and soon had a regular Board of Education, which
laid and collected taxes and supported eventually
nearly a hundred schools with ten thousand
pupils, under 162 teachers. At Port Royal, S. C.,
were gathered Edward L. Pierce’s ‘Ten Thousand
Clients’. . . . In the west, General Grant appointed Colonel John Eaton, afterwards United
States Commissioner of Education to be Superintendent of Freedmen in 1862. He sought to consolidate and regulate the schools already established and succeeded in organizing a large system."[1]
The Treasury Department of the Government, solicitous for the cotton crop, took charge of certain plantations in order to encourage the workers and preserve the crop. Thus during the Spring of 1863, there were groups of Freedmen and refugeesin long broken lines between the two armies reaching from Maryland to the Kansas border and down the coast from Norfolk to New Orleans.
In 1864 a significant action took place: the petty and insulting discrimination in the pay of white and colored soldiers was stopped. The Negro began to be a free man and the center of the problem of Emancipation became land and organized industry. Eaton, the Superintendent of
- ↑ Atlanta University Publications, Atlanta, Ga., 1906, No. 8, p. 23.
