Polish General Kosciuszko, and General
Lafayette, of France, gave evidence of their interest in the
improvement of the Negro. Kosciuszko provided in his will that the
property which he acquired in America should be used for the purchase
of slaves to be educated for higher service and citizenship.[499]
Lafayette persistently urged that the blacks be educated and
emancipated.[500]

The impression seems to prevail in some quarters that the Catholic
Church in the United States has been indifferent to the welfare of the
Negro. Sir Harry H. Johnston in his work, _The Negro in the New
World_, rather unjustly asserts that the Church maintains "nothing in
the way of Negro education and has never at any time shown particular
sympathy or desire to help the Negro slave." At the same time he
acknowledges that the Roman Catholic Church in the West Indies and
South America has been the great opponent of slavery. Johnston states
"that the infractions of the Code Noir," and the increased
mal-treatment of slaves and free mulattoes did not take place until
the Catholic order of Jesuits had been expelled from Saint Dominique
about 1766. Here, as in Brazil, and Paraguay, they had exasperated the
white colonists by standing up for the natives or the Negro slaves;
and in Hispaniola they had endeavored to exact from the local
government a full application of the various slave-protecting edicts.
Whatever faults and mistakes they may have been guilty of in the
nineteenth century, the Jesuits played, for two hundred years, a noble
part in acting as a buffer between the Caucasian on the one hand, and
the backward peoples on the other.[501]

Before the emancipation of the slaves in the United States, great
difficulties prevented the Catholic Church from benefiting the slaves,
especially in those parts where the Church had no adherents and no
freedom to act. The Church had but a limited number of clergy and
small means. The most of the South was predominantly Protestant and in
some sections, penal laws were in force against Catholics. In many
States laws were enacted against the instruction of slaves in any
manner whatever.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, we find Catholic schools in
Washington and Baltimore educating Negro children as early as
1829.[502] The Rt. Rev. John England, the first Catholic Bishop of
Charleston, South Carolina, who held his office from 1820 until his
death in 1842, cared much for the poor friendless slaves. He began