This situation, however, was not sufficiently alarming to deter all the promoters of Negro education in Virginia. It is remarkable how Robert Pleasants, a Quaker of that State who emancipated his slaves at his death in 1801, had united with other members of his sect to establish a school for colored people. In 1782 they circulated a pamphlet entitled "Proposals for Establishing a Free School for the Instruction of Children of Blacks and People of Color."[1] They recommended to the humane and benevolent of all denominations cheerfully to contribute to an institution "calculated to promote the spiritual and temporal interests of that unfortunate part of our fellow creatures in forming their minds in the principles of virtue and religion, and in common or useful literature, writing, ciphering, and mechanic arts, as the most likely means to render so numerous a people fit for freedom, and to become useful citizens." Pleasants proposed to establish a school on a three-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract of his own land at Gravelly Hills near Four-Mile Creek, Henrico County. The whole revenue of the land was to go toward the support of the institution, or, in the event the school should be established elsewhere, he would give it one hundred pounds. Ebenezer Maule, another friend, subscribed fifty pounds for the same purpose.[2] Exactly what the outcome was, no one knows; but the memorial on the life of Pleasants shows that he appropriated the rent of the three-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract and ten pounds per annum to the establishment of a free school for Negroes, and that a few years after his death such an institution was in operation under a Friend at Gravelly Run.[3] [Footnote 1: Weeks, _Southern Quakers_, p. 215.] [Footnote 2: Weeks, _Southern Quakers_, p. 216.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 216.] Such philanthropy, however, did not become general in Virginia. The progress of Negro education there was decidedly checked by the rapid development of discontent among Negroes ambitious to emulate the example of Toussaint L'Ouverture. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century that commonwealth tolerated much less enlightenment of the colored people than the benevolent element allowed them in the other border States. The custom of teaching colored pauper children apprenticed by church-wardens was prohibited by statute immediately after Gabriel's Insurrection in 1800.[1] Negroes eager to learn were thereafter largely restricted to private tutoring and instruction offered in Sabbath-schools. Furthermore, as Virginia developed few urban communities there were not sufficient persons of color in any one place to coöperate in enlightening themselves even as much as public sentiment allowed. After 1838 Virginia Negroes had practically no chance to educate themselves. [Footnote 1: Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vol. xvi., p. 124.]