.[3]

[Footnote 1: Drewery, _Slave Insurrections in Virginia_, p. 121.]

[Footnote 2: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, 1871, p. 205.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid._, p. 205.]

The coming of these refugees to Baltimore had a direct bearing on the
education of colored girls. Their condition excited the sympathy of
the immigrating colored women. These ladies had been educated both in
the Island of Santo Domingo and in Paris. At once interested in the
uplift of this sex, they soon constituted the nucleus of the society
that finally formed the St. Frances Academy for girls in connection
with the Oblate Sisters of Providence Convent in Baltimore, June 5,
1829.[1] This step was sanctioned by the Reverend James Whitefield,
the successor of Archbishop Marechal, and was later approved by the
Holy See. The institution was located on Richmond Street in a building
which on account of the rapid growth of the school soon gave way to
larger quarters. The aim of the institution was to train girls, all
of whom "would become mothers or household servants, in such solid
virtues and religious and moral principles as modesty, honesty, and
integrity."[2] To reach this end they endeavored to supply the school
with cultivated and capable teachers. Students were offered courses in
all the branches of "refined and useful education, including all that
is regularly taught in well regulated female seminaries."[3] This
school was so well maintained that it survived all reactionary attacks
and became a center of enlightenment for colored women.

[Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p. 205.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 206.]

[Footnote 3: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, p. 206.]

At the same time there were other persons and organizations in the
field. Prominent among the first of these workers was Daniel Coker,
known to fame as a colored Methodist missionary, who was sent to
Liberia. Prior to 1812 he had in Baltimore an academy which certain
students from Washington attended when they had no good schools of
their own, and when white persons began to object to the co-education
of the races. Because of these conditions two daughters of George
Bell, the builder of the first colored schoolhouse in the District of
Columbia, went to Baltimore to study under Coker.[1] An adult Negro
school in this city had 180 pupils in 1820. There were then in the
Baltimore Sunday-schools about 600 Negroes. They had formed themselves
into a Bible association which had bee