Not one of the men elected as members of Congress could take the Congressional test-oath. The mere fact that a man could take that oath was sufficient to insure his defeat.
Georgia has no common-school system. The poor, who can show that they are unable to pay for the tuition of their children, are permitted to send them to private schools on the credit of the county in which they reside. Few, however, take advantage of a privilege which involves a confession of poverty. There is great need of Northern benevolent effort to bring forward the education of the poor whites in all these States.
I found the freedmen’s schools in Georgia supported by the New-England Freedmen’s Aid Society, and the American Missionary Association. These were confined to a few localities,—principally to the large towns. There were sixty-two schools, with eighty-nine teachers, and six thousand six hundred pupils. There were in other places, self-supporting schools, taught by colored teachers, who did not report to the State Superintendent. The opposition to the freedmen’s schools, on the part of the whites, was generally bitter; and in several counties school-houses had been burned, and the teachers driven away, on the withdrawal of the troops. Occasionally, however, I would hear an intelligent planter make use of a remark like this: “The South has been guilty of the greatest inconsistency in the world, in sending missionaries to enlighten the heathen, and forbidding the education of our own servants.”
At Augusta, I visited a number of colored schools; among others, a private one kept by Mr. Baird, a colored man, in a little room where he had secretly taught thirty pupils during the war. The building, containing a store below and tenements above, was owned and occupied by persons of his own race; the children entered it by different doors, the girls with their books strapped under their skirts, the boys with theirs concealed under their coats; all finding their way in due season to the little school-room. I was shown the doors and passages by which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white persons.
Mr. Baird told me that during ten years previous to the War, he taught a similar school in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The laws prohibited persons of color from teaching; and accordingly he employed a white woman to assist him. She sat and sewed, and kept watch, until the patrol looked in, when she appeared as the teacher, and the real teacher (a small man) fell back as a pupil. It was ostensibly a school for free colored children, the teaching of slaves to read being a criminal offence; yet many of those were taught.
On the road to Augusta, my attention was attracted by the conversation of two gentlemen, a Georgian and a Mississippian, sitting behind me in the car.
We had just passed Union Point, where there was considerable excitement about an unknown negro found lying out in the woods, sick with the small-pox. Nobody went to his relief, and the citizens, standing with hands in their pockets, allowed that, if he did not die of his disease, he would soon perish from exposure and starvation.
“The trouble is just here,” said the Georgian behind me. “The niggers have never been used to taking care of their own sick. Formerly, if anything was the matter with them, their masters had them taken care of; and now they don’t mind anything about disease, except to be afraid of it. If they’ve a sick baby, they let it die. They’re like so many children themselves, in respect to sickness.”
“How much better off they were when slaves!” said the Mississippian. “A man would see to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don’t belong to anybody, and it’s no man’s business whether they live or die.”