Lot 155 email save

Sympathy for the Uneducated , Poor, White Southern

Newspaper "FRIENDS' REVIEW." Philadelphia, October 26, 1861, Edited by Samuel Rhoads, with a nice article entitled "Want of Education in the South." and reads in small part: "...Since I have lived in Washington the amount of ignorance I have encountered is truly appalling. Whole families of white persons, natives of this country, can neither read nor write, and great numbers of white children and youth are growing up in the Capital of the nation without learning to read. The boatmen on the river Potomac, who are natives of the adjoining States, are seldom able to read. On one boat there were five white men, neither of who could read, and one colored man, who said he could read; but they all knew how to play cards...if I have ever felt any sympathy for any class of my fellow creatures, it has been for the poor white people of the slave States...the poor white people suffer far more, both mentally and physically, than the colored slaves. The condition of the poor whites is beyond description...In my opinion, the present rebellion could not have been effected to its present extent, if the white people in the slave States had been as well educated as the native inhabitants of New England. And further, I do not believe that slavery could exist there long, or that it would have continued to the present time, had the white people of the South been as well educated as they are in most of the old free States. If this class of white people were once taught to read and think for themselves, they are so much more numerous than the slaveholders, they would soon put an end to slavery..." Fine.

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