the good standing of the family of Mrs. Richards and to the wisdom with
which she directed this West Indian in his new environment.

They had in all fourteen children, the training of whom was largely the
work of the mother. All of them were well grounded in the rudiments of
education and given a taste for higher things. In the course of time
when the family grew larger the task of educating them grew more
arduous. Some of them probably attended the school conducted by a
Scotch-Irishman in the home of Richard De Baptiste. When the reaction
against the teaching of Negroes effected the closing of the colored
schools in Virginia, this one continued clandestinely for many years.
Determined to have her children better educated, Mrs. Richards sent one
of her sons to a school conducted by Mrs. Beecham, a remarkable English
woman, assisted by her daughter. These women were bent on doing what
they could to evade the law interpreted as prohibiting any one from
either sitting or standing to teach a black to read. They, therefore,
gathered the colored children around them while they lay prostrate on
the couch to teach them. For further evasion they kept on hand splinters
of wood which they had the children dip into a match preparation and use
with a flint for ignition to make it appear that they were showing them
how to make matches. When this scheme seemed impracticable, one of the
boys was sent to Washington in the District of Columbia to attend the
school maintained by John F. Cook, a successful educator and founder of
the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. This young man was then
running the risk of expatriation, for Virginia had in 1838 passed a law,
prohibiting the return to that State of those Negroes, who after the
prohibition of their education had begun to attend schools in other
parts.[2]

It was because of these conditions that in 1851 when her husband died