Most people suppose that negro education began during the Civil War, but it is as old as colonization; free Negroes were always allowed some privileges in this respect, and thousands of slaves were taught to read by kind-hearted mistresses and children of the family; the opinion of one who has carefully explored this field of inquiry is that of the adult slaves, about one in ten could read and write. Nevertheless, this practice was contrary to the principles and the laws of the South, as is proved by the dramatic prosecution of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, of Norfolk, in 1853, for the crime of holding a school for free negro children, in ignorance of the fact that it was forbidden as "against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia." In due time this person, who had admitted unhallowed light into little dark souls, was duly sentenced to thirty days' imprisonment, a penalty (as the judge explained) intended to be "as a terror to those who acknowledge no rule of action but their own evil will and pleasure." Both the teachings and the prosecutions establish a general belief that Negroes could easily learn to read and write; and when during the Civil War refugees flocked into the Union camps at Beaufort and Hilton Head, charitably disposed people in the North sent down teachers; and, the federal government coöperating, schools were started among those Sea Island people, then rough, uncouth, and not far beyond the savage state, though now a quiet, well-ordered, and industrious folk. From that time till the giving up of the Freedman's Bureau in 1869, the federal government expended some money and took some responsibility for negro education. It was a pathetic sight to see old gray-headed people crowding into the schools alongside the children, with the inarticulate feeling that reading and writing would carry them upward. The Northern missionary societies kept up these elementary schools, and then began to found schools and colleges for the training of the most gifted members of the race. Out of their funds, and with the aid of the freedmen, they put up schoolhouses, they collected money to establish institutions like Fisk University in Nashville, Leland and Straight Universities in New Orleans, and Atlanta University. Such colleges were on the same pattern as other colleges for Whites both North and South, adopting the then almost universal curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, along with smatterings of other subjects; they included preparatory schools, which, as in some white colleges both North and South, included the larger number of the recorded students.