As fast as ever the Northern armies cleared the way, benevolent and devoted teachers sent down by the different churches followed, and imparted to those who had never had a chance before the elements of English education, teaching them to read, write and figure, and many other useful things besides that accompany civilization and enlightenment. The American Mission Association took the lead, but the different churches and societies sent down their full quotas, and those volunteer teachers did a splendid and most devoted work. And yet there was some risk to run in this business, now being tried for the first time, because the war was still going on, and sometimes the Southern arms regained the territory they had lost, which brought the teachers into danger on one hand, and the colored people on the other. It had always been the policy of the Southern law-makers to keep the slaves in darkness, and even the rank and file of the white people themselves were purposely kept in a condition little better than the slaves. The planters kept teachers in their own grand halls, or sent their sons and daughters away from home for education. It was made a crime for a slave to be found with a book in his possession, or for anybody to teach him, whether he was white or a free person of color. A white man taught even the celebrated Bishop Daniel E. Payne in a cellar at Charleston, S. C., of which city the bishop was a native. In short, the laws of slavery warred upon nature, and even on God himself. The whole system was a system of murder, robbery and adultery. Every human right was broken down; but as the Northern armies cleared the way the teachers and their colored pupils rushed in at once.
On the 3rd of March, 1865, Congress launched the Freedman's Bureau upon the country for the purpose of assisting the freedman in any and every way just as soon as they were set free from slavery, and required the help of the national government. The Freedman's Bureau took education under its fostering care, and did a good work during the few years that it lasted, 1865 to 1872. The devoted teachers from the North had even begun to follow the very armies themselves as early as the year 1862, and we find them then on the Lower Mississippi. The colored soldiers took to their lessons well, and owing to their great thirst for learning, they learned with an eagerness and rapidity that filled their willing teachers with the greatest surprise. And throughout the freed zones did not only young girls and boys thus drink in—yea, literally swallow up instruction, but smart men and women sixty and seventy years of age and over learned to write, read, spell and cipher with a gusto and an enthusiasm that was most inspiring!
"Arise! Shine forth, for the light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee!" Thus saith the Prophet, and it was now fulfilled. What a treat, to be sure, for men and women thus to learn to read the mighty word of God, many of them in their old age! Verily, the ways of the Lord are wonderful and past finding out! Much hardship was experienced at first in finding suitable buildings in which to teach the people, and many a church and school-house were burned to the ground both during the war and the first years that followed the entire collapse of the "peculiar institution," but that has not stopped the triumphal march of the education of the colored race, for who, indeed, could stop the waves of the ocean?
It is indeed a joyous thing to look around us at this time and behold even now how high the sun has ascended in the heavens. If we have advanced so much in thirty-two years, how much farther shall we be in thirty-two more? Behold all the schools, colleges and places of learning of every name and nature thrown open in hundreds to our young people, both male and female! What a glorious array of splendid seminaries all over the great republic, besides hundreds belonging to the whites, to which we can obtain admission! It is true that there are others still barred against us on account of the prejudice still obtaining here and there owing to the color of the skin, but that will give way in due time, for there is nothing incapable of change but the Great Creator Himself.
By way of illustrating the results of the great Civil War, let us look back a little over twenty years, when Fisk University, at Nashville, Tennessee, sent forth Miss Ella Shephard and the rest of the "Jubilee Minstrels" to astonish the North with what even those who had been in slavery could do, when once their God-given talents were brought to the front. For the benefit of Fisk University they sang an immense sum of money out of the country, and covered themselves with unfading glory for all coming time. And where would those poor girls have been if it had not been for their own fathers who assisted white men in the war to knock off the chains of slavery? Why, to be sure, instead of being the "Jubilee Minstrels" in the North, they would have been toiling among the cotton, the sugar-cane and the rice fields of the South, wearing their young lives away down there.
A SCENE ON THE JACKSON PLANTATION.
But the glories of the "Jubilee Singers" were by no means over. More money was still needed, and those devoted people again took to the road, and this time, with most laudable ambition; they even crossed the North Atlantic, and sang with the most abundant success before the crowned heads and grandees of Europe. These crowned heads and grandees knew full well that if it had not been for the war for freedom and the union, the singers would at this time have been in the cane, the cotton and the rice fields singing:
Away down in Egypt's land
We have gained the victory,
Away down in Egypt's land
We have gained the day!
Oh, children ain't you glad,
The sea gave away?
When Moses smote the waters
The children all passed over,—
O, glory, halleluia!
For we have gained the day!
Oh, children, ain't you glad,
That Moses smote the waters,—
Oh, children ain't you glad
The sea gave away?
The Jubilee singers did sing the above song and many others before the rich and great, and the general population of the British Isles and continental Europe, but it was to let them hear what slaves used to sing before the war to wile away the time before Uncle Sam came down from the North to set them all free; in doing which he was assisted by 200,000 colored men, or more. Such are the fruits of war!