As there were thirty-seven counties in Florida at that time, it is a fair presumption that twenty-five of them had assistant superintendents, whose aggregate salaries would amount to five thousand dollars.

With the superintendent's salary, which was a thousand dollars, a draft of six thousand dollars for the salaries of white men was at once made upon the twelve thousand dollars which were to be collected from freedmen.

Every teacher who was to teach in these schools was required to pay five dollars for his certificate, which also went into the school-fund; and the end of the whole matter was, that a bare pittance was left for the thirty thousand negro children in Florida of the school age.

The whole scheme was a ghastly wrong, one which, if attempted upon that class of any population in the North which is able to pay only a poll-tax, would consign the party attempting it to defeat and disgrace, and, if its enforcement were attempted, would lead to riot and bloodshed.
These laws, with all their wrong (even a stronger word might be rightfully employed), were to become, and were, indeed, already an integral part of the reconstruction scheme which President Johnson had devised and proclaimed.

Whoever assented to the President's plan of reconstruction assented to these laws, and, beyond that, assented to the full right of the rebellious States to continue legislation of this odious type.