tendance of 114,522 and an additional number of from 30,000 to 35,000 not regularly reported, together with 100,000 more attending Sunday-schools, the gain on the whole body of colored illiteracy was but a fraction of the annual gain of the negro population, not more than 20,000 successfully accomplishing the task of learning to read. But in eleven years all this had changed. The white people of the Southern States had resumed the control of their governments, had brought order out of chaos, diminished the burden of illegally made debt, and reduced taxation, and had thus given relief to all classes, and had established a public-school system for black as well as white children, which has ever since been steadily growing in public favor and increasing in efficiency and power. The result of this may be seen at a glance by the contrast of the statistics of 1869 with those of 1883. In the former year there was a total of 249,522 colored pupils enrolled at the South of all ages and grades, in day and night and Sunday schools; in the latter year there were 16,086 colored schools, colleges, and universities, etc., with an enrollment of 821,380 pupils, the average percentage of illiteracy being about seventy, except in Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia, where it was about fifty-six, a fact largely if not altogether due to the geographical situation of those States, and to their advantages as border States during the war, and to their freedom from the turmoil, dissensions, and difficulties of reconstruction. Nothing can be more instructive as to the position the negro is taking as a citizen and to his appreciation of his responsibilities. In twenty years of freedom he had blotted out thirty per cent of the illiteracy that was the heirloom of the slave, and he had done that under conditions for some years of a menacingly adverse and repressive character. The white people opposed his education because the expense of maintaining public schools would fall upon them, and most of them had a conviction that ever so little education would unsettle the brain of the freedman and elevate him "above his business" as field-hand, house-servant, or mechanic. They were justly incensed, too, at the hostile attitude of the negro and the readiness and eagerness in some instances with which he allied himself with the carpet-baggers and helped that class to postpone the restoration of peace, order, and law.
In 1870 Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans furnished free schools for the education of negroes, but elsewhere throughout the South there was manifest indisposition and indifference to supporting them. In that year, signalized above all others by the establishment of the Bureau of Education at Washington, and the first of those instructive and exhaustive reports by Commissioner Eaton, which have been continued every year since, and from which all the data of this article are taken, the scholastic colored population between the ages of five and eighteen was, in the whole country, 814,576 boys and 806,402 girls, and the attendance was 88,594 boys and 91,778 girls, but little
