Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, major general , United States army : volume 2

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[342] found six miles from Meridian a Southern white lady, who was conducting a colored pay school on her own account with 90 pupils. At Columbus, Miss., the white people had already given $1,000 to rebuild the schoolhouse which had been destroyed. Mississippi thus at that time appeared an inviting field and no personal hostility whatever met this colored inspector, and his picture of the freed people was a happy one. Many of them were intelligent, many reading the newspapers and having accurate and comprehensive understanding of the political situation. This was a better story than Gillem's. It is a pity that subsequent years had to vary the tale.

General Mower, in Louisiana, gave a very promising view of the reaction during the year (from 1866 to 1867) in favor of the schools of his jurisdiction. The numbers, however, were not large enough for that great State-only 246 schools with pupils 8,435. More than half of these were sustained by the freedmen themselves. The majority of the planters in the southern and western portions of Louisiana were still openly against education of the freedmen, so that plantation schools in those localities were few indeed.

By army and Bureau changes General Charles Griffin came to be, the first of this year, district commander and assistant commissioner in Texas, with headquarters at Galveston. He did good work while he lived. I wrote of him: “His thorough knowledge of the people, eminent patriotism, sympathy with the freedmen, and the remarkable energy and promptness which marked his administration endeared him to the laboring classes and commanded universal respect.” He fell a victim to the epidemic of yellow fever that prevailed during the autumn of that year, dying at