The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 Part 20

[Footnote 1: In 1830 one-twelfth of the population of Lexington consisted of free persons of color, who since 1822 had had a Baptist church served by a member of their own race and a school in which thirty-two of their children were taught by a white man from Tennessee. He had pledged himself to devote the rest of his life to the uplift of his colored brethren. One of these free Negroes in Lexington had acc.u.mulated wealth to the amount of $20,000. In Louisville, also a center of free colored population, efforts were being made to educate ambitious Negroes. Travelers noted that colored schools were found there generations before the Civil War and mentioned the intelligent and properly speaking colored preachers, who were bought and supported by their congregations. Charles Dabney, another traveler through this State in 1837, observed that the slaves of this commonwealth were taught to read and believed that they were about as well off as they would have been had they been free. See Dabney, _Journal of a Tour through the U.S. and Canada_, p. 185.]

[Footnote 2: Abdy, _Journal of a Tour_, etc., 1833-1834, pp. 346-348.]

It was the desire to train up white men to carry on the work of their liberal fathers that led John G. Fee and his colaborers to establish Berea College in Kentucky. In the charter of this inst.i.tution was incorporated the declaration that "G.o.d has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth." No Negroes were admitted to this inst.i.tution before the Civil War, but they came in soon thereafter, some being accepted while returning home wearing their uniforms.[1] The State has since prohibited the co-education of the two races.

[Footnote 1: Catalogue of Berea College, 1896-1897.]

The centers of this interest in the mountains of Tennessee were Maryville and Knoxville. Around these towns were found a goodly number of white persons interested in the elevation of the colored people.

There developed such an antislavery sentiment in the former town that half of the students of the Maryville Theological Seminary became abolitionists by 1841.[1] They were then advocating the social uplift of Negroes through the local organ, the _Maryville Intelligencer_.

From this nucleus of antislavery men developed a community with ideals not unlike those of Berea.[2]

[Footnote 1: Some of the liberal-mindedness of the people of Kentucky and Tennessee was found in the State of Missouri. The question of slavery there, however, was so ardently discussed and prominently kept before the people that while little was done to help the Negroes, much was done to reduce them to the plane of beasts. There was not so much of the tendency to wink at the violation of the law on the part of masters in teaching their slaves. But little could be accomplished by private teachers in the dissemination of information among Negroes after the free persons of color had been excluded from the State.]

[Footnote 2: _Fourth Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society_, New York, 1837, p. 48; and the _New England Antislavery Almanac_ for 1841, p. 31.]

The Knoxville people who advocated the enlightenment of the Negroes expressed their sentiment through the _Presbyterian Witness_. The editor felt that there was not a solitary argument that might be urged in favor of teaching a white man that might not as properly be urged in favor of enlightening a man of color. "If one has a soul that will never die," said he, "so has the other. Has one susceptibilities of improvement, mentally, socially, and morally? So has the other. Is one bound by the laws of G.o.d to improve the talents he has received from the Creator's hands? So is the other. Is one embraced in the command 'Search the Scriptures'? So is the other."[1] He maintained that unless masters could lawfully degrade their slaves to the condition of beasts, they were just as much bound to teach them to read the Bible as to teach any other cla.s.s of their population.

[Footnote 1: _African Repository_, vol. x.x.xii., p. 16.]

But great as was the interest of the religious element, the movement for the education of the Negroes of the South did not again become a scheme merely for bringing them into the church. Masters had more than one reason for favoring the enlightenment of the slaves. Georgia slaveholders of the more liberal cla.s.s came forward about the middle of the nineteenth century, advocating the education of Negroes as a means to increase their economic value, and to attach them to their masters. This subject was taken up in the Agricultural Convention at Macon in 1850, and was discussed again in a similar a.s.sembly the following year. After some opposition the Convention pa.s.sed a resolution calling on the legislature to enact a law authorizing the education of slaves. The pet.i.tion was presented by Mr. Harlston, who introduced the bill embodying this idea, piloted it through the lower house, but failed by two or three votes to secure the sanction of the senate.[1] In 1855 certain influential citizens of North Carolina[2]

memorialized their legislature asking among other things that the slaves be taught to read. This pet.i.tion provoked some discussion, but did not receive as much attention as that of Georgia.

[Footnote 1: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, p. 339]

[Footnote 2: _African Repository_, vol. x.x.xi., pp. 117-118.]

In view of this renewed interest in the education of the Negroes of the South we are anxious to know exactly what proportion of the colored population had risen above the plane of illiteracy.

Unfortunately this cannot be accurately determined. In the first place, it was difficult to find out whether or not a slave could read or write when such a disclosure would often cause him to be dreadfully punished or sold to some cruel master of the lower South. Moreover, statistics of this kind are scarce and travelers who undertook to answer this question made conflicting statements. Some persons of that day left records which indicate that only a few slaves succeeded in acquiring an imperfect knowledge of the common branches, whereas others noted a larger number of intelligent servants. Arfwedson remarked that the slaves seldom learned to read; yet elsewhere he stated that he sometimes found some who had that ability.[1]

Abolitionists like May, Jay, and Garrison would make it seem that the conditions in the South were such that it was almost impossible for a slave to develop intellectual power.[2] Rev. C.C. Jones[3] believed that only an inconsiderable fraction of the slaves could read.

Witnesses to the contrary, however, are numerous. Abdy, Smedes, Andrews, Bremer, and Olmsted found during their stay in the South many slaves who had experienced unusual spiritual and mental development.[4] Nehemiah Adams, giving the southern view of slavery in 1854, said that large numbers of the slaves could read and were furnished with the Scriptures.[5] Amos Dresser, who traveled extensively in the Southwest, believed that one out of every fifty could read and write.[6] C.G. Parsons thought that five thousand out of the four hundred thousand slaves of Georgia had these attainments.[7] These figures, of course, would run much higher were the free people of color included in the estimates. Combining the two it is safe to say that ten per cent. of the adult Negroes had the rudiments of education in 1860, but the proportion was much less than it was near the close of the era of better beginnings about 1825.

[Footnote 1: Arfwedson, _The United States and Canada_, p. 331.]

[Footnote 2: See their pamphlets, addresses, and books referred to elsewhere.]

[Footnote 3: Jones, _Religious Instruction of Negroes_, p. 115.]

[Footnote 4: Redpath, _The Roving Editor_, p. 161.]

[Footnote 5: Adams, _South-Side View of Slavery_, pp. 52 and 59.]

[Footnote 6: Dresser, _The Narrative of Amos Dresser_, p. 27; Dabney, _Journal of a Tour through the United States and Canada_, p. 185.]

[Footnote 7: Parsons, _Inside View of Slavery_, p. 248.]

CHAPTER X

EDUCATING NEGROES TRANSPLANTED TO FREE SOIL

While the Negroes of the South were struggling against odds to acquire knowledge, the more ambitious ones were for various reasons making their way to centers of light in the North. Many fugitive slaves dreaded being sold to planters of the lower South, the free blacks of some of the commonwealths were forced out by hostile legislation, and not a few others migrated to ameliorate their condition. The transplanting of these people to the Northwest took place largely between 1815 and 1850. They were directed mainly to Columbia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Greenwich, New Jersey; and Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, in the East; and to favorable towns and colored communities in the Northwest.[1] The fugitives found ready helpers in Elmira, Rochester, Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Akron, and Cincinnati, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan.[2] Colored settlements which proved attractive to these wanderers had been established in Ohio, Indiana, and Canada. That most of the bondmen in quest of freedom and opportunity should seek the Northwest had long been the opinion of those actually interested in their enlightenment. The attention of the colored people had been early directed to this section as a more suitable place for their elevation than the jungles of Africa selected by the American Colonization Society. The advocates of Western colonization believed that a race thus degraded could be elevated only in a salubrious climate under the influences of inst.i.tutions developed by Western nations.

[Footnote 1: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 32 and 37.]

The role played by the Negroes in this migration exhibited the development of sufficient mental ability to appreciate this truth.

It was chiefly through their intelligent fellows that prior to the reaction ambitious slaves learned to consider the Northwest Territory the land of opportunity. Furthermore, restless freedmen, denied political privileges and prohibited from teaching their children, did not always choose to go to Africa. Many of them went north of the Ohio River and took up land on the public domain. Observing this longing for opportunity, benevolent southerners, who saw themselves hindered in carrying out their plan for educating the blacks for citizenship, disposed of their holdings and formed free colonies of their slaves in the same section. White men of this type thus made possible a new era of uplift for the colored race by coming north in time to aid the abolitionists, who had for years const.i.tuted a small minority advocating a seemingly hopeless cause.

A detailed description of these settlements has no place in this dissertation save as it has a bearing on the development of education among the colored people. These settlements, however, are important here in that they furnish the key to the location of many of the early colored churches and schools of the North and West. Philanthropists established a number of Negroes near Sandy Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania.[1] There was a colored settlement near Berlin Crossroads, Ohio.[2] Another group of pioneering Negroes emigrating to this State found homes in the Van Buren township of Shelby County.

Edward Coles, a Virginian, who in 1818 emigrated to Illinois, of which he later became Governor, made a settlement on a larger scale. He brought his slaves to Edwardsville, where they const.i.tuted a community known as "Coles' Negroes."[3] The settlement made by Samuel Gist, an Englishman possessing extensive plantations in Hanover, Amherst, and Henrico Counties, Virginia, was still more significant. He provided in his will that his slaves should be freed and sent to the North. It was further directed "that the revenue from his plantation the last year of his life be applied in building schoolhouses and churches for their accommodation," and "that all money coming to him in Virginia be set aside for the employment of ministers and teachers to instruct them."[4] In 1818, Wickham, the executor of this estate, purchased land and established these Negroes in what was called the Upper and Lower Camps of Brown County, Ohio.

[Footnote 1: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 249.]

[Footnote 2: Langston,_From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol_, p. 35.]

[Footnote 3: Davidson and Stuve,_A Complete History of Illinois_, pp.

321-322; and Washburne, _Sketch of Edward Cole, Second Governor of Illinois_, pp. 44 and 53.]

[Footnote 4: _History of Brown County_, pp. 313 _et seq._; and Lane, _Fifty Years and over of Akron and Summit County, Ohio_, pp. 579-580.]

Augustus Wattles, a native of Connecticut, made a settlement of Negroes in Mercer County early in the nineteenth century.[1] About the year 1834 many of the freedmen, then concentrating at Cincinnati, were induced to take up 30,000 acres of land in the same vicinity.[2] John Harper of North Carolina manumitted his slaves in 1850 and had them sent to this community.[3] John Randolph of Roanoke freed his slaves at his death, and provided for the purchase of farms for them in Mercer County.[4] The Germans, however, would not allow them to take possession of these lands. Driven later from Shelby County[5] also, these freedmen finally found homes in Miami County.[7] Then there was one Saunders, a slaveholder of Cabell County, now West Virginia, who liberated his slaves and furnished them homes in free territory. They finally made their way to Ca.s.s County, Michigan, where philanthropists had established a prosperous colored settlement and supplied it with missionaries and teachers. The slaves of Theodoric H. Gregg of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, were liberated in 1854 and sent to Ohio,[7] where some of them were educated.

[Footnote 1: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 356.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 356.]

[Footnote 3: Ma.n.u.script in the hands of Dr. J.E. Moreland.]

[Footnote 4: _The African Repository_, vol. xxii., pp. 322-323.]

[Footnote 5: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 465.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 466.]

[Footnote 7: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 723.]

Many free persons of color of Virginia and Kentucky went north about the middle of the nineteenth century. The immediate cause in Virginia was the enactment in 1838 of a law prohibiting the return of such colored students as had been accustomed to go north to attend school after they were denied this privilege in that State.[1] Prominent among these seekers of better opportunities were the parents of Richard De Baptiste. His father was a popular mechanic of Fredericksburg, where he for years maintained a secret school.[2] A public opinion proscribing the teaching of Negroes was then rendering the effort to enlighten them as unpopular in Kentucky as it was in Virginia. Thanks to a benevolent Kentuckian, however, an important colored settlement near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio, was then taking shape. The nucleus of this group was furnished about 1856 by Noah Spears, who secured small farms there for sixteen of his former bondmen.[3] The settlement was not only sought by fugitive slaves and free Negroes, but was selected as the site for Wilberforce University.[4]

[Footnote 1: Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series x.x.xi., No. 3, p. 492; and _Acts of the General a.s.sembly of Virginia_, 1848, p. 117.]

[Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 352.]

[Footnote 3: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities" (_Southern Workman_, vol. x.x.xvii., p. 158).]

[Footnote 4: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, p. 373; and _Non-Slaveholder_, vol. ii., p. 113.]