Most interest in the cause in Maryland was manifested near the cities of Georgetown and Baltimore.[1] Long active in the cause of elevating the colored people, the influence of the revolutionary movement was hardly necessary to arouse the Catholics to discharge their duty of enlightening the blacks.  Wherever they had the opportunity to give slaves religious instruction, they generally taught the unfortunates everything that would broaden their horizon and help them to understand life.  The abolitionists and Protestant churches were also in the field, but the work of the early fathers in these cities was more effective.  These forces at work in Georgetown made it, by the time of its incorporation into the District of Columbia, a center sending out teachers to carry on the instruction of Negroes.  So liberal were the white people of this town that colored children were sent to school there with white boys and girls who seemed to raise no objection.[2] Later in the nineteenth century the efforts made to educate the Negroes of the rural districts of Maryland were eclipsed by the better work accomplished by the free blacks in Baltimore and the District of Columbia.

[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., pp. 195 et seq., and pp. 352-353.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 353.]

Having a number of antislavery men among the various sects buoyant with religious freedom, Virginia easily continued to look with favor upon the uplift of the colored people.  The records of the Quakers of that day show special effort in this direction there about 1764, 1773, and 1785.  In 1797 the abolitionists of Alexandria, some of whom were Quakers, had been doing effective work among the Negroes of that section.  They had established a school with one Benjamin Davis as a teacher.  He reported an attendance of one hundred and eight pupils, four of whom “could write a very legible hand,” “read the Scriptures with tolerable facility,” and had commenced arithmetic.  Eight others had learned to read, but had made very little progress in writing.  Among his less progressive pupils fifteen could spell words of three or four syllables and read easy lessons, some had begun to write, while the others were chiefly engaged in learning the alphabet and spelling monosyllables.[1] It is significant that colored children of Alexandria, just as in the case of Georgetown, attended schools established for the whites.[2] Their coeducation extended not only to Sabbath schools but to other institutions of learning, which some Negroes attended during the week.[3] Mrs. Maria Hall, one of the early teachers of the District of Columbia, obtained her education in a mixed school of Alexandria.[4] Controlled then by aristocratic people who did not neglect the people of color, Alexandria also became a sort of center for the uplift of the blacks in Northern Virginia.

[Footnote 1:  Proceedings of the Am.  Conv., etc., 1797, p. 35.]