s country thought that the victory for the
despised race had been won. Traveling in 1783 in the colony of
Virginia, where the slave trade had been abolished and schools for
the education of freedmen established, Johann Schoepf felt that the
institution was doomed.[1] After touring Pennsylvania five years
later, Brissot de Warville reported that there existed then a country
where the blacks were allowed to have souls, and to be endowed with an
understanding capable of being formed to virtue and useful knowledge,
and where they were not regarded as beasts of burden in order that
their masters might have the privilege of treating them as such. He
was pleased that the colored people by their virtue and understanding
belied the calumnies which their tyrants elsewhere lavished against
them, and that in that community one perceived no difference between
"the memory of a black head whose hair is craped by nature, and that
of the white one craped by art."[2]

[Footnote 1: Schoepf, _Travels in the Confederation_, p. 149.]

[Footnote 2: Brissot de Warville, _New Travels_, vol. I., p. 220.]

CHAPTER V

BETTER BEGINNINGS

Sketching the second half of the eighteenth century, we have observed
how the struggle for the rights of man in directing attention to those
of low estate, and sweeping away the impediments to religious
freedom, made the free blacks more accessible to helpful sects and
organizations. We have also learned that this upheaval left the slaves
the objects of piety for the sympathetic, the concern of workers in
behalf of social uplift, a class offered instruction as a prerequisite
to emancipation. The private teaching of Negroes became tolerable,
benevolent persons volunteered to instruct them, and some schools
maintained for the education of white students were thrown open to
those of African blood. It was the day of better beginnings. In fact,
it was the heyday of victory for the ante-bellum Negro. Never had his
position been so advantageous; never was it thus again until the whole
race was emancipated. Now the question which naturally arises here
is, to what extent were such efforts general? Were these beginnings
sufficiently extensive to secure adequate enlightenment to a large
number of colored people? Was interest in the education of this class
so widely manifested thereafter as to cause the movement to endure? A
brief account of these efforts in the various States will answer these
questions.

In t