[Footnote 3:  Note broadside (Charleston, 1861) accessible in Special Library of Boston Public Library as Document No. 9 in 20th Cab. 3. 7.]

Whatever may have been the situation of special groups, however, it can readily be seen that there were at least some Negroes in the country—­a good many in the aggregate—­who by 1860 were maintaining a high standard in their ordinary social life.  It must not be forgotten that we are dealing with a period when the general standard of American culture was by no means what it is to-day.  “Four-fifths of the people of the United States of 1860 lived in the country, and it is perhaps fair to say that half of these dwelt in log houses of one or two rooms.  Comforts such as most of us enjoy daily were as good as unknown....  For the workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough wool hats were the rule."[1] In Philadelphia, a fairly representative city, there were at this time a considerable number of Negroes of means or professional standing.  These people were regularly hospitable; they visited frequently; and they entertained in well furnished parlors with music and refreshments.  In a day when many of their people had not yet learned to get beyond showiness in dress, they were temperate and self-restrained, they lived within their incomes, and they retired at a seasonable hour.[2]

[Footnote 1:  W.E.  Dodd:  Expansion and Conflict, Volume 3 of “Riverside History of the United States,” Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1915, p. 208.]

[Footnote 2:  Turner:  The Negro in Pennsylvania, 140.]

In spite moreover of all the laws and disadvantages that they had to meet the Negroes also made general advance in education.  In the South efforts were of course sporadic, but Negroes received some teaching through private or clandestine sources.[1] More than one slave learned the alphabet while entertaining the son of his master.  In Charleston for a long time before the Civil War free Negroes could attend schools especially designed for their benefit and kept by white people or other Negroes.  The course of study not infrequently embraced such subjects as physiology, physics, and plane geometry.  After John Brown’s raid the order went forth that no longer should any colored person teach Negroes.  This resulted in a white person’s being brought to sit in the classroom, though at the outbreak of the war schools were closed altogether.  In the North, in spite of all proscription, conditions were somewhat better.  As early as 1850 there were in the public schools in New York 3,393 Negro children, these sustaining about the same proportion to the Negro population that white children sustained to the total white population.  Two institutions for the higher education of the Negro were established before the Civil War, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1854) and Wilberforce University in Ohio (1856).  Oberlin moreover was founded in 1833.  In 1835 Professor