aptist Annual Register_, 1798-1801, p. 368. _Ibid._,
1790-1793, p. 339.

[205] Benedict, _History of the Baptists_, pp. 790-791.

FIFTY YEARS OF HOWARD UNIVERSITY

PART I[206]

Howard University, in common with nearly all the larger private
institutions of learning in the southern and border States devoted to
the education of the Negro, was founded shortly after the Civil
War.[207] These institutions with a few exceptions were originally
supported by northern philanthropy, and their courses of study were
determined by the zealous missionaries from the North, who
successfully attempted to transplant among the freedmen the pedagogic
traditions of New England. That such a procedure, so vigorously
condemned on many sides when initiated but so gloriously justified in
its results, could have been possible may well prove a cause of wonder
to the student of education a century hence. And indeed, under
ordinary circumstances, the establishment of classical colleges and
schools of law, medicine and theology for a primitive people, unable
to read or write, would seem the height of folly. But the
circumstances were not ordinary. The situation was critical and
unusual remedies were required.

The close of the War of the Rebellion in 1865 witnessed something new
in the field of educational problems. A group numbering nearly four
millions was presented to the American nation for training in the
essentials of manhood and the duties of citizenship. The
apprenticeship which this group had served had been spent under a
system that did little more than acquaint them with the cruder tools
of industry and an imperfect use of a modern language. And while it
is true that many individual slaves acquired considerable skill in
industrial pursuits and a few became artisans of a rather high order,
the great mass of Negroes were laborers of the lowest class, requiring
the exercise of an intelligence but little above that of the beasts of
burden. On the side of the mastery of letters the best that can be
said by even the most generous students of this subject is that, at
the beginning of the year 1861, about ten per cent. of the adult
Negroes in the United States could read and write.[208]

From the standpoint of the white South the liberation of the slaves
had let loose upon the land what they considered a horde of
half-savage blacks, descendants of jungle tribes, inferior in every
respect to the white man and incapable of assimilati