Leaf image Leaf image Historical and Philosophical Review of Reconstruction Period of South Carolina Leaf image By MATILDA A. EVANS, M. D. Graduate Schofield School By MATILDA A. EVANS, M. D. Graduate Schofield School Copyright, 1916. By Matilda A. Evans , M. D. DuPre Printing Company, Columbia, S.C....

To the men and women who braved the dangers and suffered the hardships of frontier life and bore with fortitude the pain of social ostracism and the sting of poison slander that through their work a lowly race might be educated, this work is respectfully dedicated by The Author ....

One of the benefits conferred by education is that of enlightening the mind on the subject of one’s duty. Finding what is duty the manner of discharging it will suggest itself to the alert, the active, and those of industrious and intelligent discernment. Perhaps forever hidden would remain the necessity for certain tasks were it not for the inspiration idealists receive from education. This education, if proper and well rounded, also forces all who embrace it into the line of work promising the

A woman apparently thirty years of age, of mulatto skin, fell limp into a chair in the kitchen of Mrs. Oliver Schofield of Darby, Bucks County, Pennsylvania about the year 1857, with blood hounds and the voices of angry men following close upon her heels through the tangled swamps from which she had just emerged. “Who can thee be? Who can thee be?—and what does thee want here?” inquired excited Mrs. Schofield as she dropped the dish rag and rushed to the prostrate form in the chair, eager to ren

During the ten years intervening between the precipitate appearance of the runaway slave at the Schofield home and the coming to Edisto Island, South Carolina, of Miss Martha Schofield for the purpose of founding an industrial school for the colored race, the new form of liberty conceived by our fore-fathers and dedicated to the principle that all men are born free and equal, had been put to a severe test as to whether this new form of government could be put into practice. The great Civil War p

Into the midst of these terrible times which made weak the souls and hearts of the strongest of men, came Miss Martha Schofield, the first of the pioneers to push into the distracted South to labor, to suffer, and if need be, to die for the millions of ignorant, irresponsible Negroes. Their education, along industrial lines, she made her life-work—crowning it on the 77th day of her birth, February 1, 1916, by passing from earth to heaven. But she left to show that she did something on earth a sc

What motive led this young woman of only twenty-six, surrounded by wealth, by culture, and every circumstance that made her not only acceptable but desirable in the highest circles of society, to abandon all—home and friends and money and the pleasures which her position in the social world brings—for a life of the most arduous toil among a barbarous, if not a savage people, whose skin, unlike hers, was black and whose habits and customs were thought to be repugnant and repelling to those of ref

When Martha Schofield opened her first school in South Carolina it was impossible to secure the necessary text books and much of the instruction was oral. With the few books which the school did possess it was not an uncommon sight to see three and four pupils preparing their lessons from the same book. The children took the books home nights, until the “Blue Back” and Webster’s had gone the circuit round many times. Having advanced to the ability to write and read script, a pupil was no longer

Some time as many as a half dozen funerals a day occurred in the coast region from malarial fever or small pox. The chances for recovery were rendered difficult by the absence of any physician, the nearest one being sixty miles away. Among the medicines sent Miss Schofield from friends of the North was a bottle of port wine. This was sent in 1876, when she was attacked by a hemorrhage of the lungs, with instructions from a physician that she must take it three times a day. But the fear of settin

Between the years of 1865 and 1876 the severest tests were put to the work of being done by Miss Schofield, to see whether it could be made practical or not. By the courage with which she met and answered them she established once and for always the truth that the progress of light and reason can not be retarded long, no matter by whom and for what purpose such an attempt might be undertaken. The outrageous murders of Negroes by white men which went on almost daily following the unwise policy of

Several riots and some of as foul murders as ever disgraced the lives of men attended the uprisings around Aiken. Among the most important of these were the Hamburg, the Ellenton and Ned Tennant riots, all occurring within a few miles of Miss Schofield’s school. The Hamburg riot occurred in July, 1876, and proved to be one of the most tragic events, as it was one of the most disastrous occurrences for the Negro race and the Republican Party of the South that occurred during the entire period of

The reign of lawlessness resulting in the torture and wanton murder of the blacks following the Hamburg riot went unrestrained in spite of the presence of white Union soldiers stationed in those sections where the greatest outrages occurred after the Negro troops had been partly mustered out. The reason for this was not want of ample power close at hand for the enforcement of law and order and respect for the rights of every citizen, white and black alike; but inefficiency or culpable neglect on

After the withdrawal of troops from the South, crime of every sort went regularly on much as usual, though not on nearly so large a scale as before. Negro men and women, as well as those of the whites who had sympathized with the radical regime, were whipped and even murdered on the flimsiest and slightest pretext and in the most wanton manner. Robbery was of such frequent occurrence as to occasion surprise only when it did not happen. Negroes became good Democrats or submitted to unmerciful whi

At the time of this dramatic period in the life of “Uncle” Alex, the greatest excitement prevailed elsewhere in Lick Skillet neighborhood, as Allen Dodson and his neighbors, armed with rifles and led by blood hounds, pursued the trail of Leslie Duncan, a son of Laura, whom the reader met in the first chapter of this story, firmly determined to hang him to the first convenient limb and riddle his body with bullets. With a pitch-fork he had stabbed Willie Hudson, Allen’s 15 year old son and inflic

The predicament of Millard was rendered all the more distressing by the engagement of most of his friends in the conspiracy against the life of “Uncle” Alex Bettis. They were not in ignorance, however, of the chase for Leslie Duncan and the desire to get into it themselves probably hastened the brief consultation which resulted in the release of Bettis on his promise to see to it that the classes of study in his school included agriculture and not social and political economy. Besides Brother Be

At the close of one of the first meetings of the farmer’s conference in Schofield chapel at which was discussed more than anything else the growing friction between the white and colored people, there called at the Schofield school a young woman, accompanied by a man about her age, and each appeared to be exhausted from travel and greatly excited from some cause or other, no one knew just what. It was Matilda Deas and Leslie Duncan, the two young lovers who had escaped from Millard Dodson a few

Miss Schofield had great confidence in the ultimate conversion of the white people of the South to the cause which she represented and looked to the support of her work by them as one of the essentials to the achievements of the highest success. She, however, went about securing the cooperation of the whites in a manner entirely different from the means employed by Booker T. Washington in accomplishing the same end. She drew attention of the white people to the necessity for her work by making t

Miss Schofield was most solicitous concerning the future difficulties which the Negro problem would occasion when the colored race reaches that stage of development when requests as are made at the present time for certain rights become demands which can not be ignored or disposed of by trickery and hypocritical legislation. As she was in advance of her time about thirty years in valuing the importance of industrial training for the Negro, and as early as 1890 was teaching and practicing the pri

The records of the conduct of Negroes in office, with the exception of the rascality of those in power in the South during the Reconstruction Period, are creditable indeed, to the race from which they sprang. Responsibility for the scandals attaching to the rule of the race in some of the Southern States directly after the war are chargeable not to the Negro but to the corruption of the white men who imposed on the Negro by taking advantage of his ignorance and making him the cat’s paw with whic

Martha Schofield’s conception of an education included a great deal more than the mere matter of acquiring a fund of knowledge. She taught that knowledge without the ability to use it was worthless, and inspired every one coming under her influence with the necessity for a means of practicing what they were taught. This made her work intensely practical and enabled her students to succeed in overcoming difficulties as they saw her overcome them. The operation of her school, including the farm, t