[9] By virtue of the power and for the purposes aforesaid, I do ordain and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States, are and henceforth shall be free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.—­Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

[10] From Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America I construct the following table showing the number of colored troops employed by the Federal Government during the war of the Rebellion: 

Colored Troops Furnished 1861-65
Total of New England States 7,916
Total of Middle States 13,922
Total, Western States and Territories 12,711
Total, Border States 45,184
Total, Southern States 63,571
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Grand Total States 143,304
At Large 733
Not accounted for 5,083
Officers 7,122
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Grand total 156,242

This gives colored troops enlisted in the States in Rebellion; besides this, there were 92,576 colored troops (included with the white soldiers) in the quotas of the several States.

CHAPTER V

Illiteracy—­Its Causes

At the close of the rebellion there were in the Union (according to the census of 1860) 4,441,830 people of African origin; in 1880 they had increased to 6,580,793.  Of this vast multitude in 1860, it is safe to say, not so many as one in every ten thousand could read or write.  They had been doomed by the most stringent laws to a long night of mental darkness.  It was a crime to teach a black man how to read even the Bible, the sacred repository of the laws that must light the pathway of man from death unto life eternal.  For to teach a slave was to make a firebrand—­to arouse that love of freedom which stops at nothing short of absolute freedom.  It is not, therefore, surprising that every southern state should have passed the most odious inhibitary laws, with severe fines and penalties for their infraction, upon the question of informing the stunted intelligence of the slave population.  The following table will show the condition of education in the South in 1880: