as fast increasing, and
the planters believed that the public safety could only be guaranteed by
compelling them to remain illiterate.

In point of fact, however, the slaves on the plantations were not as
ignorant as their too sanguine owners supposed them to be. In a secret
way one here and there may even have learned to read; and, in regard to
what was going on in the outside world, they were oftentimes hardly less
well informed than their masters and mistresses. As Booker Washington
remembers it, the time of his childhood was a wonderful era of
transition. None more fully realised than the slaves themselves that the
bone of contention which occasioned the Civil War was the question of
slavery. Thus, to them, the period of conflict was a time of wild, but
still subdued, excitement, for fear their sentiments should be detected
and be followed by pains and penalties. The traffic on "the underground
railroad" was probably for the time suspended; but what was called "the
grapevine telegraph" was in full operation, and on every plantation and
in every planter's palatial mansion the slaves looked for its messages
with that ardent interest which cannot be described. They could not read
newspapers, and would have been forbidden to do so had they been able,
but whenever a messenger was sent to a neighbouring town he took care to
linger about the post-office, or elsewhere where persons conversed on
the current news, and everything that entered the coloured messenger's
sharpened ears soon became generally known to every soul on the
plantation. There were masters who professed to believe that their
people would fight for them; but in secret nocturnal meetings these
slaves congratulated one another on every Northern victory, while they
prayed with pathetic ardour for the success of Lincoln and his armies.

At the same time, when they were tolerably well used by their owners,
there was a good deal of sympathy binding together the coloured race and
the white people. Booker Washington does not think that his race have
ever betrayed any trust that has been reposed in them. Being born into
slavery, they grew up without being acquainted with any other condition
of life, so that it must have appeared quite natural to them for the
dominant whites to live in the great house and for themselves, who were
merely niggers, to herd in the cabins. But while they never undervalued
freedom, and, personally, ardently longed for it, there were certai