From the South Carolina Leader

The manner in which this model district is managed at the present time is a source of great satisfaction to all concerned. The friendly relations existing between both classes, and the general quietness and good order, commands the respect of all other districts throughout the State. And as this is of some importance at the present time, we are pleased to say a few words in relation to the present state of affairs.

While under command of other officers, it will be seen that either they did not understand how to administer justice to all, irrespective of color, or else the people have at last found the right man in the right place. Colonel J. C. Beecher, 35th C. T., who is in command of this district, assumed command immediately after Gen. Van Wyke, who was here but a short time, having relieved Gen. Hartwell, of the 55th Mass. Colored Troops, and if we are to credit the story going the rounds of the district, Hartwell was in favor with the first families, and parted from the colored people with no regrets on their part.

At the time he was in command there were issued twelve thousand rations to all classes, and without regard to necessity. This number was reduced to about seven hundred by Genl. Van Wyke, and is to-day still further reduced to four hundred.

Not Charleston — Colleton District, up the coast — but printed in a Charleston paper and worth reading for who is doing the judging. The colonel commanding is James C. Beecher of the 35th United States Colored Troops, Harriet Beecher Stowe's half-brother; the officer he replaced commanded the 55th Massachusetts. Notice what the paper counts as the measure of good government: whether justice is administered to all irrespective of color, and how many rations are still being issued.

Colored people in Alexandria are hereafter to be treated like white people, not arrested if out after ten o'clock at night, nor be deprived of fowling-pieces. A shot-gun taken from a negro has been restored to him.

Jeff Thompson tells the editor of the Louisville Journal that the only people in the South who wish to do any more fighting are those who didn't do any when they had a chance.

The Freedmen's Bureau in Washington have received the letter in full of Governor Sharkey of Mississippi, in which he takes the ground that the action of the late Convention, in its amendments to the State constitution recognizing that slavery has [ended], secures the rights of suing and being sued in any State.

The Leader's round-up column, five months after the surrender. The first paragraph is the whole of Reconstruction in three lines: a curfew lifted, a gun returned. Read it as news of what had not been normal until that week.

CHARLESTON, S. C., Dec. 5, 1865.

Sir, — In your paper of the 2nd inst., under the heading “Hardships of Freedmen,” I find mention of a case of defrauding a freedman at Hilton Head. It seems he was induced by some swindler to sell his cotton crop of one hundred pounds for ten dollars, and the same cotton was sold again soon after for forty-five dollars. It is well to publish every such case as this which is discovered, both as a warning to the freedmen and to attract the attention of the authorities whose duty it is to prevent these abuses.

But one reflection in this article might seem a little unjust in its application, viz., “It is painful to know that those who have authority to prevent such villainous transactions put forth no effort to remedy the evil.” The officers and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau are authorized, and it is their plain duty to remedy such evils; and I am happy to say that they are constantly interfering to this purpose throughout the State, as they have abundant occasion to do. To show you that this matter has not escaped the attention of all of the authorities, as well as to give publicity to a regulation so important to the welfare of the freedmen, I enclose the following.

The whole economy of the first free cotton crop in one paragraph. A hundred pounds of cotton bought off a freedman for ten dollars and resold within days for forty-five — a swindle of roughly four hundred per cent, worked on a man who had no way to know the market price and no one to ask. The Leader had said the authorities were doing nothing; this is an officer writing in to object, and the exchange is more useful than either side alone. Both agree on the facts. They disagree only about whether anybody is stopping it.

The people in Mitchelville are, or have been, largely employed in the “Forts,” as they call the business part of the town. They come over the narrow bridge in long lines in the morning, with buckets, baskets, bags, haversacks, etc., and return at evening with those articles filled variously. Some contain household necessaries, while others are filled with broken stale bread or other refuse of cookhouses. This may be called dry swill; and is intended for sundry black, white, and speckled swine.

The people find employment in the stables, in the commissaries, in the stores.

Mitchelville, on Hilton Head, was the first self-governing town of freedpeople in the United States — laid out in 1862 with its own elected mayor, council, and compulsory school law. This is what its ordinary weekday looked like from the inside: the long lines over the narrow bridge at dawn, the buckets going out empty and coming back filled, the swill for the pigs. Nobody is being described as a symbol. They are going to work.

THE LEADER. Charleston, S. C., Saturday, Dec. 24, 1865.

AUTHORIZED AGENTS: William Dart, Paul Poinsett, Samuel L. Bennett, of Charleston; Wm. B. Nash, Columbia; Dean Dudley, Boston, Mass.; Rev. A. Waddle, Savannah; A. G. Baxter, Georgetown.

THE LEADER can be obtained at the stores of T. W. Cardozo, corner of Henrietta and Elizabeth Streets, and at Simons & Deany, Market Street, opposite Anderson's.

The distribution network of Black South Carolina, three months after the paper started, printed as an ordinary standing notice. William Beverly Nash of Columbia would sit in the state Senate within two years. T. W. Cardozo, whose store at Henrietta and Elizabeth sold the paper, was Thomas Cardozo, of the Charleston family; his brother Francis became South Carolina's Secretary of State in 1868. The masthead reads “Saturday, Dec. 24, 1865” — the 23rd was the Saturday, and the archive files it there.

In the Senate Mr. Sumner's bill has been considered, calling for information as to whether there were not persons employed in the Treasury Department who have not taken the oath of allegiance, and whether there are persons employed in offices not provided for by law.

Mr. Wilson called up Senate Bill to repeal all laws in lately insurrectionary States based on distinctions of color or race, and, in some brief remarks, advocated its immediate passage, giving his reasons therefor, which were, that certain States had passed laws inimical to the rights of the freedmen in those States, and it was necessary that Congress shall take some immediate action upon the subject, to annul the action of the Legislatures of those States. He therefore opposed its reference to any committee.

Some debate occurring upon the bill, Mr. Wilson further stated that he did not present it from any feelings of bitterness towards the Southern people, for he regarded them all as his [countrymen].

The laws “inimical to the rights of the freedmen” that Henry Wilson wanted annulled were the Black Codes, and South Carolina's had been enacted that same month. The bill he was pushing is the direct ancestor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Leader's readers in Charleston were reading the Senate debate about their own state's new laws in the same week those laws took effect.

Last week we wrote of the planters' loyalty, introducing some resolutions that were adopted at a meeting of planters in the District of Marlboro, that they might speak for themselves. No one can read these resolutions in the light of the Constitutional amendment forever prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, without discovering disloyal sentiments. But they have obtained sufficient notoriety, and we hasten to notice the pleasing contrast which the conduct of the freedmen evinces.

We have yet to learn of the first Union prisoner escaping from his wretched captivity during the war, who did not find friends among the colored slaves, willing to secrete him by day, and direct his steps by night, to the Union lines. The prayers of the slaves for the success of “Massa Lincum's sojers” cannot be numbered, their tears shed for the dear old Union never known. And then how soon did they take the musket when opportunity was offered, and lay their lives upon the altar of American Liberty and Union. The stories of Fort Pillow, Oulustee, and Battery Wagner exhibit a history which time will not obliterate — a loyalty which tyrant fears and traitor calumniations can not tarnish. A dark skin was always considered synonimous with loyalty.

Whence comes this quaking fear, this mortal dread of a rising of the freedmen to indiscriminate slaughter of the whites? It flows to us from the fountain of slavery, a legitimate stream whose waters are turbid with treason.

Constant fears are expressed by former slave masters of an insurrection among the freedmen. They are extremely anxious about the holidays, and want military sent to every part of the State to over-awe the anticipated insurrectionists. Poor fellows! they have fanned a flame which they now fear is to consume them. But they need not tremble. God has been merciful in preserving them from utter annihilation by the government, against whose constituted authority they raised the bloody hand of war. And all that now remains for them to do in order to enjoy the blessings of a beneficent and magnanimous government, is to abide by the oaths they have severally taken to be loyal subjects of the United States. We do not know of any truly loyal men who entertain such fears. They have generally proceeded from those who have taken the oath of allegiance with a mental reservation.

Acts of injustice like the holding of our fellow men in slavery, very naturally suggests to guilty parties fear of retaliation.

All of the freedmen have thus taken an oath which but few white men in South Carolina would take; and it was not compulsory. This organisation can always be relied upon as loyal citizens and devoted subjects. No treason ever entered into their deliberations.

In carefully summing up all the evidence on the subject of loyalty that has come under our observation, we hesitate not to say that freedmen can be trusted as the firm friends and faithful defenders of the Union. And the secessionists are to be watched with a jealous eye, and their fears and statements considered in connection with former treason and acts of diabolism.

Christmas week, 1865, in Charleston. White South Carolina had worked itself into a panic that the freedpeople would rise at the holidays — the insurrection scare that ran across the whole South that December — and was demanding troops be posted through the State to overawe them. This is the answer, printed in the freedpeople's own paper, and it is the most formidable piece of writing in this whole collection. It turns the question round: who, in this State, has actually taken up arms against the government? “Poor fellows! they have fanned a flame which they now fear is to consume them.” Note the three names it reaches for — Fort Pillow, Olustee, Battery Wagner. Wagner is four miles from the office this was written in.