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188

Very Respectfully 
Your Obedient Servant
1st Lieut & A.A.A.G.


Head Quarters Dist of Alabama
Montgomery Sept. 12th, 1866

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Howard Major General O.O.
Commissioner &c
Washington D.C.

General

I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your communication of the 6th inst, touching the employment of teachers.  It is a matter of concern with us that we should have for some time pursued a course you do not feel at liberty to sanction the more so from the kindness with which you have assumed what has been done, and provided against its sudden termination.  These and several considerations, I beg leave to present in this connection.

While considerable support for freedmens schools can be had from both the white and colored people of this state, yet generally the initiative and a measure of continuous pecuniary aid must come from the Bureau or from Aid Associations.  We have from the first used and are still using all the Aid we can obtain from the Associations.  
Heretofore we have found that while some of them operated down the Coast, and others down the river, (where our forces [[?]] part the way) all seemed to find enough to do, or nearly so, before reaching this State between. 

The few teachers that they do send they select themselves and send down from the North.  These are generally excellent teachers and where there are troops or an efficient police, they are perhaps the best. 

Hence we have them at Mobile, Montgomery, Talladega and Huntsville, points which more than absorb the supply.  But away from the towns, I am sorry to say, the work under these auspices would be wholly unsafe.  The school is a bugbear, and its real nature must be shown through some one who has a strong hold on the community and this is what we seek to do.

At Auburn for example, and at Opelika two Methodist clergymen of high character and long


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residence were induced by our friend Bishop McTyeire to open schools for freedmen.  There was much feeling but these are men it is not safe to molest.  Meanwhile the schools are very prosperous, and the feeling is experiencing a reverse.

At Tuscaloosa, Rev. Dr. Easter (Episcopal) has found us a fine teacher, procedured a building and opened a large school.  The Mayor of Tuskagee (Baptist) is Godfather to just such an enterprise, and the Congressmen elect from this District, to another in Pike County.  These and similar operations embrace twenty teachers with an aggregate of thirteen hundred pupils, most of whom not only would not but could not, have been reached in annother way.  
I have often comforted myself thinking that probably this single item made my life for the time being more useful than it would be in any other situation though the work indeed is done by our admirable Superintendent, Mr. Buckley, of whom I can hardly speak too highly.  Indeed, in the present dicadence of our powers, I have considered this the principal means of usefulness remaining.  

So much for the past, for the future although possibly the construction may be a little strained, I heartily wish the urgency of the facts might authorize teachers to be regarded as Agents of the Bureau, so far at least as they can be paid out of the Refugees and Freedmens fund.

For the Aid associations the only other resort, are the offspring of the War, and I am somewhat mistaken if their existence does not prove to be spasmodic.  Already intimations to this effect have reached me from several places, but this is a point as to which a little inquiry will make you better informed than I am.  Should they however maintain their present vigor, they will yet be unavailable to three fourths the colored children of this State, their operations being unsafe, and their means wholly inadequate.  On the other hand there have been transmitted to Washington from the Refugees and Freedmen Fund for this state over $45,000.  There will be raised for the same fund under the Act from $25,000 to $75,000 more.

The amount already remitted would sustain beyond the present limitations of the Bureau, an expenditure of $2000. per month adequate to the maintaince of 40 teachers, with 2500 pupils.

Each of these schools becomes an incitement to private effort, a fountain of light, if I may say so, to its