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Footnotes 1415
® Bryce, of, cit,^ Vol. 2, p. 320.
® The Southern pro-slavery theory was expounded upon the principle of equality
among the whites just as much as of their superiority over the Negroes (see Chapters 20
and 31). One of the glaring contradictions between philosophy and life in the Old South
was, therefore, its aristocratic educational system which left the masses of poor whites
altogether uneducated. This was seen by some of the pro-slavery advocates. George Fitz-
hugh, for instance, wrote:
“We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones. Our
citizens, like those of Rome, and Athens, are a privileged class. We should train and
educate them to deserve the privileges and to perform the duties which society confers
on them. Instead, by a low demagoguism depressing their self-respect by discourses on
the equality of man, we had better excite their pride by reminding them that they do
not fulfill the menial offices which white men do in other countries. Society does not
feel the burden of providing for the few helpless paupers in the South. And we
should recollect that here we have but half the people to educate, for half are Negroes;
whilst at the North they profess to educate all. It is in our power to spike this last gun
of the abolitionists. We should educate all the poor.” {Soctolog’^ for the South [1854],
p. 93; compare pp. 144, 147 ff., 255 ff., fassim,)
Before the Civil War many of the Northern states had separate schools for Negroes,
but these were not very inferior to those for whites. Most colleges—with the notable
exceptions of Oneida Institute, New York Central College, and Oberlin College (whose
President was Horace Mann, the greatest leader of public education in the United
States) —refused to accept Negroes, but three Negro colleges—^Avery College (Pennsyl-
vania, 1849), Ashmun Institute (now Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, 1854), Wilber-
force University (Ohio, 1856)—^were established there. (See Doxey A. Wilkerson,
“The Negro in American Education,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study
[1940], Vol. I, p. 91.)
Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order
(1934), p. 21. See also Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations
(1934), pp. 350-351. South Carolina and Georgia had such laws in the eighteenth
century.
^^W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935), p. 638. The Census of 1870
reports that 1 8.6 per cent of all Negroes 10 years old and over were literate. (U.S. Bureau
of the Census, Negroes In the United States: 1920-1952, p. 231.) This figure includes
the ante-bellum free Negro population (who could go to school in the North), and it
probably includes many Negroes whose literacy consisted in nothing more than ability
to write one’s name. Too, it refers to a date five years after the end of the Civil War.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction^ p. 1 23.
^^They have been very differently judged. A Southern white liberal in the previous
generation, Thomas Nelson Page, wrote:
“But the teachers, at first, devoted as many of them were, by their unwisdom alienated
the good-will of the whites and frustrated much of the good which they might have
accomplished. They might have been regarded with distrust in any case, for no people
look with favor on the missionaries who come to instruct them as to matters of which
they feel they know much more than the missionaries, and the South regarded jealously
any teaching of the Negroes which looked toward equality. The new missionaries
went counter to the deepest prejudice of the Southern people. They Jived with the
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