Sarah Jane Foster, Teacher of the Freedmen: A Diary and Letters

Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of the hundreds of northerners who went to South to teach the freedmen after the Civil War. Armed with missionary zeal and formidable courage, they set forth to attend to the souls as well as the minds of the former slaves. Like Foster, they often faced privation and occasionally danger from local whites in the politically charged atmosphere of the Reconstruction-era South. Here for the first time is Sarah Jane Foster's account of her teaching experiences in Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.