William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

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Chapter 16: coloured people at school.

At the time of my first visit to Virginia, the Negro had been free about a year, and in the freshness of his freedom showed a spring and go that hinted, not at physical vitality only, but at a power of moral progress. Sam, the waiter, sat up half his night over book and slate. Harry, the labourer, squatted on a waste, and wrung his maize and onion from a blasted heath. Sam walked with me one evening to a score of Negro cabins, where, in dens and garrets, we saw woolly pates bending over desks and dirty fingers pointing at A B C. No city in Virginia had then a public school for either White or Black; but the enfranchised Negro seemed resolved to have such schools as he could make. His schools were small and rude; but the beginnings of many great things have been small and rude. What seemed of consequence was the impulse.