There was another handicap. The Civil War left South Carolina "Shermanized." The story of this invader's wreck of the State is a familiar one. Barnwell, Buford's Bridge, Blackville, Graham's Station (Sato), Midway, Bamberg, and Orangeburg were all more or less destroyed. Three-fifths of the capital was committed to the flames and Charleston, although this city escaped the invader, had been partially burned already in 1861.[73] With millions of dollars in slave property lost, added to the above, the native whites were in no frame of mind to approve this philanthropic effort of the northern teachers. Furthermore, on the question of education the State had no substantial background by which it could encourage any efforts at this time. Free schools had been established prior to the war, but owing to the eleemosynary stigma attached to them and the permissive character of the legislative acts very little had been accomplished for the whites even, in the sense that we understand public education today.[74] There ran very high the feeling that the Yankees were fostering social equality and that if they were allowed to educate the freedmen the next thing would be to let them vote.[75] Some reasoned that since the North had liberated the slaves, it was now its business to care for them. It is safe to say that without the protection of the United States military forces during the first year at least the efforts to enlighten the ex-slaves would have been impossible. The native white attitude, however, appears to have undergone a change from year to year and from locality to locality. At Orangeburg, the superintendent of education reported that a night school was fired into on one or two occasions, and the attempt to discover the perpetrators of this outrage was without success.[76] A. M. Bigelow, a teacher of a colored school at Aiken, was compelled by curses and threats to leave the town in order to save his life.[77] In the town of Walhalla a school conducted by the Methodist church was taught by a lady from Vermont. A number of white men tried to break it up by hiring a drunken vagabond Negro to attend its sessions and accompany the young lady through the village street. The attempted outrage was frustrated only by the intercession of a northern gentleman. At Newberry, about the same time, a man who was building a school for the freedmen was driven by armed men from the hotel where he was staying and his life threatened. These occurrences the superintendent reported as "specimen" cases.[78]