[Footnote 1:  African Repository, vol. x., pp. 174, 205, and 245.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., vol. xi., pp. 140 and 268.]

[Footnote 3:  Goodell, Slave Code, pp. 323-324.]

[Footnote 4:  The Enormity of the Slave Trade, etc., p. 74.]

Some of the objects of such charity turned out to be interesting characters.  Samuel Lowry of Tennessee worked and studied privately under Rev. Mr. Talbot of Franklin College, and at the age of sixteen was sufficiently advanced to teach with success.  He united with the Church of the Disciples and preached in that connection until 1859.[1] In some cases colored preachers were judged sufficiently informed, not only to minister to the needs of their own congregations, but to preach to white churches.  There was a Negro thus engaged in the State of Florida.[2] Another colored man of unusual intelligence and much prominence worked his way to the front in Giles County, Tennessee.  In 1859 he was the pastor of a Hard-shell Baptist Church, the membership of which was composed of the best white people in the community.  He was so well prepared for his work that out of a four days’ argument on baptism with a white minister he emerged victor.  From this appreciative congregation he received a salary of from six to seven hundred dollars a year.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 144.]

[Footnote 2:  Bremer, Homes of the New World, vol. ii., pp. 488-491.]

[Footnote 3:  The Richmond Enquirer, July, 1859; and Afr.  Repository, vol. xxxv., p. 255.]

Statistics of this period show that the proportionately largest number of Negroes who learned in spite of opposition were found among the Scotch-Irish of Kentucky and Tennessee.  Possessing few slaves, and having no permanent attachment to the institution, those mountaineers did not yield to the reactionaries who were determined to keep the Negroes in heathendom.  Kentucky and Tennessee did not expressly forbid the education of the colored people.[1] Conditions were probably better in Kentucky than in Tennessee.  Traveling in Kentucky about this time, Abdy was favorably impressed with that class of Negroes who though originally slaves saved sufficient from their earnings to purchase their freedom and provide for the education of their children.[2]

[Footnote 1:  In 1830 one-twelfth of the population of Lexington consisted of free persons of color, who since 1822 had had a Baptist church served by a member of their own race and a school in which thirty-two of their children were taught by a white man from Tennessee.  He had pledged himself to devote the rest of his life to the uplift of his colored brethren.  One of these free Negroes in Lexington had accumulated wealth to the amount of $20,000.  In Louisville, also a center of free colored population, efforts were being made to educate ambitious Negroes.  Travelers noted that colored schools were found there generations