Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, major general , United States army : volume 2

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[339] class of men within his jurisdiction who took the greatest pleasure in persecuting freedmen, and considered the murder of a colored man only a practical joke; that the civil authorities took little pains to put a stop to such crimes, and that freedmen were killed and buried without notice to the authorities. Yet by the end of October, 1867, he considered his educational work highly satisfactory. Like North Carolina, there was here no State system of public schools for any of the children. Beyond the limits of the Charleston district there was not a single free school in that State. The law, however, with grim humor encouraged education by the following exemption: that persons convicted of certain crimes, as burglary and arson, were relieved from the death penalty, provided they could read and write — a strange survival from the English law of the “benefit of clergy.” At that time 30 per cent. of the white population of that proud State could not write their names. In the Charleston district the colored people, who were then two thirds of the whole population and paying their proportion of the taxes, had all their children excluded from the new “free schools,” i. e., in the district where schools just started were supported by 30 per cent. added to the general tax. The excuse was that the general Government had freed the negroes and might now educate them; and taxes of all kinds put upon the whites were but a meager return to the State because of the loss of slave property. The colored schools in South Carolina, both those aided by the Bureau and private ones not formally reported, contained 20,000 pupils. Some of the most prominent South Carolinians, among them the Rev. A. Toomer Porter, D. D., had come forward to take a positive and earnest interest in the work of