If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of
his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the
planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of
free elementary education among all classes in the South. It
not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent
agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover
and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware,
Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to
Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed
itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an
educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was
not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men
always has had, and always will have, an element of danger
and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless,
men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox,
even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets
allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies
smouldering in the South, but not flaming.
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