. The story of 

 the movement is well told in a recent book entitled "Letters from 

 Port Royal," edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Early in the war * 

 the Sea Islands region of South Carolina, in the neighborhood of Port 

 Royal and Beaufort, became, all of a sudden, untenable for its 

 Southern occupants in consequence of the capture of- two forts by 

 Commodore Dupont, and the great plantations there were at once 

 abandoned by their owners, who fled precipitately, leaving behind them 

 several hundred negroes, incapable of caring for themselves, and a vast 

 amount of cotton nearly ready for exportation. Not only this, but refu- 

 gee negroes soon came pouring in, so that the number finally reached 

 several thousand. Cotton agents were sent down by the Government to 

 look after the cotton, and Mr. Edward L. Pierce of Milton was placed 

 in charge of the negro problem and of the work of planting next year's 

 crop. Mr. Pierce sought at once the aid of private citizens, at first in 

 Boston, then in New York and Philadelphia. A Freedmen's Aid So- 

 ciety was formed, and very quickly a band of the best people of the 

 North was under way, sufficiently well equipped in money, ability, and 

 ardent devotion to the cause, but destitute of training or experience, to 

 face the problems of " the housekeeper, the teacher, the superintend- 

 ent of labor, and the landowner," under conditions strange and new. 

 Especially prominent among them was Mr. Edward S. Philbrick of 

 Boston, but the group comprised many other persons of intelligence 

 and devotion, college graduates and women of the best sort. "For 

 the first time in our history educated Northern men had taken charge 

 of the Southern negro, had learned to know his nature, his status, 

 his history, first-hand, in the cabin and the field. And though subse- 

 quently other Southern territory was put into the hands of Northern 

 men and women to manage in much the same fashion, it was not in 

 the nature of things that these conditions should ever be exactly 

 reproduced. The question whether or not the freedman would work 

 without the incentive of the lash was settled once for all by the Port 

 Royal Experiment." 



* L. c. Preface. 



