Volume II Part 24 (1/2)
MRS. HALL'S SCHOOL.
During this period Mrs. Anne Maria Hall started a school on Capitol Hill, between the old Capitol and Carroll Row, on First Street, east.
After continuing there with a full school for some ten years, she moved to a building which stood on what is now the vacant portion of the Casparis House lot on A Street, close to the Capitol. Some years later she went to the First Bethel Church, and after a year or two she moved to a house still standing on E Street, north, between Eleventh and Twelfth, west, and there taught many years. She was a Colored woman from Prince George's County, Maryland, and had a respectable education, which she obtained at schools with white children in Alexandria. Her husband died early, leaving her with children to support, and she betook herself to the work of a teacher, which she loved, and in which, for not less than twenty-five years, she met with uniform success. Her schools were all quite large, and the many who remember her as their teacher speak of her with great respect.
MRS. MARY BILLING'S SCHOOL.
Of the early teachers of Colored schools in this district there is no one whose name is mentioned with more grat.i.tude and respect by the intelligent Colored residents than that of Mrs. Mary Billing, who established the first Colored school that was gathered in Georgetown.
She was an English woman; her husband, Joseph Billing, a cabinet-maker, coming from England in 1800, settled with his family that year in Was.h.i.+ngton, and dying in 1807, left his wife with three children. She was well educated, a capable and good woman, and immediately commenced teaching to support her family. At first, it is believed, she was connected with the Corporation School of Georgetown.
It was while in a white school certainly that her attention was arrested by the wants of the Colored children, whom she was accustomed to receive into her schools, till the opposition became so marked that she decided to make her school exclusively Colored. She was a woman of strong religious convictions, and being English, with none of the ideas peculiar to slave society, when she saw the peculiar dest.i.tution of the Colored children in the community around her, she resolved to give her life to the cla.s.s who seemed most to need her services. She established a Colored school about 1810, in a brick house still standing on Dunbarton Street, opposite the Methodist church, between Congress and High streets, remaining there till the winter of 1820-'21, when she came to Was.h.i.+ngton and opened a school in the house on H Street, near the Foundry Church, then owned by Daniel Jones, a Colored man, and still owned and occupied by a member of that family.
She died in 1826, in the fiftieth year of her age. She continued her school till failing health, a year or so before her death, compelled its relinquishment. Her school was always large, it being patronized in Georgetown as well as afterward by the best Colored families of Was.h.i.+ngton, many of whom sent their children to her from Capitol Hill and the vicinity of the Navy Yard. Most of the better-educated Colored men and women now living, who were school children in her time, received the best portion of their education from her, and they all speak of her with a deep and tender sense of obligation. Henry Potter succeeded her in the Georgetown school, and after him Mr. Shay, an Englishman, who subsequently came to Was.h.i.+ngton and for many years had a large Colored school in a brick building known as the Round Tops, in the western part of the city, near the Circle, and still later removing to the old Western Academy building, corner of I and Seventeenth streets. He was there till about 1830, when he was convicted of a.s.sisting a slave to his freedom, and sent a term to the penitentiary. Mrs. Billing had a night school in which she was greatly a.s.sisted by Mr. Monroe, a government clerk and a Presbyterian elder, whose devout and benevolent character is still remembered in the churches. Mrs. Billing had scholars from Bladensburg and the surrounding country, who came into Georgetown and boarded with her and with others. About the time when Mrs. Billing relinquished her school in 1822 or 1823, what may be properly called
THE SMOTHERS SCHOOL-HOUSE,
was built by Henry Smothers on the corner of Fourteenth and H streets, not far from the Treasury building. Smothers had a small dwelling-house on this corner, and built his school-house on the rear of the same lot. He had been long a pupil of Mrs. Billing, and had subsequently taught a school on Was.h.i.+ngton Street, opposite the Union Hotel in Georgetown. He opened his school in Was.h.i.+ngton in the old corporation school-house, built in 1806, but some years before this period abandoned as a public school-house. It was known as the Western Academy, and is still standing and used as a school-house on the corner of I and Nineteenth streets, west. When his school-house on Fourteenth and H streets was finished, his school went into the new quarters. This school was very large, numbering always more than a hundred and often as high as a hundred and fifty scholars. He taught here about two years, and was succeeded by John W. Prout about the year 1825. Prout was a man of ability. In 1831, May 4, there was a meeting, says the ”National Intelligencer” of that date, of ”the colored citizens, large and very respectable, in the African Methodist Episcopal Church,” to consider the question of emigrating to Liberia.
John W. Prout was chosen to preside over the a.s.semblage, and the article in the ”Intelligencer” represents him as making ”a speech of decided force and well adapted to the occasion, in support of a set of resolutions which he had drafted, and which set forth views adverse to leaving the soil that had given them birth, their true and veritable home, _without the benefits of education_.” The school under Prout was governed by a board of trustees and was organized as
A FREE SCHOOL,
and so continued two or three years. The number of scholars was very large, averaging a hundred and fifty. Mrs. Anne Maria Hall was the a.s.sistant teacher. It relied mainly for support upon subscription, twelve and a half cents a month only being expected from each pupil, and this amount was not compulsory. The school was free to all Colored children, without money or price, and so continued two or three years, when failing of voluntary pecuniary support (it never wanted scholars), it became a regular tuition school. The school under Mr.
Prout was called the ”Columbian Inst.i.tute,” the name being suggested by John McLeod, the famous Irish school-master, who was a warm friend of this inst.i.tution after visiting and commending the scholars and teachers, and who named his new building, in 1835, the Columbian Academy. The days of thick darkness to the Colored people were approaching. The Nat. Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, which occurred in August, 1831, spread terror everywhere in slave communities. In this district, immediately upon that terrible occurrence, the Colored children, who had in very large numbers been received into the Sabbath-schools in the white churches, were all turned out of those schools. This event, though seeming to be a fiery affliction, proved a blessing in disguise. It aroused the energies of the Colored people, taught them self-reliance, and they organized forthwith Sabbath-schools of their own. It was in the Smothers school-house that they formed their first Sunday-school, about the year 1832, and here they continued their very large school for several years, the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church ultimately springing from the school organization. It is important to state in this connection that
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL,
always an extremely important means of education for Colored people in the days of slavery, was emphatically so in the gloomy times now upon them. It was the Sabbath-school that taught the great ma.s.s of the free people of color about all the school knowledge that was allowed them in those days, and hence the consternation which came upon them when they found themselves excluded from the schools of the white churches.
Lindsay Muse, who has been the messenger for eighteen Secretaries of the Navy, successively, during fifty-four years, from 1828 to the present time, John Brown, Benjamin M. McCoy, Mr. Smallwood, Mrs.
Charlotte Norris, afterward wife of Rev. Eli Nugent, and Siby McCoy, are the only survivors of the resolute little band of Colored men and women who gathered with and guided that Sunday-school. They had, in the successor of Mr. Prout, a man after their own heart,
JOHN F. COOK,
who came into charge of this school in August, 1834, about eight years after his aunt, Alethia Tanner, had purchased his freedom. He learned the shoemaker's trade in his boyhood, and worked diligently, after the purchase of his freedom, to make some return to his aunt for the purchase-money. About the time of his becoming of age, he dislocated his shoulder, which compelled him to seek other employment, and in 1831, the year of his majority, he obtained the place of a.s.sistant messenger in the Land Office. Hon. John Wilson, now Third Auditor of the Treasury, was the messenger, and was Cook's firm friend till the day of his death. Cook had been a short time at school under the instruction of Smothers and Prout, but when he entered the Land Office his education was at most only the ability to stumble along a little in a primary reading-book. He, however, now gave himself in all his leisure moments, early and late, to study. Mr. Wilson remembers his indefatigable application, and affirms that it was a matter of astonishment at the time, and that he has seen nothing in all his observations to surpa.s.s and scarcely to equal it. He was soon able to write a good hand, and was employed with his pen in clerical work by the sanction of the commissioner, Elisha Hayward, who was much attached to him. Cook was now beginning to look forward to the life of a teacher, which, with the ministry, was the only work not menial in its nature then open to an educated Colored man. At the end of three years he resigned his place in the Land Office, and entered upon the work which he laid down only with his life. It was then that he gave himself wholly to study and the business of education, working with all his might; his school numbering quite a hundred scholars in the winter and a hundred and fifty in the summer. He had been in his work one year when the storm which had been, for some years, under the discussion of the slavery question, gathering over the country at large, burst upon this district.
THE SNOW RIOT,
or ”Snow storm,” as it has been commonly called, which occurred in September, 1835, is an event that stands vividly in the memory of all Colored people who lived in this community at that time. Benjamin Snow, a smart Colored man, keeping a restaurant on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, was reported to have made some remark of a bravado kind derogatory to the wives of white mechanics; whereupon this cla.s.s, or those a.s.suming to represent them, made a descent upon his establishment, destroying all his effects. Snow himself, who denied using the offensive language, with difficulty escaped unharmed, through the management of white friends, taking refuge in Canada, where he still resides. The military was promptly called to the rescue, at the head of which was General Walter Jones, the eminent lawyer, who characterized the rioters, greatly to their indignation, as ”a set of ragam.u.f.fins,” and his action was thoroughly sanctioned by the city authorities.
At the same time, also, there was a fierce excitement among the mechanics at the Navy Yard, growing out of the fact that a large quant.i.ty of copper bolts being missed from the yard and found to have been carried out in the dinner-pails by the hands, the commandant had forbid eating dinners in the yard. This order was interpreted as an insult to the white mechanics, and threats were made of an a.s.sault on the yard, which was put in a thorough state of defence by the commandant. The rioters swept through the city, ransacking the houses of the prominent Colored men and women, ostensibly in search of anti-slavery papers and doc.u.ments, the most of the gang impelled undoubtedly by hostility to the Negro race and by motives of plunder.
Nearly all the Colored school-houses were partially demolished and the furniture totally destroyed, and in several cases they were completely ruined. Some private houses were also torn down or burnt. The Colored schools were nearly all broken up, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the Colored churches were saved from destruction, as their Sabbath-schools were regarded, and correctly regarded, as the means through which the Colored people, at that time, procured much of their education.
The rioters sought, especially, for John F. Cook, who, however, had seasonably taken from the stable the horse of his friend, Mr. Hayward, the Commissioner of the Land Office, an anti-slavery man, and fled precipitately from the city. They marched to his school-house, destroyed all the books and furniture, and partially destroyed the building. Mrs. Smothers, who owned both the school-house and the dwelling adjoining the lots, was sick in her house at the time, but an alderman, Mr. Edward Dyer, with great courage and n.o.bleness of spirit, stood between the house and the mob for her protection, declaring that he would defend her house from molestation with all the means he could command. They left the house unharmed, and it is still standing on the premises. Mr. Cook went to Columbia, Pennsylvania, opened a school there, and did not venture back to his home till the autumn of 1836.
At the time the riot broke out, General Jackson was absent in Virginia. He returned in the midst of the tumult, and immediately issuing orders in his bold, uncompromising manner to the authorities to see the laws respected at all events, the violence was promptly subdued. It was, nevertheless, a very dark time for the Colored people. The timid cla.s.s did not for a year or two dare to send their children to school, and the whole ma.s.s of the Colored people dwelt in fear day and night. In August, 1836, Mr. Cook returned from Pennsylvania and reopened his school, which under him had, in 1834, received the name of
UNION SEMINARY.
During his year's absence he was in charge of a free Colored public school in Columbia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which he surrendered to the care of Benjamin M. McCoy when he came back to his home, Mr. McCoy going there to fill out his engagement.