Planters themselves sometimes saw to the education of their slaves.  Ephraim Waterford was bound out in Virginia until he was twenty-one on the condition that the man to whom he was hired should teach him to read.[1] Mrs. Isaac Riley and Henry Williamson, of Maryland, did not attend school but were taught by their master to spell and read but not to write.[2] The master and mistress of Williamson Pease, of Hardman County, Tennessee, were his teachers.[3] Francis Fredric began his studies under his master in Virginia.  Frederick Douglass was indebted to his kind mistress for his first instruction.[4] Mrs. Thomas Payne, a slave in what is now West Virginia, was fortunate in having a master who was equally benevolent.[5] Honorable I.T.  Montgomery, now the Mayor of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was, while a slave of Jefferson Davis’s brother, instructed in the common branches and trained to be the confidential accountant of his master’s plantation.[6] While on a tour among the planters of East Georgia, C.G.  Parsons discovered that about 5000 of the 400,000 slaves there had been taught to read and write.  He remarked, too, that such slaves were generally owned by the wealthy slaveholders, who had them schooled when the enlightenment of the bondmen served the purposes of their masters.[7]

[Footnote 1:  Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery, p. 373.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 133.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 123.]

[Footnote 4:  Lee, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, p. x.]

[Footnote 5:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 368.]

[Footnote 6:  This is his own statement.]

[Footnote 7:  Parsons, Inside View, etc., p. 248.]

The enlightenment of the Negroes, however, was not limited to what could be accomplished by individual efforts.  In many southern communities colored schools were maintained in defiance of public opinion or in violation of the law.  Patrick Snead of Savannah was sent to a private institution until he could spell quite well and then to a Sunday-school for colored children.[1] Richard M. Hancock wrote of studying in a private school in Newbern, North Carolina;[2] John S. Leary went to one in Fayetteville eight years;[3] and W.A.  Pettiford of this State enjoyed similar advantages in Granville County during the fifties.  He then moved with his parents to Preston County where he again had the opportunity to attend a special school.[4] About 1840, J.F.  Boulder was a student in a mixed school of white and colored pupils in Delaware.[5] Bishop J.M.  Brown, a native of the same commonwealth, attended a private school taught by a friendly woman of the Quaker sect.[6] John A. Hunter, of Maryland, was sent to a school for white children kept by the sister of his mistress, but his second master said that Hunter should not have been allowed to study and stopped his attendance.[7] Francis L. Cardozo of Charleston, South Carolina, entered school there in 1842 and continued his studies until he was twelve years of age.[8] During the fifties J.W.  Morris of the same city attended a school conducted by the then distinguished Simeon Beard.[9] In the same way T. McCants Stewart[10] and the Grimke brothers [11] were able to begin their education there prior to emancipation.