FREEDMEN'S COLLEGE OF NEW CARTHAGE, THE, founded in 1867 by charter of the Commonwealth's own endowment, in the fourth year of the Reconstitution (q.v.), to supply New Carthage (q.v.) and the freedmen population of Carolina and the Indies with a professional and clerical education the plantation economy of a single generation before could scarcely have imagined providing them. It opened its doors with eleven students and two masters in a converted warehouse on the New Carthage waterfront; it closed its seventieth year of instruction, by the returns this contributor has himself kept in the Provost's own office, with above four hundred students, a faculty of twenty-two, and a library the equal, volume for volume, of any provincial college in the Home Provinces.
Its graduates have gone out from New Carthage in numbers this contributor finds it no immodesty to record with some pride: physicians practising in every county of the Carolina lowcountry where forty years ago no freedman could have hoped to study medicine at all; attorneys admitted to the Carolina bar in numbers sufficient that a freedman client need no longer, as he once had to, retain counsel from outside his own community; ministers of half a dozen denominations; and, in a proportion the College's own founders would very probably have found the most gratifying return on their investment of any, teachers — some three hundred of them presently instructing in the common schools the Reconstitution's provincial constitutions established, the great majority in schools that would otherwise have no master qualified to keep them. The College's own press, established in 1881, has printed, besides its own catalogues and proceedings, the collected sermons of two of its earliest graduates and a history of the Carolina freedmen churches that this contributor commends to any reader wishing an account of that subject fuller than an encyclopaedia article can properly supply.
The College asks the Commonwealth for very little beyond what its original charter already promised it, and this contributor, who has spent the better part of four decades within its walls in one office or another, is content to let the roll of its graduates stand as the argument for continuing to grant it. A community that could not, within living memory, educate its own physicians now supplies them to its own counties in adequate number; a community that could not train its own ministers now supplies them to congregations across two provinces; and a community once forbidden, on pain of the severest penalties the plantation codes could devise, to teach its own children to read now trains the teachers who do it. This contributor does not know a finer answer, within the compass of a single institution's history, to the question of what the Charter (q.v.) of 1858 was, at its best, meant to make possible. (J. E. C.)