80.] Planters themselves sometimes saw to the education of their slaves.
Ephraim Waterford was bound out in Virginia until he was twenty-one on the condition that the man to whom he was hired should teach him to read.[1] Mrs.Isaac Riley and Henry Williamson, of Maryland, did not attend school but were taught by their master to spell and read but not to write.[2] The master and mistress of Williamson Pease, of Hardman County, Tennessee, were his teachers.[3] Francis Fredric began his studies under his master in Virginia.

Frederick Douglass was indebted to his kind mistress for his first instruction.[4] Mrs.
Thomas Payne, a slave in what is now West Virginia, was fortunate in having a master who was equally benevolent.[5] Honorable I.T.
Montgomery, now the Mayor of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was, while a slave of Jefferson Davis's brother, instructed in the common branches and trained to be the confidential accountant of his master's plantation.[6] While on a tour among the planters of East Georgia, C.G.Parsons discovered that about 5000 of the 400,000 slaves there had been taught to read and write.

He remarked, too, that such slaves were generally owned by the wealthy slaveholders, who had them schooled when the enlightenment of the bondmen served the purposes of their masters.[7] [Footnote 1: Drew, _A North-Side View of Slavery_, p.

373.] [Footnote 2: Ibid., p.

133.] [Footnote 3: Ibid., p.