Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/24

10 of the State, was widely known, from the character of its training, as the "West Point of the South." Numerous denominational colleges, some of them dating from colonial times, with able faculties, were established at various places in the State, while the university of Virginia, of which Jefferson was the father and which was liberally subsidized by the State, was, beyond controversy, the leading university of the United States in the character of its professors, its methods of instruction and training, and its large attendance of students from Virginia and States of the South and West. From its schools of law, medicine, science and literature, had been graduated a large proportion of the leading professional men not only of the Southern but of many of the Western States, even to the shores of the Pacific. The State patronized a medical college at Richmond, and from the Union theological seminary of the Presbyterians, near Hampden-Sidney college, and from the Episcopal theological seminary, near Alexandria, many able divines came to the churches throughout the same extensive regions. Female schools of a high order were established in many portions of the State, which were widely patronized from the same regions as were the colleges and the university.

Contrary to the general belief, the training of the negroes was not neglected. For, although the teaching of them in public was prohibited for prudential reasons, the right of their owners to teach them was not abridged, and very many were taught the elements of reading, etc. Their religious instruction was generally well provided for, and large numbers of them were members of the same churches as were their masters and mistresses, while they had numerous churches of their own, built by the liberality of the whites and supplied by preachers of their own race, but very often by those of the dominant one. They had another sort of education which has been rarely recognized. It is a fact that there were in Virginia thousands of technical schools, properly so called, for training the negro race, in the days of slavery. Every plantation where there was any considerable number of slaves was a well-organized and self-contained colony, in which each member of the community, from the youngest that was able to perform any light labor to the oldest who was not helpless, had an assigned duty to