In the good old times, before the advent of Farragut and Butler, the statutes of Louisiana declared teaching slaves to read and write a “crime, having a tendency to excite insubordination among the servile class, and punishable by imprisonment at hard labor for not more than twenty-one years, or by death, at the discretion of the court.” When asked, therefore, to visit the negro schools of New Orleans, I was not unduly sanguine in my expectations. Reverend and Lieutenant Wheelock, a keen, practical Yankee preacher, acting as secretary to the “Board of Education for Freedmen,” instituted by General Banks, was guide.

The first school-house to which we were conducted was an old store-room, the second story of which had been used as a hall for the Knights of the Golden Circle, and still bore on its walls the symbols of that hollowest and most insolent of Southern humbugs. Rude partitions divided the store-room, and separated the three different grades of the primary school.

In the first we were received by a coarse, ill-dressed, rude-looking man, who evidently sprang from the poor white trash. Ranged along the wall as we entered were a dozen or more boys, reading as boys do read, in the Third Reader—with many a pause and many a tracing of hard words with a great fore-finger that blurs everything it touches. Among the class was a bright, fair-haired boy, who would have been called handsome anywhere. Seated behind the little desks were some large, coarse girls, seemingly eighteen or twenty years of age, conning their spelling-books. The hot air was languidly stirred by the hot breeze from the street windows, which brought in with it the sound of boys at play on the pavement; and one did not wonder at the noise and general inattention that prevailed.

The next room was ruled by a woman as coarse and slatternly as became the neighbor of the man whose school we had just left. A little fellow made some noise to displease her as we entered, and she bowled him against the wall as one would bowl a ball down a ten-pin alley. Children were at work mumbling over charts hung against the wall, and professing, with much noisy show of industry, to be spelling out simple sentences. But their zeal did not prevent surreptitious pinches, when the slatternly school-mistress’s back was turned, nor a trade of “five alleys for a bright-colored glass one,” on the sly. I think such scenes are not unknown even in model Northern schools.

The teacher in the third room was as great a contrast to the two we had just seen as was her school to theirs. She was smart, bright, looking for all the world like a Lowell factory girl of the better class; and her pupils, though by no means quiet as lambs, were in fine order. Their faces had evidently been washed systematically; long labors had forced upon their comprehension the advantages of clean aprons and pinafores; and they appeared attentive and noisily anxious to learn. This teacher seemed capable of giving an intelligent opinion as to the capacities of her scholars. She had taught at the North, and she saw no difference in the rapidity with which whites and blacks learned to spell and read. There were dull scholars and bright scholars everywhere. Some here were as dull as any she ever saw; others were bright as the brightest. And she called out a little coal-black creature, who had been in school eight days, and was apparently not more than as many years old. The eyes of the little thing sparkled as she began to spell! Eight days ago she had not known her letters. From spelling she went to reading, and was soon found to have mastered every sentence on the charts hung about the walls.

The more advanced scholars were found in the old hall of the K. G. C., up stairs. Here, where once schemes for taking Cuba, or perpetuating slavery in the South, were discussed, forty or fifty boys and girls, lately slaves, stood before the platform where the knights had ranged themselves for initiation, and peacefully recited their lesson in the Fourth Reader! Where once the Knight Commander sat, stalked now a loose-jointed, angular oddity from one of the Middle States—narrow-headed, and with ideas in proportion, which he seemed in nowise fitted to impart. Nigger school-teaching was manifestly not the respectable thing to do in New Orleans; and the Board seemed to have been put to sad straits sometimes for teachers. The reading was bunglingly done, but the teacher didn’t read so very much better himself. On spelling the class did better. In geography they had learned by rote the answers to the common questions; and they could point out with considerable accuracy, on the outline maps, New Orleans and Louisiana, and the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. But one woolly-headed urchin brought his teacher to grief and wrath, by selecting Cuba as the proper location for Iceland; matters were nowise improved by the further transfer of Asia to the exact latitude and longitude of San Francisco. Yet, with all the allowances, it was a fair average school. Boys and girls, ranging in age from twelve to twenty, read the Fourth Reader passably; some of them had a fair conception of geography, and they had even made an entrance on the mysteries of grammar. Arithmetic seemed to be all plain sailing till they reached long division. Here the process became too complicated, and they were sure to blunder in the multiplication of the divisor by the dividend, or to add where they should subtract, or to bring down the wrong figures at the wrong time. Was it the fault of the stupid teacher? or was their previous progress due to their imitative faculties, and did they fail now simply because they had reached a point where reasoning powers of their own were needed? It is the question which touches the marrow of the whole discussion about the average negro capacity; but the time has been too short and the experiments have been too incomplete as yet to furnish satisfactory data for its solution.

The next school to which we were conducted was kept by a middle-aged negro, in gold spectacles, and with amusingly consequential air. His assistant—what would not the Opposition journals have given for such a fact during the late political campaign?—was an English girl, young and lame, who seemed to have gone to work here, “among the niggers,” very much as she would have gone to work among the pots and kettles, simply because a living was to be earned, and this way to earn it happened to offer. The negro principal had a short, sharp way of dealing with his pupils; and strap and ferule lay convenient for immediate use beside the books upon his table. He explained that many of his pupils were “contrabans,” from the plantations, or negroes that had been “refugeed” from the Red River country; and their experiences in slavery had been such that they knew no motive for obedience but the fear of punishment. “Coax ’em and they’ll laugh at you; you’ve got to knock ’em about, or they won’t think you’ve got any power over ’em.” The theory seemed to have made a pretty good school, whether by virtue of the ferule or in spite of it.

The children were having their noon recess when we entered, and the school-room was perfectly quiet. At the sound of the bell they came trooping noisily to the door, and in a few moments the black tide had overflowed all the desks. A Fourth Reader class was called up, which read well—quite as well as the average of such classes anywhere. Now and then one noticed a curious mouthing of the words and a quaint mispronunciation that the forms of the ordinary negro dialect would not account for. In these cases the children were of French parentage, and were learning a language as well as the art of reading. “The children are taught exclusively in English,” the Board of Education say sententiously in their report. “Bound by the strong ligament of a common tongue, they will never foster the subtle enmity to national unity that lurks in diversity of speech.”

The exercises in arithmetic that followed disclosed the same slower progress in this than in other branches, which had already been observed in the schools previously visited. A few questions of a miscellaneous nature showed that the scholars were by no means destitute of general intelligence; and especially that they had a very keen appreciation of the fact that they had once been slaves, but were so no longer.

We were treated to a special performance before we left—reserved for the closing of the school, except upon grand occasions. An astonishing youth, with wool growing down almost to his eyebrows, beneath which gleamed cunning eyes that alone relieved the face from an expression of utter stupidity, took his place in the aisle in front of the teacher’s desk. The hum of the school suddenly hushed, and all eyes were fastened on the droll figure. The woolly head gave a bob forward, while the body seemed to go through contortions caused by some inward pain. As the head ducked down the second time and came up with snapping eyes, the opening of the song was ejected, and the shrill voice was soon drowned in the roar that joined in from the whole open-throated throng.

Such singing may never be heard elsewhere. The nearest approach a Northern reader is ever likely to make to it is when he hears the enthusiastic chorus at some noisy camp-meeting about the time the “power” is supposed to be “coming down, coming down.” The song was nothing—a rhyming effort of the gold-spectacled teacher himself, I believe, rudely setting forth the joy of the slaves at the great deliverance, and ending in a refrain of thanks and prayer for “Honest Abe.” But the negroes, too, have learned to worship the rising rather than the setting sun. “Honest Abe” was very well in his way; but if the schools were to be continued and the teachers paid, there would be more present need of help from his successor. And so the song had been already patched; and the refrain came thundering in for “Andie J.” After all, there is a good deal of human nature in negroes!

Some rickety, tumble-down buildings on an out-of-the-way corner had been secured for another school, which we next visited. A motherly old negress here had her brood of little ones gathered about her, learning in concert the alphabet from the chart which she held in her lap. Up the row and down it she led them with the little pointer, which looked as if it might be chosen a double duty to perform. Now one was singled out to name a letter selected at random from some other chart; then the pointer flitted from top to bottom and back to middle of the alphabet, and the shiny-faced urchins eagerly shouted the responses, or winced as the pointer descended threateningly near some naughty hand that was wandering into foreign pockets.

In another room, a bright, lady-like young quadroon, who was similarly occupied, smiled a pleasant greeting as we entered. She had been at the fair at Pierre Soulé’s. With ample means and a pleasant home, she volunteered to do this work of duty to her race; and the neat, orderly school-room, with the quiet ways and clean faces of her little charge, not less than their prompt answers, told her success.

In one of the rooms in this building a row of picaninnies, ranging from four to fourteen, stood up to recite in the First Reader. At their head, painfully spelling his way through a sentence as we entered, was an old man of sixty, with white wool and a wrinkled face. He wore a pair of huge brass-rimmed spectacles; but they would not stick on his bullet-shaped head without further contrivance, and so he had tied a bit of packing-cord into the ends of the brass temples, and around his head. I asked the old man what he wanted to learn to read for.

“Reckon if it’s good for white folks, good for me too.”

“But you’re so old, uncle, one would think you wouldn’t care for such things any more.”

“Reckon if it’s good for chil’en, can’t be bad for old folks.”

Subsequent talk showed that the old man had a Bible, and wanted to learn to read it, and, further, that he believed, as soon as he could read, he would be entitled to vote. Precisely what good that would do him he did not seem to understand; but he worked away industriously over his well-thumbed First Reader, and scarcely gave a second look to the visitors, at whom the children were staring with all their eyes. It was a trifling thing, doubtless, and the old man may have been very silly to be thus setting himself to children’s tasks, in the simplicity of his desire to learn what he knew white folks had found good for them; but to me there seemed nothing more touching or suggestive in all the sights of New Orleans.

We saw no other old men in the schools, and few young ones beyond the age of twenty; but the teachers said the cases were quite numerous in which the more intelligent scholars were instructing their parents at home. In all such instances the parents were sure to enforce regular attendance on the part of their children, and the influence of the school became reflex, first on the scholars, from them to the families, thence back to the school again.

The few schools spoken of above may be taken as a fair specimen of the system in operation in New Orleans in June, 1865. It was soon destined to give way to the reaction of public feeling, which already began to influence the affairs of the department. But it had now been carried on for fourteen months. Few, even of the most advanced, had, at the beginning, been able to read the simplest sentence. Now there were classes in geography, grammar, and arithmetic, and a very fair proportion of the fourteen thousand seven hundred and forty-one scholars could read quite intelligently. The gate of knowledge had been opened to them; there was little likelihood that hereafter a General commanding would be able to stop the spread of these dangerous arts of reading and writing, by an official notification that the opening of schools for negro children would be very hazardous and unwise.^[33]

So rapid was the progress that, on the 1st of January, 1865, the scholars had advanced so far as to be thus classified:

Writing on slates, 3,883; writing in copy-books, 1,108; studying grammar, 283; studying geography, 1,338; studying practical arithmetic, 1,223; studying mental arithmetic, 4,628; reading, 7,623; spelling, 8,301; learning the alphabet, 2,103.

And from the beginning of the experiment down to the 1st of June, 1865, there had been a regular increase of eleven hundred and fourteen scholars and fourteen teachers per month. Two thousand new scholars had come into the schools in May alone; in April there had been fifteen hundred. The expense of this entire system was about one-half what it cost to support a single regiment in the field. This expense was to be met by a tax on the property within the lines of military occupation; General Banks’s order explaining, for the comfort of dissatisfied tax-payers, that henceforth labor must be educated in the South in order to be valuable, and that if they didn’t support the negro schools, they would find it hard to secure negro labor.

Judging, both from personal observation and from the testimony of the teachers and the Board of Education, I should say that the negro pupils are as orderly and as easily governed as any corresponding number of white children, under similar circumstances. There is, I think, a more earnest desire to learn, and a more general opinion that it is a great favor to have the opportunity. There is less destruction of books, less whittling of school furniture, less disposition to set up petty revolts against the teacher’s authority. The progress in learning to read is exceptionally rapid. I do not believe that in the best schools at the North they learn the alphabet and First Reader quicker than do the average of these slave children. The negroes are not quicker-witted, but they are more anxious to learn. In writing they make equally rapid progress, and where the teachers are competent they do well in geography. Arithmetic presents the first real obstacles, and arouses painful inquiries as to the actual mental capacity of this long-neglected race.

But, up to this point, the question of negro education is no longer an experiment. In reading and writing I do not hesitate to say that the average progress of the children of plantation hands, as shown in every negro school from Fortress Monroe around to New Orleans, is fully equal to the average progress of white children at the North.

The experiment of high schools is about to be tried among them, under the auspices of a voluntary organization, mainly made up and sustained by themselves. Its constitution was adopted a fortnight or more before our visit, and such men as Thomas J. Durant were uniting with the negroes in an effort to get the enterprise properly started.

On the Sunday after our visit to these schools, we were taken to see a Sunday-school, made up largely of the same scholars, although conducted under the auspices of Mr. Conway, a business-like preacher, in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the city. The building into which we were conducted had been, in former times, a medical college. Ranged upon the seats, which arose, amphitheater-like, half-way to the ceiling, sat row after row of closely-crowded, smiling, black-faced, but bright-eyed, Sunday-school scholars, as clean, as smiling, and as prettily dressed as one would see almost anywhere in our Northern rural districts. On the higher benches, where the larger scholars sat, were a few young ladies, tastefully attired in white. At that distance, one had difficulty in seeing that their faces were not of the pure Anglo-Saxon tinge; but, neat and pretty as they looked, they were only niggers, and nigger Sunday-school teachers at that.

A graduate of Amherst met us as we mounted the platform once occupied by the demonstrator of anatomy. He was a sober, sedate figure, in professional black, and, with his dignified ways, might have been taken for a Southern Doctor of Divinity, if you did not look at his face. That was as black as his coat. His son, a handsome, graceful young fellow (always barring the black face and the kinky wool), took his seat at the piano. The sober representative of Amherst rapped on the table, and tapped the little bell, till the children slowly and gradually mastered the almost irrepressible torrent of whispers and laughter. But the bell-taps sounded clearer and clearer; silence at last reigned. A hymn was read; the young negro at the piano softly touched the keys for a moment, and then the whole rich, joyous nature of the children gushed into a volume of melody that rose and swelled till the very air of the old lecture-room was vocal with praise. It was like listening to the grand peals of Plymouth Church itself.

There followed a little address, with, perhaps, a trifle too much of talk about their liberty, and too little of how it should be made profitable; too much about the prejudices against them, and too little about the means for an improvement which should conquer prejudices; too much about the faults of their masters, and too little about their own. But this seems to be the general strain; and perhaps, after all, it may be necessary, in some such way, to gain the confidence of the children before you can instruct them. Occasional questions kept alive the interest, and the lustily shouted answers showed an intelligence that plainly took in the full meaning of the speech.

“What great man freed you all, and was then taken home?”

Surely, if the murdered President could but have been present, beside his old associate, at that scene, he would have thought the shouts that brought back his name the sweetest praise the lips of mortals ever bore him.

“Are you really free now?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What would you do if anybody should now try to take your freedom away?”

It was fine to watch the play of surprise and apprehension across the animated faces. “We’d fight,” exclaimed a sturdy fellow, twelve or fourteen years old. “We wouldn’t let them,” said many more. “The soldiers would stop it,” murmured the most. That, alas! seemed still the main hope of these submissive, long-enslaved people. They had not reached—not even the oldest of them—the conception of organized effort to protect themselves. “The soldiers would stop it.” That was all.