The next Governor, Nehemiah, was a reformer. He put down the practices of taking heathen wives, of violating the Sabbath, and of exacting illegal interest. No improvement has as yet been made upon that style of civil reconstruction. Religion and education, the church and the school, must go along with the re-ordering of the State. So we find our work at the South in the line of a Divine pattern. The Bible gives us its ideal of dealing with freedmen by taking into its sacred canon the five books of Moses for the emancipated Israelites, the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah, for the restored captives.
A good deal has been said, from time to time, of the abatement among the colored people of that eagerness to learn, which marked the days immediately following their emancipation. Of course, much of it is true; many found by trial that it was not so easy or instantaneous a process to learn to read as they had supposed; the pressure of self-support drew away the attention of others from their aspirations after an education; unduly excited ambitions and crude hopes were seen to be unfounded, and in the disappointment many were discouraged. But all of it is not true. There are many instances yet of the early eagerness to learn among the young, and even among the old; we give an instance from a teacher’s letter: “One woman, 39 years old, lives in the country, and walks six miles to school, and six miles again after school to her home. Her seat has been vacant only on one or two of the rainiest days since the school opened, September 1st. At home, she has all her household affairs to look after, and finds time to study at night even then; and if, on account of helping her husband to pick cotton in the fall, she would go late to bed without ‘knowing her lesson,’ it ‘worried’ her so, she said, that she ‘could not get a wink of sleep,’and her husband would waken to find her up and studying. She is gaining slowly in rudimentary knowledge, and is very much pleased, or, as she would say, ‘proud’ of her success. Several such ones, eager to learn, I have under my care, and though they can learn but slowly, it is really better than that they should never know anything, though I think we would count it hardly worth while to take such pains so late in life; yet, better to get upon the first round of the ladder than not to rise at all.”