Alexandria Gazette

Last week the Gazette published an account of one of the many instances occurring daily in all parts of the South that show the kindly feeling still entertained for the negroes who were once their slaves. A night or two after, a gentleman of this city was sent for by one of his dead father's former slaves, and upon entering the hovel in which the freedman lived, found, or rather felt, for there was neither lamp nor candle, the man's wife lying dead upon a filthy straw pallet, two grown daughters without a bed, and the whole surroundings indicating the most abject and degraded poverty and destitution. The gentleman referred to is now a loyal citizen, but says that when he compared the present condition of the man who used to call him his young master, with what it was in his neat and clean and tidy cabin on the old plantation, with all his physical wants amply supplied, and with no anxiety for the future among the possibilities, he could not help thinking that great harm is sometimes done in the name of philanthropy, and that the negroes would be a great deal happier if Mr. Lincoln had not deemed their liberation necessary to the success of the federal army.