The custom of teaching colored pauper children apprenticed by church-wardens was prohibited by statute immediately after Gabriel's Insurrection in 1800.[1] Negroes eager to learn were thereafter largely restricted to private tutoring and instruction offered in Sabbath-schools.

Furthermore, as Virginia developed few urban communities there were not sufficient persons of color in any one place to cooeperate in enlightening themselves even as much as public sentiment allowed.

After 1838 Virginia Negroes had practically no chance to educate themselves.
[Footnote 1: Hening, _Statutes at Large_, vol.xvi., p.

124.] North Carolina, not unlike the border States in their good treatment of free persons of color, placed such little restriction on the improvement of the colored people that they early attained rank among the most enlightened ante-bellum Negroes.

This interest, largely on account of the zeal of the antislavery leaders and Quakers,[1] continued unabated from 1780, the time of their greatest activity, to the period of the intense abolition agitation and the servile insurrections.