fluence which must come from it be realized by others; but it is
believed that this was but the shield and weapon which men of unselfish
principle found necessary at first." The newspapers took the attitude
that the Southern whites should teach the Negroes because it was their
duty, because it was good policy, and because if they did not do so some
one else would. The "Advertiser" of Montgomery stated that education
was a danger in slavery times but that under freedom ignorance became
a danger. For a time there were numerous schools taught by crippled
Confederates and by Southern women.

But the education of the Negro, like his religious training, was
taken from the control of the Southern white and was placed under the
direction of the Northern teachers and missionaries who swarmed into the
country under the fostering care of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Northern
churches, and the various Freedmen's Aid Societies. In three years the
Bureau spent six million dollars on Negro schools and everywhere it
exercised supervision over them. The teachers pursued a policy akin
to that of the religious leaders. One Southerner likened them to
the "plagues of Egypt," another described them as "saints, fools,
incendiaries, fakirs, and plain business men and women." A Southern
woman remarked that "their spirit was often high and noble so far as the
black man's elevation was concerned, but toward the white it was bitter,
judicial, and unrelenting." The Northern teachers were charged with
ignorance of social conditions, with fraternizing with the blacks, and
with teaching them that the Southerners were traitors, "murderers of
Lincoln," who had been cruel taskmasters and who now wanted to restore
servitude.

The reaction against Negro education, which began to show itself before
reconstruction was inaugurated, found expression in the view of most
whites that "schooling ruins a Negro." A more intelligent opinion was
that of J. L. M. Curry, a lifelong advocate of Negro education:

"It is not just to condemn the Negro for the education which he received
in the early years after the war. That was the period of reconstruction,
the saturnalia of misgovernment, the greatest possible hindrance to the
progress of the freedmen.... The education was unsettling, demoralizing,
[and it] pandered to a wild frenzy for schooling as a quick method
of reversing social and political conditions. Nothing could have been
better devised for deluding the poor Ne