[Footnote 3:  Ibid., 1801, Report from New York.]

[Footnote 4:  Andrews, History of the New York African Free Schools, p. 20.]

[Footnote 5:  Proceedings of the American Convention of Abolition Societies, 1812, p. 7.]

Decided improvement was noted after 1814.  The directors then purchased a lot on which they constructed a building the following year.[1] The nucleus then took the name of the New York “African Free Schools.”  These schools grew so rapidly that it was soon necessary to rent additional quarters to accommodate the department of sewing.  This work had been made popular by the efforts of Misses Turpen, Eliza J. Cox, Ann Cox, and Caroline Roe.[2] The subsequent growth of the classes was such that in 1820 the Manumission Society had to erect a building large enough to accommodate five hundred pupils.[3] The instructors were then not only teaching the elementary branches of reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, but also astronomy, navigation, advanced composition, plain sewing, knitting, and marking.[4] Knowing the importance of industrial training, the Manumission Society then had an Indenturing Committee find employment in trades for colored children, and had recommended for some of them the pursuit of agriculture.[5] The comptrollers desired no better way of measuring the success of the system in shaping the character of its students than to be able to boast that no pupils educated there had ever been convicted of crime.[6] Lafayette, a promoter of the emancipation and improvement of the colored people, and a member of the New York Manumission Society, visited these schools in 1824 on his return to the United States.  He was bidden welcome by an eleven-year-old pupil in well-chosen and significant words.  After spending the afternoon inspecting the schools the General pronounced them the “best disciplined and the most interesting schools of children” he had ever seen.[7]

[Footnote 1:  Andrews, History of the New York African Free Schools, p. 18.]

[Footnote 2:  Andrews, History of the New York African Free Schools, p. 17.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 18.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid., p. 19.]

[Footnote 5:  Proceedings of the Am.  Convention of Abolition Soc., 1818, P. 9; Adams, Anti-slavery, p. 142.]

[Footnote 6:  Proceedings of the American Convention, etc., 1820.]

[Footnote 7:  Andrews, History of the New York African Free Schools, p. 20.]

The outlook for the education of Negroes in New Jersey was unusually bright.  Carrying out the recommendations of the Haddonfield Quarterly Meeting in 1777, the Quakers of Salem raised funds for the education of the blacks, secured books, and placed the colored children of the community at school.  The delegates sent from that State, to the Convention of the Abolition Societies in 1801, reported that there had been schools