al advantages tended to make colored city
schools self-supporting. There developed a class of self-educating
Negroes who were able to provide for their own enlightenment. This
condition, however, did not obtain throughout the South. Being a
proslavery farming section of few large towns and cities, that part of
the country did not see much development of the self-sufficient class.
What enlightenment most urban blacks of the South experienced resulted
mainly from private teaching and religious instruction. There were
some notable exceptions, however. A colored "Santo Dominican" named
Julian Troumontaine taught openly in Savannah up to 1829 when such
an act was prohibited by law. He taught clandestinely thereafter,
however, until 1844.[1] In New Orleans, where the Creoles and freedmen
counted early in the nineteenth century as a substantial element in
society, persons of color had secured to themselves better facilities
of education. The people of this city did not then regard it as a
crime for Negroes to acquire an education, their white instructors
felt that they were not condescending in teaching them, and children
of Caucasian blood raised no objection to attending special and
parochial schools accessible to both races. The educational privileges
which the colored people there enjoyed, however, were largely paid for
by the progressive freedmen themselves.[2] Some of them educated their
children in France.

[Footnote 1: Wright, _Negro Education in Georgia_, p. 20.]

[Footnote 2: Many of the mixed breeds of New Orleans were leading
business men.]

Charleston, South Carolina, furnished a good example of a center of
unusual activity and rapid strides of self-educating urban Negroes.
Driven to the point of doing for themselves, the free people of color
of this city organized in 1810 the "Minor Society" to secure to their
orphan children the benefits of education.[1] Bishop Payne, who
studied later under Thomas Bonneau, attended the school founded by
this organization. Other colored schools were doing successful work.
Enjoying these unusual advantages the Negroes of Charleston were
early in the nineteenth century ranked by some as economically and
intellectually superior to any other such persons in the United
States. A large portion of the leading mechanics, fashionable tailors,
shoe manufacturers, and mantua-makers were free blacks, who enjoyed "a
consideration in the community far more than that enjoyed by any of
the