common-school opportunities and the low grade of numbers of the pri vate or neighborhood facilities, these secondary schools, though often dignified with the title "college," were largely given to what is now regarded the higher-elementary and grammar-grade instruction in a good Southern graded school. It is impossible to learn the number of pupils sent to the North, instructed by northern or European teachers at home, or educated abroad; but from occasional statements, espe cially in the older States, it must have been considerable.

XV.

But the most interesting, as well as the most obscure, portion of this record is the persistent effort of leading educators in all these States to establish an effective system of public elementary schooling for the masses of the white people. The glimpses into the dark realm of lowerclass illiteracy which opens in twilight vistas along the journey traversed by the historical student are painfully suggestive of an educational destitution not known or not recognized by the educated class. The persistent effort of an eminent group of educational reformers, of whom President Thornwell of South Carolina, Dr. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and Dr. Wiley of North Carolina were illustrious examples, to arouse the public mind to the danger of such a condition, drew a broad avenue of light through the twilight of popular intelligence up to the very year of the war of secession. No volume of greater interest and value to the present condition of the South could be published than a collection of the addresses and a record of the important meetings called in every Southern State by distinguished men for the furtherance of this style of public education.

The Southern free school of this period did not propose to be a 66 common school" for "all orders and conditions of people." Like the English board school, it was professedly a limited elementary system of public instruction for the large number of children and youth unable to incur the expense of the established collegiate and secondary institutions. In several of these States, in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, and Louisiana, an intermittent, sometimes, as in the case of North Carolina for a few years before 1860, a hopeful success, was achieved. But the whole tide of political policy and the established habit of society worked against the permanent establishment of such a meager system of public education. The schools were so often poor and the conditions of lower caste life so oppressive that they were avoided by the very people for whom the system was established. An American citizen may be ignorant, degraded, full of the prejudices and vices of illiteracy, but the one thing he will not abide is the imputation of "sitting down at the second table" in any public arrangement. Against this and other equally serious impediments this system struggled, swamped in failure or achieving a spasmodic success even more discouraging to the intelligent friends of universal education.

But in several of the foremost cities of the South, in Charleston, S. C., Mobile, Ala., Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans, La., in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., with greater success in Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis, on the border, a city system of public instruction was established, of efficient character, frequently under the direction of eminent teachers from the North, which included large numbers of the more favored class of the population and laid the foundation of the present excellent public schools of all those cities. Especially to this movement in Tennessee and North Carolina is the South indebted for a numerous body of superintendents in the new graded schools in all the Southern Atlantic States, as Virginia still furnishes a large contingent of the professors and presidents of the leading colleges of the Southwest.

XVI.

But it is not to this imperfect ante-bellum system of public education that we are to look for the schooling of Southern girls in the last generation. Up to 1865 there was no coeducational State university in the South. The intermittent and feeble free schools of the open country offered small attraction even for the daughters of the poorer classes. Twenty years ago, visiting a public school in Sheffield, England, I observed with astonishment the inferior dress and general appearance of the girls, for which the characteristic explanation was given by the master; "You must know, sir, that an Englishman, of the class that patronize these schools, gives all he has to the boy of the family and leaves the girl to get on as she can." The lot of the girl of the humbler classes of white people in our Southern States, a generation ago, did not include even the small allowance of schooling granted to the boy. The exception to this habit was the large attendance on the new public schools in a few Southern cities. In each of these an excellent public high school for girls was established. Indeed, one of the most. significant results of this movement was the coming to the front of a large class of enthusiastic girls, already waiting for the opening act of the inspiring drama of woman's free education in the Southland.

The secondary schools of these States, established by the different religious bodies, sometimes by private or even municipal associated enterprise, were, during the period that closed in 1860, the chief dependence of the Southern girl who aspired to more than the ordinary home or neighborhood training and was not able to go to more ambitious seminaries in the North or study abroad. In another place we shall endeavor to give a list of the more celebrated of this class of schools which, under the numerous titles, "female seminary," "college," "institute," were multiplied through all the fifteen States south of Mason and Dixon's line, up to the memorable opening year of the great conflict. Here again, the unfortunate lack of valuable statistics prevents a satisfactory estimate of the number, quality, or influence of these numerous and highly appreciated seminaries. A few of the best have

preserved interesting records. The grateful recollection of numbers of good women trained in them, and the States and localities blessed by the labors of their more celebrated teachers, might be drawn upon for a memorial of what is rapidly passing out of public remembrance. One of these institutions, the Wesleyan Female College, of Macon, Ga., claims the honor of being the first in the United States to bestow college degrees on young women.

The character of these schools probably did not differ essentially from the same class of schools for girls in the Northern States, although, in the North, there were a large number of coeducational academies. The old-time academy of New England, attended by the ambitious boys and girls of the neighborhood, was the suggestion and model of the American coeducational college. There is no doubt that the instruction in this class of secondary schools was more thorough than in the female seminaries of similar rank; for the presence of a considerable class of young men, preparing for college, was an incentive to their friends of the other sex. But it must be recollected that the present advanced opinions and elaborate arrangements for the secondary and higher education of girls, in the Northern States, largely represent an educational movement of the past thirty years. A few really superior schools for young ladies, mostly too expensive for general attendance; a smaller number of less expensive colleges or higher class academies, like Oberlin, Ohio, and South Hadley, Mass.; two or three colleges, somewhat reluctantly opened for the admittance of female students; and the new State Normal School of the East, blazed the route of the splendid highway along which the American girl now walks amid the observation and applause of the educational public in both hemispheres. The best arrangements for a general superior training of young women up to 1860, were perhaps found in the upper grade of the State normal schools of Massachusetts. Here was introduced a method of instruction that was destined to supersede the regulation female seminary type of superficial cramming in the solid and rapid "shamming" in the ornamental branches. Some of these Northern schools attracted large numbers of Southern girls. Of these, the celebrated Troy, N. Y., Female Seminary, established and presided over with great executive ability by Madame Emma Willard, was the most celebrated. Even up to the year 1860, as we recall, this school was crowded with the daughters of leading families from all the States of the South.

Some of the home schools of this description were established and taught by Northern educators, like the Central Female College at Clinton, Miss., by Dr. Hillman and others hereafter to be named. Others were under the direction of teachers greatly prized and affectionately remembered at home. But few of them were under the entire control of women. The Southern Protestant clergy during this period were as influential in the direction of the academical and college education of the South as the Catholic priesthood of any European

nation to-day. Especially was the "female college" a special profes. sional preserve. The labors, sacrifices, and devoted services of many of these men endeared them to this generation of Southern women, and their affectionate appreciation of their spiritual leaders has hindered the development of the higher grades of the public schools and largely aided in the rebuilding of the old-time seminary for girls overthrown by the war.

XVII.

The lack of good preparatory home schools and the isolation of family life in the country were a great obstacle to the success of this class of institutions and hindered the solid education of the Southern young women during all these years. Even now thousands of these good girls, eager for educational opportunity, are compelled to come to the academy so imperfectly prepared in the elements that a thorough secondary education, in the brief period of attendance, is a virtual impossibility. In these earlier years the hindrances must have been even more formidable than at present. But with all these drawbacks there was a fair amount of excellent work going on in these numerous female colleges and seminaries, as the large class of intelligent and accomplished Southern women of that day, trained exclusively in them, attests. One of the peculiarities of the old-time Southern education was the large number of English, Scotch, and Protestant Irish teachers in all these schools. Many of them were men of eminent ability. Some of the Catholic schools of these States, especially those of Maryland and Louisiana, are said to have had unusual merit. There were also in every city of the South, and now and then in the villages, schools of especial value, semiprivate, generally a small number of select students grouped about a teacher of rare ability and notable womanhood. Would that a picture of this deeply interesting world of the old-time school life of the Southern girl could be reproduced even as vivid and vital as is possible for the similar realm of culture in the Northern States. No occupation should be more attractive to a large number of young literary aspirants in the South than the gathering up of these memorials of the dear old days of the mothers and grandmothers, and presenting them in the simple garb of honest and truthful histories for the reverent recollection and encouragement of the wideawake young Southern womanhood of to-day.

XVIII.

But it must be evident to every careful observer of Southern affairs, for the past generation, that the school life of these States previous to 1860 does not sufficiently explain the remarkable revelation of Southern womanhood subsequent to that critical epoch. Valuable as some of these schools may have been, and much as a limited class may have availed themselves of larger opportunities elsewhere, still the question

forces itself upon the observer, to what must we attribute the wonderful display of ability, industry, and patient endurance of the greatest earthly trials by multitudes of Southern women during the war? How account for the marvelous rebound of ambition and energy that, in the twenty-five years since its close, have virtually placed the younger womanhood of all these States in control of the upper story of the new order of Southern society? Now that the old-time assumption of a hereditary social superiority, dating from the colonial era, has been relegated to the domain of romance, the reasons for this condition must be sought in the environment of the woman's lot during the generations before this flood. There must we look for "the hiding place of power" in this episode of the social history of the South.

Our human nature, in spite of its "natural and acquired depravity" and its "often infirmities," has a wondrous facility in adjusting itself to inflexible conditions. What can not be had through the ordinary channels of supply will "by hook or crook" be secured, at least in a partial degree, often by the most circuitous route and in ways incomprehensi ble to the social and educational pedant. No people on earth has displayed the practical ability to wrench the best things of life out of the most uncompromising surroundings to such an extent as the energetic and aspiring race that formed the bulk of the settlers of the old thirteen American colonies. Neither the southern nor northern Atlantic coast has any special reason to boast of the current of "gentle blood" from the old world mingled with its population previous to the Revolutionary war. In the South it was oftener a hindrance than a help. The leading patriotic class in each of the Atlantic colonies, that seized the reins of public affairs at this crisis and dragged an often reluctant following at its heels through the terrible eight years of conflict, was every where composed of the intelligent, progressive "middle interest" that has made the larger Great Britian of to-day. Such a people divines by a swift instinct the essentials of success in education and drives at the heart of the matter through methods inscrutable to the cultured classes.

Nowhere in any civilized country has been seen a spectacle like the career of the women of New England from the landing on Plymouth Rock to the edge of the present half century. For more than two hundred years these women, not inferior to any in the world in the capacity for the noblest culture, devoutly religious, the best blood of the great middle class of the British Islands, worked at the development of one of the most difficult countries ever subdued by civilized man. Exposed to the hardships of a savage climate and a bleak and stubborn soil; with no servant class; compelled to build up their home life from the foundation by the work of their own hands;-such a record of toil, hardship, sacrifice, and suffering, so patiently and silently endured that no adequate picture of it has yet passed into the literature of New England, is without parallel in the annals of any superior race. But out of the