The custom of teaching colored pauper children
apprenticed by church-wardens was prohibited by statute immediately
after Gabriel's Insurrection in 1800.[1] Negroes eager to learn were
thereafter largely restricted to private tutoring and instruction
offered in Sabbath-schools. Furthermore, as Virginia developed few
urban communities there were not sufficient persons of color in any
one place to cooeperate in enlightening themselves even as much as
public sentiment allowed. After 1838 Virginia Negroes had practically
no chance to educate themselves.
[Footnote 1: Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vol. xvi., p. 124.]
North Carolina, not unlike the border States in their good treatment
of free persons of color, placed such little restriction on the
improvement of the colored people that they early attained rank among
the most enlightened ante-bellum Negroes. This interest, largely
on account of the zeal of the antislavery leaders and Quakers,[1]
continued unabated from 1780, the time of their greatest activity,
to the period of the intense abolition agitation and the servile
insurrections. In 1815 the Quakers were still exhorting their members
to establish schools for the literary and religious instruction of
Negroes.
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