by Mary Ames (Author)
This post Civil War diary describes the experience of two young white women from Massachusetts, who sign up with the Freedmen's Bureau to teach school to newly freed slaves on Edisto Island in South Carolina-one month after General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox. Mary Ames relates living among a thousand black Americans during a unique but brief period before the US Government pardoned the former Confederates and relinquished land control back to white gentlemen plantation owners. The freed slaves hungered for the learning Mary and friend Emily Bliss provided. Sharing food and clothing, the women set up a school with nothing but two chairs; listened to their new friends relate the trials of slavery, and taught how whites could live among blacks as sisters. The text is transcribed from the 1906 publication archived by the Massachusetts Historical Society.