In 1704, Elias Neau, a French Protestant, who had come to New York and conformed to the English Church, opened a school for the Negroes. Success attended his efforts; but, in 1712, attempts were made to close his school as contributing to insurrectionary movements. Mr. Neau was able to prove that only one of his pupils had joined such a movement, and the school continued its good work under successive teachers and rectors for more than half a century. Originally this school was under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (“S. P. G.”), but later it came under parochial support, presumably that of Trinity Church.
The S. P. G. required of its teachers that the Negroes and Indians be taught to read the Bible and other useful books and poems, and be grounded in the Church Catechism. Some three years before the opening of the Neau School, the Rev. Samuel Thomas had established an S. P. G. school in Goose Creek Parish, S. C. Mr. Thomas in his account of the one thousand slaves in his parish, reported that many of them could read the Bible distinctly. Gradually schools were here and there dotted over the colonies, in connection with the churches.
The most ambitious enterprise of these early years, was the school established in Charleston, about 1741. Two slaves were bought, Harry and Andrew, selected for their unusual intelligence, and trained to be the teachers of others, and especially of slaves who could carry back to their homes the learning acquired. Commissary Garden erected the building and launched the school with about sixty young students at the opening. The promoters planned to send out annually from thirty to forty youths as teachers. Unhappily its life was short, less than twenty-five years.
About the same time the Catechetical Schools in St. Peter’s and Christ Church, Philadelphia, were opened with William Sturgeon, a graduate of Yale, as instructor. His nineteen years of service and its satisfactory fruits entitle him to rank among the great teachers of his time.
Commissary Bray of Maryland, through influential friends in England, gathered a school-fund whose benefactions overflowed into Pennsylvania on the North, and North Carolina on the South.
Meantime the Quakers, who had been the first, were always the most consistent in teaching the Negroes, often defying both sentiment and local laws that they might be true to their convictions. The Moravians also were active in the settlement at Bethlehem, Pa., as well as in New Jersey and in the Carolinas.
An interesting private venture was that of Mrs. Elize Lucas Pinckney, mother of the two patriot statesmen and soldiers of the Revolution, who, while managing her father’s South Carolina estate, found time to teach a class of young Negroes to read. This about 1740.
Quite naturally, the American Revolution stimulated greatly the cause of education, both of the Whites and of the Negroes, when it was declared to be both the duty and the right of man under the new institutions. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison, were foremost in commending gradual emancipation after education and training for citizenship. The following passages from Doctor Woodson’s Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, fairly express the teaching of these and other Fathers of the Republic. “Many Americans who considered slavery an evil, had found no way out of the difficulty, when the alternative was to turn loose upon society so many uncivilized men without the ability to discharge the duties of citizenship.” “These leaders recommended gradual emancipation for States having a large slave population, that those designated for freedom might first be instructed in the value and meaning of liberty to render them comfortable in the use of it.”
How many of the heartaches and tragedies of the succeeding long years might have been prevented, had the people of America been as ready to follow their leaders in making pathways for peace and righteousness, and in establishing right and justice and self-government for their Negro and Indian people, as they had been ready to follow them in paths of war in fending their own rights and establishing their own self-government! But self-interest makes partisans of the general run of people not less now than then.
The Fathers of our Country, of our (then) new model of social life, found the motive of education to be comfort in freedom and usefulness in citizenship. They looked forward to the day when present slaves would be future citizens. They looked out upon their day in which education was the preparation of the embryo citizens. The thought of the era greatly stimulated interest in education.