It seems open to question whether there were more educated Negroes in 1825 than in 1863. Undoubtedly there were more in some cities where the harsh measures used against them led to a flight to more favorable abodes. But the removal, for example, of Frederick Douglass, from Baltimore to New York, or of Daniel A. Payne from Charleston to Gettysburg, or of the Quakers in North Carolina to a freer air in Ohio, did not by any means eliminate them from the Negro ranks; but rather set them in positions where their own education could go on by leaps and bounds, and their inspiring personality become a ten-fold greater force in promoting the educational ambition of their comrades. In 1825 education for the Negro was undoubtedly more in honor among the white people than afterwards. The advertisements of the time show that it was sometimes regarded as adding to the market value of a slave, so as to be put forward to help the sale. By the middle of the century all this was changed; the schools of free Negroes were frowned upon and teaching slaves was under the ban; an intelligent Negro became an object of suspicion, and it was not politic for one to be known as able to read and write. On this account the estimate of their number was likely to be much below what is actually was. PRE-CIVIL-WAR PERIOD. Although some of the early State legislatures passed laws providing for the supervision of meetings of slaves by white men, the more stringent laws prohibiting the assembling and teaching of Negroes were not passed until the period between 1830 and 1935. The immediate cause of the passage of these laws was a series of uprisings of slaves. The laws were enacted to prevent the slaves from reading the literature of the French and Haitian Revolutions and the writings of the abolitionists. While these laws were a natural expression of the highly wrought emotional excitement that prevailed after the disturbance headed by Denmark Vesey and the more serious affair of Nat Turner, it is probable that such laws were not rigidly enforced. It is more likely that the effect of the law was to make the slaves value the ability to read all the more, and to incline them in quiet ways to impart the precious gift to their friends. It seems likely, too, that the more liberal-minded masters and mistresses, out in the open country over the vast regions of the South, thought nothing whatever of such a law and paid no attention to it, in any instructions they wished to impart to favorite servants in their houses. As bearing on this point, some weight may be given to words uttered about 1840, by the Hon. J. B. O’Neil, a distinguished jurist of South Carolina, at one time Speaker of the House of Representatives, and in his later years the chief justice of the State: