ulated to promote
the spiritual and temporal interests of that unfortunate part of our
fellow creatures in forming their minds in the principles of virtue
and religion, and in common or useful literature, writing, ciphering,
and mechanic arts, as the most likely means to render so numerous a
people fit for freedom, and to become useful citizens." Pleasants
proposed to establish a school on a three-hundred-and-fifty-acre
tract of his own land at Gravelly Hills near Four-Mile Creek, Henrico
County. The whole revenue of the land was to go toward the support of
the institution, or, in the event the school should be established
elsewhere, he would give it one hundred pounds. Ebenezer Maule,
another friend, subscribed fifty pounds for the same purpose.[2]
Exactly what the outcome was, no one knows; but the memorial on
the life of Pleasants shows that he appropriated the rent of the
three-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract and ten pounds per annum to the
establishment of a free school for Negroes, and that a few years after
his death such an institution was in operation under a Friend at
Gravelly Run.[3]

[Footnote 1: Weeks, _Southern Quakers_, p. 215.]

[Footnote 2: Weeks, _Southern Quakers_, p. 216.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 216.]

Such philanthropy, however, did not become general in Virginia. The
progress of Negro education there was decidedly checked by the rapid
development of discontent among Negroes ambitious to emulate the
example of Toussaint L'Ouverture. During the first quarter of the
nineteenth century that commonwealth tolerated much less enlightenment
of the colored people than the benevolent element allowed them in the
other border States. The custom of teaching colored pauper children
apprenticed by church-wardens was prohibited by statute immediately
after Gabriel's Insurrection in 1800.[1] Negroes eager to learn were
thereafter largely restricted to private tutoring and instruction
offered in Sabbath-schools. Furthermore, as Virginia developed few
urban communities there were not sufficient persons of color in any
one place to cooeperate in enlightening themselves even as much as
public sentiment allowed. After 1838 Virginia Negroes had practically
no chance to educate themselves.

[Footnote 1: Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vol. xvi., p. 124.]

North Carolina, not unlike the border States in their good treatment
of free persons of color, placed such little restriction on the
improvement of the colored peop