[18] Mrs. Philbrick.
[19] Miss Laura E. Towne of Philadelphia. She never returned to live in the North. The school she started in 1862 is still in existence, under the name of the Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School.
[20] Known as the Smith Plantation.
[21] The ferry to Ladies Island, across which ran the road to St. Helena Island and Mr. Philbrick's plantations.
[22] The plantation "praise-house," as the negroes' church was called, was often merely "a rather larger and nicer negro hut than the others. Here the master was an exemplary old Baptist Christian, who has left his house full of religious magazines and papers, and built his people quite a nice little house,—the best on this part of the Island."
(Letter of W. C. G., April 22, 1862.)
[23] Pine Grove was in this respect an exception among the Sea Island plantations.
[25] Mrs. Philbrick.
[26] "The true 'shout' takes place on Sundays or on 'praise'-nights through the week, and either in the praise-house or some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held. Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light-wood fire burns red before the door to the house and on the hearth.... The benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young, men and women, sprucely-dressed young men, grotesquely half-clad field-hands—the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts—boys with tattered shirts and men's trousers, young girls barefooted, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the 'sperichil' is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to 'base' the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house." (New York Nation, May 30, 1867.)