Historical Introduction1One night in Lottsburgh2 on Virginia's Northern Neck-maybe it was April, probably in 1876-Sam Blackwell (ca. 1815-?) sat with his fellow nightschool students in the classroom of the Holley School as his teacher, Caroline Putnam (1826-1917), aloud the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). As Putnam reached a stopping place, Blackwell interjected: is the most familiarest book ever heard (letter 7, below). Caroline Putnam is known to historians as a founder of the school-one of the early schools in Virginia for freed people after the Civil War. It certainly makes sense that she would have been reading the Douglass Narrative; Frederick Douglass (1818-95) and Caroline Putnam knew one another as fellow members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Douglass was one of the prominent abolitionists whom Putnam had asked to serve as bondsmen for her installation as Lottsburgh's postmistress. The Narrative was a text with which Putnam was intimately familiar. While less is known about Sam Blackwell, one may well imagine the impact of the Narrative on him. Given that the conversation took place in the night-school classes at the Holley School, Blackwell and his fellow students were likely emancipated slaves-eleven years after the end of the war and thirteen after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, there were still many freed people in the area seeking an education for themselves and their children. The 1870 census for Lottsburgh, Virginia, shows that Samuel Blackwell (age 56) was a farmer and a resident of Lottsburgh and husband to Mary Blackwell (age 55), with Virginia (age 20), Novella (age 11), and Auther (age 12) also in the household.3 The form suggests that Samuel was literate (as the boxes for cannot read and cannot were not checked for him, as they were for Mary and Virginia) and notes that Auther attended school within the year-no doubt also at Holley School.It is likely that Sam Blackwell was related to Glasgow Blackwell (dates unknown), who had, back in November of 1868, welcomed Putnam when she had first been installed as the new schoolmistress.4 Said Glasgow Blackwell in his address to the assembled, They told me they would break my fingers off close to my hand if they catched me with a book in it. But now our children will have this good chance to learn to write, . . . and they will have to come to our children to get their business done (qtd. in Herbig 243-44). Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative, had instructed the reader in the crucial importance of his own literacy in making his escape from slavery possible: I wished to learn how to write, as have occasion to write my own pass (280). While thanking his young teachers, however-the hungry little urchins of the Baltimore streets-Douglass made clear that he would not name them, as it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to in this Christian country (278). As Caroline Putnam this story to Sam Blackwell's class, certainly he would have understood that education-forbidden under slavery to his kinsmen, to Frederick Douglass, and to himself-would help to make his life, and that of his community, more navigable, though it would still be condemned by many, for both student and teacher.The blacks of Lottsburgh, Virginia, however, were clearly ready to face the risks and challenges of getting an education. As Heather Andrea Williams writes in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom about her findings related to postbellum black education,It made perfect sense that someone who had climbed into a hole in the woods to attend school would, in freedom, sacrifice time and money to build a schoolhouse. It rang true that people who waited up until ten o'clock at night to sneak off to classes on the plantation would want to establish schools in the open as soon as they possibly could. (5)It would have been a self-evident truth to the enslaved and ultimately emancipated people of the South that education would be essential to their very survival, let alone their economic advancement. …