ng year.[1] The
nucleus then took the name of the New York "African Free Schools."
These schools grew so rapidly that it was soon necessary to rent
additional quarters to accommodate the department of sewing. This work
had been made popular by the efforts of Misses Turpen, Eliza J. Cox,
Ann Cox, and Caroline Roe.[2] The subsequent growth of the classes
was such that in 1820 the Manumission Society had to erect a building
large enough to accommodate five hundred pupils.[3] The instructors
were then not only teaching the elementary branches of reading,
writing, arithmetic, and geography, but also astronomy, navigation,
advanced composition, plain sewing, knitting, and marking.[4] Knowing
the importance of industrial training, the Manumission Society then
had an Indenturing Committee find employment in trades for colored
children, and had recommended for some of them the pursuit of
agriculture.[5] The comptrollers desired no better way of measuring
the success of the system in shaping the character of its students
than to be able to boast that no pupils educated there had ever been
convicted of crime.[6] Lafayette, a promoter of the emancipation
and improvement of the colored people, and a member of the New York
Manumission Society, visited these schools in 1824 on his return to
the United States. He was bidden welcome by an eleven-year-old pupil
in well-chosen and significant words. After spending the afternoon
inspecting the schools the General pronounced them the "best
disciplined and the most interesting schools of children" he had ever
seen.[7]

[Footnote 1: Andrews, _History of the New York African Free Schools_,
p. 18.]

[Footnote 2: Andrews, _History of the New York African Free Schools_,
p. 17.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid._, p. 18.]

[Footnote 4: _Ibid._, p. 19.]

[Footnote 5: _Proceedings of the Am. Convention of Abolition Soc._,
1818, P. 9; Adams, _Anti-slavery_, p. 142.]

[Footnote 6: _Proceedings of the American Convention_, etc., 1820.]

[Footnote 7: Andrews, _History of the New York African Free Schools_,
p. 20.]

The outlook for the education of Negroes in New Jersey was unusually
bright. Carrying out the recommendations of the Haddonfield Quarterly
Meeting in 1777, the Quakers of Salem raised funds for the education
of the blacks, secured books, and placed the colored children of
the community at school. The delegates sent from that State, to the
Convention of the Abolition Societies in 1801, reported