Less interested in Christian education but nevertheless effective in promoting generally the cause which made the situation of the Negro church so much better in the South was Dr. J. L. M. Curry, a lawyer and congressman, representative of the Southern Confederacy. His work as Director of the Peabody Fund, easily connected with the systematic efforts of Dr. Amory Dwight Mayo, a northern man, who investigated the Negro schools in the South, set forth methods for their improvement and kept the North and the South well informed as to the forces at work among Negroes for the good of all. The southern churches as a whole during this period, however, did not so quickly forget their prejudices as to do anything of consequence for the good of the Negroes. The Negro had been begrudgingly granted his freedom and the northern teacher and missionary seemed like interlopers to be tolerated but not worthy of cooperation. The South, moreover, could not have done very much for Negro missions for the reason that immediately after the war it was decidedly impoverished; for many of the aid societies which assisted the Negroes ministered also to the whites in the desolated areas. These missionary teachers came with a determination to do something like that of Francis Xavier, Henry Martyn, and Adoniram Judson, who bore the religious message to the Orient. They came to change the character of the freedmen through an intelligent religion based upon actual knowledge of God as revealed in the Bible. Among these workers one should mention Rev. D. L. Johnson, a teacher of refugees in Washington; Solomon Peck, a volunteer teacher of the contrabands at Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1862; Horace Bumstead, afterward President of Atlanta University; and Gen. O. O. Howard, President of Howard University. The sort of education promoted by these workers will further explain the significance of the movement. All of the church aid societies and many of those beyond the control of churchmen had for their purpose the industrial, social, intellectual, and religious improvement of the freedmen. The capstone of the structure they would build then had its foundation in moral and religious instruction. Most workers, therefore, were chosen with regard to their fitness to function in these positions as missionaries in the school room. Few persons volunteering to do such work at that time could be devoid of a sympathetic nature, but more than this was required to build in these new citizens that Christian character which would make them helpful to their fellows and useful in the work of the Master. While education was necessary for the Negroes as for all other persons, the chief need of the Negro, as most of these workers observed it, was religion.