[598] Acts, 1st Called Sess. (1861), p. 82.
[599] Acts (1862), p. 97.
[600] Acts, 2d Called and 1st Regular Sess. (1861), pp. 65, 182, 183, 223, 253, 255; Acts of 1863 and 1864, passim.
[601] My chief source of information in regard to the common schools during the war has been the accounts of persons who were teachers and pupils in the schools.
[602] From 1863 to 1865 W. G. Clark and Co. of Mobile, the chief educational publishers of the state, brought out a series of five readers, “The Chaudron Series,”—by Adelaide de V. Chaudron, a well-known writer of Mobile. Large numbers were sold. S. H. Goetzel of Mobile published Madame Chaudron’s spelling-book, of which 40,000 copies were sold in 1864 and 1865. W. G. Clark and Co. printed a revision of Colburn’s Mental Arithmetic in 1864. A Mental Arithmetic by G. Y. Browne of Tuscaloosa is dated Atlanta, 1865, but was probably published in North Carolina. In 1864 W. G. Clark and Co. announced “A Book of Geographical Questions.” Before the close of the war Confederate text-books were quite common in the state. The series were usually named “Confederate,” “Dixie,” “Texas,” “Virginia,” etc. Stephen B. Weeks, in “A Preliminary Bibliography of Confederate Text-books” (Rept. of Comr. of Ed., 1898-1899, Vol. I, p. 1139), lists 16 primers, 14 spellers, 29 readers, 4 geographies, 1 dictionary, 12 arithmetics, 12 grammars, 8 books in foreign languages, 20 Sunday-school and religious works, and 10 miscellaneous educational publications. Those published in Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia sold largely in Alabama. Few came from the West. See also Yates Snowden, “Confederate Books.”
[603] See Weeks, “Bibliography of Confederate Text-books.”
[604] See Mrs. Clayton, “White and Black,” p. 115, and Hague, “Blockaded Family.”
[605] See Hague, “A Blockaded Family.” Miss Hague was a teacher in a plantation school during the war.
[606] W. W. Screws, “Alabama Journalism,” in “Memorial Record,” Vol. II, pp. 195, 234.
[607] Screws, pp. 194, 195, 205, 212, 218, 233, 234; Pub. Laws, C.S.A., 1st Cong., 1st Sess., April 21, 1862; 2d Sess., Oct. 11, 1862; Yates Snowden, “Confederate Books.”