20.] [Footnote 2: Many of the mixed breeds of New Orleans were leading business men.] Charleston, South Carolina, furnished a good example of a center of unusual activity and rapid strides of self-educating urban Negroes.
Driven to the point of doing for themselves, the free people of color of this city organized in 1810 the "Minor Society" to secure to their orphan children the benefits of education.[1] Bishop Payne, who studied later under Thomas Bonneau, attended the school founded by this organization.

Other colored schools were doing successful work.
Enjoying these unusual advantages the Negroes of Charleston were early in the nineteenth century ranked by some as economically and intellectually superior to any other such persons in the United States.

A large portion of the leading mechanics, fashionable tailors, shoe manufacturers, and mantua-makers were free blacks, who enjoyed "a consideration in the community far more than that enjoyed by any of the colored population in the Northern cities."[2] As such positions required considerable skill and intelligence, these laborers had of necessity acquired a large share of useful knowledge.

The favorable circumstances of the Negroes in certain liberal southern cities like Charleston were the cause of their return from the North to the South, where they often had a better opportunity for mental as well as economic improvement.[3] The return of certain Negroes from Philadelphia to Petersburg, Virginia, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, is a case in evidence.[4] [Footnote 1: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p.

1078.] [Footnote 2: _Niles Register_, vol.xlix., p.