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By Root 1326 0

appreciation for the achievements of their race. “Talked to the children a little while to-day about the noble Toussaint [L’Ouverture],” she noted in her journal. “They listened very attentively. It is well that they sh’ld know what one of their color c’ld do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage and ambition (of a noble sort,) and high purpose.” Perhaps more typical of the black missionary teachers was Virginia C. Green, who came to the Wood’s plantation, on Davis Bend, Mississippi, where she set about organizing classes for 120 children. The freedmen sustained the school, four trustees chosen from among them controlled its operations, and in Miss Green they appear to have found a dedicated teacher. “I class myself with the freedmen,” she wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. “Though I have never known servitude they are … my people. Born as far north as the lakes I have felt no freer because so many were less fortunate.… I look forward with impatience to the time when my people shall be strong, blest with education, purified and made prosperous by virtue and industry. The people on the plantation where I have labored I see tending slowly but steadily to this point.”88

Not all the blacks who taught in the postwar South would have qualified for membership in Richard H. Cain’s projected black intellectual elite. Fortunately for the Reverend Cain, who assumed a pastorate in Charleston, the individual who answered to the fullest his call for a talented elite to descend upon the South chose to settle in the same city. The credentials of Francis L. Cardozo were, indeed, impressive, exceeding those of most of the white teachers and superintendents. A freeborn mulatto, reputedly the son of a prominent Charleston economist and editor, Cardozo attended the University of Glasgow (from which he graduated with distinction), studied theology in Edinburgh and London, and returned to the United States to serve as pastor of the Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut. Within weeks after the fall of Charleston, he resigned his pastorate to return to his native city as the principal of a Negro school operated under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. A complex and ambitious person, who found it difficult to brook any criticism, Cardozo shared with many of the white school officials a relatively low estimation of black teachers—at least in their present state of preparation. Presumably, the several blacks he employed on his own staff must have been distinguished, since Cardozo took considerable care in the selection and assignment of teachers and vowed to hire no blacks rather than one who might “disgrace” the entire cause. “I have placed the educated and experienced white Northern teachers in the highest and most responsible positions,” he informed a northern AMA official, “and the colored ones in the lower and less responsible ones, where they may improve by the superiority of their white fellow-laborers, and whose positions afterwards they may be able to occupy.” When subsequently confronted by two northern black teachers with his previously expressed preference for whites, Cardozo replied that he had always insisted upon competence in his staff members, regardless of color, and any reports to the contrary should be squelched since “it would hurt my influence very much.”89

No visit to postwar Charleston was thought to be complete without calling on Cardozo and being guided through this showcase of the black educational effort in the South. To maintain that reputation, his critics would charge, he had begun to discriminate as carefully in the selection of pupils as in the assignment of teachers. By his own estimate, 200 of the 438 students in November 1867 were freeborn Negroes. Earlier that year, however, Sarah W. Stansbury, who had previously taught in Cardozo’s school, expressed her immense relief over being transferred to a new post. “This is more like missionary work than any I have done since coming here. The children are all ex-slaves which is more than can be said of Mr. Cardozo’s