was
erected in Charleston, South Carolina. In the school which opened in
this building in 1744 Harry and Andrew served as teachers.[1] In the
beginning the school had about sixty young students, and had a very
good daily attendance for a number of years. The directors of the
institution planned to send out annually between thirty and forty
youths "well instructed in religion and capable of reading their
Bibles to carry home and diffuse the same knowledge to their fellow
slaves."[2] It is highly probable that after 1740 this school was
attended only by free persons of color. Because the progress of Negro
education had been rather rapid, South Carolina enacted that year a
law prohibiting any person from teaching or causing a slave to be
taught, or from employing or using a slave as a scribe in any manner
of writing.

[Footnote 1: Meriwether, _Education in South Carolina_, p. 123;
McCrady, _South Carolina_, etc., p. 246; Dalcho, _An Historical
Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina_, pp.
156, 157, 164.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., pp. 157 and 164.]

In 1764 the Charleston school was closed for reasons which it is
difficult to determine. From one source we learn that one of the
teachers died, and the other having turned out profligate, no
instructors could be found to continue the work. It does not seem that
the sentiment against the education of free Negroes had by that time
become sufficiently strong to cause the school to be discontinued.[1]
It is evident, however, that with the assistance of influential
persons of different communities the instruction of slaves continued
in that colony. Writing about the middle of the eighteenth century,
Eliza Lucas, a lady of South Carolina, who afterward married Justice
Pinckney, mentions a parcel of little Negroes whom she had undertaken
to teach to read.[2]

[Footnote 1: _An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, p. 15.]

[Footnote 2: Bourne, _Spain in America_, p. 241.]

The work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts was also effective in communities of the North in which the
established Church of England had some standing. In 1751 Reverend Hugh
Neill, once a Presbyterian minister of New Jersey, became a missionary
of this organization to the Negroes of Pennsylvania. He worked among
them fifteen years. Dr. Smith, Provost of the College of Philadelphia,
devoted a part of