In the northern States, education of the Whites took a leap forward; and not a few schools for Negroes, often separate at their own request, were opened and adapted to their needs and occupations.
In New England, Boston taking the lead, the negro children were generally admitted to the schools. The Negroes opened a school for themselves in one of their homes and applied for its admission and better equipment as a separate school, but this was declined.
The Clarkson Hall Schools in Philadelphia were the most successful, perhaps of the time; and by 1815 were offering free tuition to more than 300 pupils. Evening sessions were opened for adults. In Maryland, the Roman Catholics and Quakers were foremost in this field of endeavor. In Virginia, the cities of Alexandria, Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk were chief centers of education. In Alexandria, both races attended the same schools, a practice probably growing out of a like custom in Sunday school. In the rural districts, the instruction of the Negroes was done through the churches very generally, spelling and reading of the Bible being the goal.
North Carolina was even more liberal in her attitude toward education, and the Negroes “attained rank among the most enlightened in ante-bellum days.” A remarkable instance, all the more so because the only one known, is that of the Rev. John Chavis, a Presbyterian minister, described as a full-blooded Negro of dark brown color, whose intellectual gifts early attracted the attention of his white neighbors of Oxford, N. C. He was sent to Princeton to see if a Negro would take a collegiate education. There he took high rank as a good Latin, and a fair Greek scholar. Upon graduation, he spent many years as a missionary and pastor until laws were passed, in 1831, forbidding Negroes to preach. He then became a teacher, opening a classical school for white pupils. Some of the most distinguished men of the State were his patrons and pupils. Professor Basset of Trinity College, N. C., tells his story, and names among his pupils, W. P. Mangum, afterwards U. S. Senator; Archibald and John Henderson, sons of the Chief Justice; Charles Manley, afterwards Governor of North Carolina; and Dr. James L. Wortham, of Oxford.
Beyond the parish school instruction, there were no schools reported in South Carolina outside of Charleston. In that city, schools for the free Negroes taught by white teachers were maintained up to the Civil War, and, indeed, until about ten years ago, when the Negroes requested their own teachers to be substituted for the Whites.
The combined result of the Abolition movement and the insurrections in 1830 and later, was a reaction against such education, very general over the entire country. Even in New Hampshire and Connecticut, attempts to open schools for Negroes were thwarted. Prudence Crandall, a Quakeress, was imprisoned in Connecticut; and a newly built school in Canaan, N. H., was wrecked. By about 1850, hostility had abated, and, in the north, activities were revived and stimulated; while in the South, Negroes, in small numbers, received some teaching in private or clandestinely. There were exceptions to this last statement, for there were open schools in Petersburg, Va., and in Charleston, S. C., as well as in North Carolina.
Before the Civil War, there were three opportunities for higher learning opened to the Negroes—Oberlin College, 1833, and Wilberforce, 1856 (both in Ohio), and Lincoln University, 1854, in Pennsylvania. Apart from these, a very few Negroes, as in the case of the Rev. John Chavis, were by favor admitted to other colleges in the North and West. The Episcopal Church was first in the field of education as of evangelization, the two were wedded together; but it was not until after Emancipation that higher education was made a part of her school system for the Negroes.
It is well to remember that, from our present point of view, the era we have been reviewing is a primitive one. Up to 1860, most of our population lived isolated, rural lives, and about one-half of our white citizens were deprived of schooling, and were classed as illiterate. Literary ambition was not a normal asset. Among the Negroes, but a bare ten per cent were literate at the close of this period; and, of these, the far greater number were free Negroes in the upper tier of States. During the Civil War, this percentage seems to have declined; and, at its close, something like six to eight per cent expresses the ratio of the literate.
The after-war period opens with the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau, created in connection with the War Department, to instruct and prepare the Negroes for the exercise of the rights and duties of citizenship. In this, the Government acted in conjunction with Boards of Churches, either already formed or at once organized.
In the South, the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic were the only large and undivided bodies with which such alliance could be made. The disaffection among the negro members of the Episcopal Church stripped her of any great powers of usefulness; therefore, the Boards acting with the Freedmen’s Bureau were generally northern. Among these, the American Missionary Society, at first interdenominational and later Congregational, must hold distinction as first in service.