The rise of the American city made possible the contact of the colored people with the world, affording them a chance to observe what the white man was doing, and to develop the power to care for themselves. The Negroes who had this opportunity to take over the western civilization were servants belonging to the families for which they worked; slaves hired out by their owners to wait upon persons; and watermen, embracing fishermen, boatmen, and sailors. Not a few slaves in cities were mechanics, clerks, and overseers. In most of these employments the rudiments of an education were necessary, and what the master did not seem disposed to teach the slaves so situated, they usually learned by contact with their fellowmen who were better informed. Such persons were the mulattoes resulting from miscegenation, and therefore protected from the rigors of the slave code; house servants, rewarded with unusual privileges for fidelity and for manifesting considerable interest in things contributing to the economic good of their masters; and slaves who were purchasing their freedom.[1] Before the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century not much was said about what these classes learned or taught. It was then the difference in circumstances, employment, and opportunities for improvement that made the urban Negro more intelligent than those who had to toil in the fields. Yet, the proportion did not differ very much from that of the previous period, as the first Negroes were not chiefly field hands but to a considerable extent house servants, whom masters often taught to read and write.
[Footnote 1: Jones, Religious Instruction, p. 117.]
Urban Negroes had another important advantage in their opportunity to attend well-regulated Sunday-schools. These were extensively organized in the towns and cities of this country during the first decades of the last century. The "Sabbath-school" constituted an important factor in Negro education. Although cloaked with the purpose of bringing the blacks to God by giving them religious instruction the institution permitted its workers to teach them reading and writing when they were not allowed to study such in other institutions.[1] Even the radical slaveholder was slow to object to a policy which was intended to facilitate the conversion of men's souls. All friends especially interested in the mental and spiritual uplift of the race hailed this movement as marking an epoch in the elevation of the colored people.
[Footnote 1: See the reports of almost any abolition society of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century. Special Report of the U.S.
Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 200; and Plumer, Thoughts on the Religious
Instruction of Negroes.]
In the course of time racial difficulties caused the development of the colored "Sabbath-school" to be very much like that of the American Negro Church. It began as an establishment in the white churches, then moved to the colored chapels, where white persons assisted as teachers, and finally became an organization composed entirely of Negroes. But the separation here, as in the case of the church, was productive of some good. The "Sabbath-schools," which at first depended on white teachers to direct their work, were thereafter carried on by Negroes, who studied and prepared themselves to perform the task given up by their former friends. This change was easily made in certain towns and cities where Negroes already had churches of their own. Before 1815 there was a Methodist church in Charleston, South Carolina, with a membership of eighteen hundred, more than one thousand of whom were persons of color. About this time, Williamsburg and Augusta had one each, and Savannah three colored Baptist churches. By 1822 the Negroes of Petersburg had in addition to two churches of this denomination, a flourishing African Missionary Society.[1] In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston the free blacks had experienced such a rapid religious development that colored churches in these cities were no longer considered unusual.
[Footnote 1: Adams, Anti-slavery, etc., pp. 73 and 74.]
The increase in the population of cities brought a larger number of these unfortunates into helpful contact with the urban element of white people who, having few Negroes, often opposed the institution of slavery. But thrown among colored people brought in their crude state into sections of culture, the antislavery men of towns and cities developed from theorists, discussing a problem of concern to persons far away, into actual workers striving by means of education to pave the way for universal freedom.[1] Large as the number of abolitionists became and bright as the future of their cause seemed, the more the antislavery men saw of the freedmen in congested districts, the more inclined the reformers were to think that instant abolition was an event which they "could not reasonably expect, and perhaps could not desire." Being in a state of deplorable ignorance, the slaves did not possess sufficient information "to render their immediate emancipation a blessing either to themselves or to society."[2]
[Footnote 1: As some masters regarded the ignorance of the slaves as an argument against their emancipation, the antislavery men's problem became the education of the master as well as that of the slave. Believing that intellectual and moral improvement is a "safe and permanent basis on which the arch of freedom could be erected," Jesse Torrey, harking back to Jefferson's proposition, recommended that it begin by instructing the slaveholders, overseers, their sons and daughters, hitherto deprived of the blessing of education. Then he thought that such enlightened masters should see to it that every slave less than thirty years of age should be taught the art of reading sufficiently for receiving moral and religious instruction from books in the English language. In presenting this scheme Torrey had the idea of most of the antislavery men of that day, who advocated the education of slaves because they believed that, whenever the slaves should become qualified by intelligence and moral cultivation for the rational enjoyment of liberty and the performance of the various social duties, enlightened legislators would listen to the voice of reason and justice and the spirit of the social organization, and permit the release of the slave without banishing him as a traitor from his native land. See Torrey's Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, p. 21.]
[Footnote 2: Sidney, An Oration Commemorative of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the United States, p. 5; and Adams, Anti-slavery, etc., pp. 40, 43, 65, and 66.]
Yet in the same proportion that antislavery men convinced masters of the wisdom of the policy of gradual emancipation, they increased their own burden of providing extra facilities of education, for liberated Negroes generally made their way from the South to urban communities of the Northern and Middle States. The friends of the colored people, however, met this exigency by establishing additional schools and repeatedly entreating these migrating freedmen to avail themselves of their opportunities. The address of the American Convention of Abolition Societies in 1819 is typical of these appeals.[1] They requested free persons of color to endeavor as much as possible to use economy in their expenses, to save something from their earnings for the education of their children … and "let all those who by attending to this admonition have acquired means, send their children to school as soon as they are old enough, where their morals will be an object of attention as well as their improvement in school learning." Then followed some advice which would now seem strange. They said, "Encourage, also, those among you who are qualified as teachers of schools, and when you are able to pay, never send your children to free schools; for this may be considered as robbing the poor of their opportunities which are intended for them alone."[2]