nineteenth century, educationally, morally, financially and otherwise
at all commensurate with his opportunities?

The year 1863 saw four million Negroes come forth from a state of
cruel bondage with little of this world's goods that constitute
capital; with few of those incentives to labor that universally are
requisites to the full and free development of labor and capital. The
knowledge the Negro had of agriculture, of domestic life, and in some
cases, his high-grade mechanical skill, gave him something of a
vantage ground, but for nearly two hundred and fifty years he had been
so "worked" that it would be expecting too much to demand that he at
once comprehend the true dignity of labor. Nor was it to be expected
that to his untutored mind freedom and work were terms to be
intimately associated. Then there was a certain amount of
constitutional inertia to be overcome, a natural heritage of the
native of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, but quite incompatible
with the fierce competition of American civilization, or with the
material conditions of a people who owned in the entire country forty
years ago, only a few thousand dollars; and among whom education was
limited to the favored few whose previous estate either of freedom,
or by other propitious circumstance, had rendered its acquisition
possible. Organizations for business enterprise or any purpose of
reform and advancement, outside of the Northern cities, was
practically unknown.

Evidently one of the first things to be done by which the Negro could
be reconstructed and become an intelligent member of society was to
educate him; teach him to provide for himself; making him more
provident and painstaking; teaching him self-reliance and
self-control; teaching him the value of time, of money, and the