[Footnote 1: Secker, Works, vol. v., p. 88.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., vol. vi., p. 467.]
[Footnote 3: An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, p.6.]
This organization hit upon the plan of purchasing two Negroes named Harry and Andrew, and of qualifying them by thorough instruction in the principles of Christianity and the fundamentals of education, to serve as schoolmasters to their people. Under the direction of Rev. Mr. Garden, the missionary who had directed the training of these young men, a building costing about three hundred and eight pounds was erected in Charleston, South Carolina. In the school which opened in this building in 1744 Harry and Andrew served as teachers.[1] In the beginning the school had about sixty young students, and had a very good daily attendance for a number of years. The directors of the institution planned to send out annually between thirty and forty youths “well instructed in religion and capable of reading their Bibles to carry home and diffuse the same knowledge to their fellow slaves."[2] It is highly probable that after 1740 this school was attended only by free persons of color. Because the progress of Negro education had been rather rapid, South Carolina enacted that year a law prohibiting any person from teaching or causing a slave to be taught, or from employing or using a slave as a scribe in any manner of writing.
[Footnote 1: Meriwether, Education in South Carolina, p. 123; McCrady, South Carolina, etc., p. 246; Dalcho, An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina, pp. 156, 157, 164.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., pp. 157 and 164.]
In 1764 the Charleston school was closed for reasons which it is difficult to determine. From one source we learn that one of the teachers died, and the other having turned out profligate, no instructors could be found to continue the work. It does not seem that the sentiment against the education of free Negroes had by that time become sufficiently strong to cause the school to be discontinued.[1] It is evident, however, that with the assistance of influential persons of different communities the instruction of slaves continued in that colony. Writing about the middle of the eighteenth century, Eliza Lucas, a lady of South Carolina, who afterward married Justice Pinckney, mentions a parcel of little Negroes whom she had undertaken to teach to read.[2]