In the good old times, before the advent of Farragut and Butler, the statutes of Louisiana declared teaching slaves to read and write a “crime, having a tendency to excite insubordination among the servile class, and punishable by imprisonment at hard labor for not more than twenty-one years, or by death, at the discretion of the court.” When asked, therefore, to visit the negro schools of New Orleans, I was not unduly sanguine in my expectations. Reverend and Lieutenant Wheelock, a keen, practical Yankee preacher, acting as secretary to the “Board of Education for Freedmen,” instituted by General Banks, was guide. * * * * * The first school-house to which we were conducted was an old store-room, the second story of which had been used as a hall for the Knights of the Golden Circle, and still bore on its walls the symbols of that hollowest and most insolent of Southern humbugs. Rude partitions divided the store-room, and separated the three different grades of the primary school. [Illustration: _Negro Schools of New Orleans.—Page 246._] In the first we were received by a coarse, ill-dressed, rude-looking man, who evidently sprang from the poor white trash. Ranged along the wall as we entered were a dozen or more boys, reading as boys do read, in the Third Reader—with many a pause and many a tracing of hard words with a great fore-finger that blurs everything it touches. Among the class was a bright, fair-haired boy, who would have been called handsome anywhere. Seated behind the little desks were some large, coarse girls, seemingly eighteen or twenty years of age, conning their spelling-books. The hot air was languidly stirred by the hot breeze from the street windows, which brought in with it the sound of boys at play on the pavement; and one did not wonder at the noise and general inattention that prevailed. The next room was ruled by a woman as coarse and slatternly as became the neighbor of the man whose school we had just left. A little fellow made some noise to displease her as we entered, and she bowled him against the wall as one would bowl a ball down a ten-pin alley. Children were at work mumbling over charts hung against the wall, and professing, with much noisy show of industry, to be spelling out simple sentences. But their zeal did not prevent surreptitious pinches, when the slatternly school-mistress’s back was turned, nor a trade of “five alleys for a bright-colored glass one,” on the sly. I think such scenes are not unknown even in model Northern schools.