[Footnote 1: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 144.]
[Footnote 2: Bremer, _Homes of the New World_, vol. ii., pp. 488-491.]
[Footnote 3: _The Richmond Enquirer_, July, 1859; and _Afr. Repository_, vol. xxxv., p. 255.]
Statistics of this period show that the proportionately largest number of Negroes who learned in spite of opposition were found among the Scotch-Irish of Kentucky and Tennessee. Possessing few slaves, and having no permanent attachment to the institution, those mountaineers did not yield to the reactionaries who were determined to keep the Negroes in heathendom. Kentucky and Tennessee did not expressly forbid the education of the colored people.[1] Conditions were probably better in Kentucky than in Tennessee. Traveling in Kentucky about this time, Abdy was favorably impressed with that class of Negroes who though originally slaves saved sufficient from their earnings to purchase their freedom and provide for the education of their children.[2]
[Footnote 1: In 1830 one-twelfth of the population of Lexington consisted of free persons of color, who since 1822 had had a Baptist church served by a member of their own race and a school in which thirty-two of their children were taught by a white man from Tennessee. He had pledged himself to devote the rest of his life to the uplift of his colored brethren. One of these free Negroes in Lexington had accumulated wealth to the amount of $20,000. In Louisville, also a center of free colored population, efforts were being made to educate ambitious Negroes. Travelers noted that colored schools were found there generations before the Civil War and mentioned the intelligent and properly speaking colored preachers, who were bought and supported by their congregations. Charles Dabney, another traveler through this State in 1837, observed that the slaves of this commonwealth were taught to read and believed that they were about as well off as they would have been had they been free. See Dabney, _Journal of a Tour through the U.S. and Canada_, p. 185.]
[Footnote 2: Abdy, _Journal of a Tour_, etc., 1833-1834, pp. 346-348.]
It was the desire to train up white men to carry on the work of their liberal fathers that led John G. Fee and his colaborers to establish Berea College in Kentucky. In the charter of this institution was incorporated the declaration that "God has made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth." No Negroes were admitted to this institution before the Civil War, but they came in soon thereafter, some being accepted while returning home wearing their uniforms.[1] The State has since prohibited the co-education of the two races.