land was to go toward the support of the institution, or, in the event the school should be established elsewhere, he would give it one hundred pounds.  Ebenezer Maule, another friend, subscribed fifty pounds for the same purpose.[2] Exactly what the outcome was, no one knows; but the memorial on the life of Pleasants shows that he appropriated the rent of the three-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract and ten pounds per annum to the establishment of a free school for Negroes, and that a few years after his death such an institution was in operation under a Friend at Gravelly Run.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Weeks, Southern Quakers, p. 215.]

[Footnote 2:  Weeks, Southern Quakers, p. 216.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 216.]

Such philanthropy, however, did not become general in Virginia.  The progress of Negro education there was decidedly checked by the rapid development of discontent among Negroes ambitious to emulate the example of Toussaint L’Ouverture.  During the first quarter of the nineteenth century that commonwealth tolerated much less enlightenment of the colored people than the benevolent element allowed them in the other border States.  The custom of teaching colored pauper children apprenticed by church-wardens was prohibited by statute immediately after Gabriel’s Insurrection in 1800.[1] Negroes eager to learn were thereafter largely restricted to private tutoring and instruction offered in Sabbath-schools.  Furthermore, as Virginia developed few urban communities there were not sufficient persons of color in any one place to cooeperate in enlightening themselves even as much as public sentiment allowed.  After 1838 Virginia Negroes had practically no chance to educate themselves.

[Footnote 1:  Hening, Statutes at Large, vol. xvi., p. 124.]

North Carolina, not unlike the border States in their good treatment of free persons of color, placed such little restriction on the improvement of the colored people that they early attained rank among the most enlightened ante-bellum Negroes.  This interest, largely on account of the zeal of the antislavery leaders and Quakers,[1] continued unabated from 1780, the time of their greatest activity, to the period of the intense abolition agitation and the servile insurrections.  In 1815 the Quakers were still exhorting their members to establish schools for the literary and religious instruction of Negroes.[2] The following year a school for Negroes was opened for two days in a week.[3] So successful was the work done by the Quakers during this period that they could report in 1817 that most colored minors in the Western Quarter had been “put in a way to get a portion of school learning."[4] In 1819 some of them could spell and a few could write.  The plan of these workers was to extend the instruction until males could “read, write, and cipher,” and until the females could “read and write."[5]

[Footnote 1:  Weeks, Southern Quakers, p. 231; Levi Coffin, Reminiscences, pp. 69-71; Bassett, Slavery in North Carolina, p. 66.]