The damaging effect, morally, physically, and otherwise, on the negro, of the robbery of the Freedmen’s Bank can hardly be over estimated. It was a very serious blow to his progress—to his future hopes. It made him lose faith in the integrity of the white man. The hope of gain no longer sweetens labor with him. He no longer saves his money to deposit in a saving bank, where he was so plausibly told it would bring him large interest, and ultimately a home. No; my experience has been that a large majority of the negroes to-day spend their money as they earn it, and indeed have lost that ambition to put something aside for a rainy day which characterized them a few years ago.
I will here relate an instance in proof of what is said in the above, and which will forceably illustrate a thousand other cases. During the campaign on the peninsula (1862) under McClellan, we had our headquarters (Franklin’s) at Toler’s Farm, Cumberland Landing, on the Pamunkey. A very intelligent and respectable colored man came to me and disclosed the secret that he had more than fourteen hundred dollars, in silver, buried in the cellar. His wife, a wonderfully active woman, and one child were owned by the Tolers. He, himself, was the slave of a Mr. Myers, of Richmond, of whom he bought his time, as was common among the more intelligent and thrifty slaves. He boasted that his master would trust him anywhere, and had always been very kind to him. The Tolers, on the other hand, were very hard on their slaves, and Henry’s greatest ambition was to get money enough to purchase the freedom of his wife and child, and the money he had saved from fishing and oystering on the York and Pamunkey rivers was for that purpose. For that he had toiled, and toiled, and toiled for sixteen years to get money enough to purchase the freedom of his wife and child. Even then he could have taken his money, his wife, and his child, and gone to Washington; but he refused. Indeed, he remained true to his master until the fall of Richmond. Then he came here, put what money he had left in the Freedmen’s Bank, and the painful story is told in these words: he lost it. The Washington sharpers got it. I met this man a few years ago; dissipation had overtaken him; he was a changed man; uttering curses on the heads of the men who had robbed him.