[Footnote 2: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed_., 1871, p. 363.]
On account of these appeals made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a larger number of slaves of the English colonies were thereafter treated as human beings capable of mental, moral, and spiritual development. Some masters began to provide for the improvement of these unfortunates, not because they loved them, but because instruction would make them more useful to the community. A much more effective policy of Negro education was brought forward in 1741 by Bishop Secker.[1] He suggested the employment of young Negroes prudently chosen to teach their countrymen. To carry out such a plan he had already sent a missionary to Africa. Besides instructing Negroes at his post of duty, this apostle sent three African natives to England where they were educated for the work.[2] It was doubtless the sentiment of these leaders that caused Dr. Brearcroft to allude to this project in a discourse before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1741.[3]
[Footnote 1: Secker, _Works_, vol. v., p. 88.]
[Footnote 3: _An Account of the Endeavors Used by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts_, p.6.]
This organization hit upon the plan of purchasing two Negroes named Harry and Andrew, and of qualifying them by thorough instruction in the principles of Christianity and the fundamentals of education, to serve as schoolmasters to their people. Under the direction of Rev. Mr. Garden, the missionary who had directed the training of these young men, a building costing about three hundred and eight pounds was erected in Charleston, South Carolina. In the school which opened in this building in 1744 Harry and Andrew served as teachers.[1] In the beginning the school had about sixty young students, and had a very good daily attendance for a number of years. The directors of the institution planned to send out annually between thirty and forty youths "well instructed in religion and capable of reading their Bibles to carry home and diffuse the same knowledge to their fellow slaves."[2] It is highly probable that after 1740 this school was attended only by free persons of color. Because the progress of Negro education had been rather rapid, South Carolina enacted that year a law prohibiting any person from teaching or causing a slave to be taught, or from employing or using a slave as a scribe in any manner of writing.