ical origin, for every Northern Methodist was a Republican and
every Southern Methodist was a Democrat.

The schools of the South, like the churches and political institutions,
were thrown into the melting pot of reconstruction. The spirit in which
the work was begun may be judged from the tone of the addresses made at
a meeting of the National Teachers Association in 1865. The president,
S. S. Greene, declared that "the old slave States are to be the new
missionary ground for the national school teacher." Francis Wayland, the
former president of Brown University, remarked that "it has been a war
of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism." President
Hill of Harvard spoke of the "new work of spreading knowledge and
intellectual culture over the regions that sat in darkness." Other
speakers asserted that the leading Southern whites were as much opposed
to free schools as to free governments and "we must treat them as
western farmers do the stumps in their clearings, work around them and
let them rot out"; that the majority of the whites were more ignorant
than the slaves; and that the Negro must be educated and strengthened
against "the wiles, the guile, and hate of his baffled masters and their
minions." The New England Freedmen's Aid Society considered it necessary
to educate the Negro "as a counteracting influence against the evil
councils and designs of the white freemen."

The tasks that confronted the Southern States in 1865-67 were two:
first, to restore the shattered school systems of the whites; and
second, to arrange for the education of the Negroes. Education of the
Negro slave had been looked upon as dangerous and had been generally
forbidden. A small number of Negroes could read and write, but there
were at the close of the war no schools for the children. Before 1861,
each state had developed at least the outlines of a school system.
Though hindered in development by the sparseness of the population and
by the prevalence in some districts of the Virginia doctrine that free
schools were only for the poor, public schools were nevertheless in
existence in 1861. Academies and colleges, however, were thronged with
students. When the war ended, the public schools were disorganized,
and the private academies and the colleges were closed. Teachers and
students had been dispersed; buildings had been burned or used
for hospitals and laboratories; and public libraries had virtually
disappeared.

Th