Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of the hundreds of northerners who went 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 Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. There, her devotion to the principle of living according to her belief in the equality of the races led to her public disgrace and the loss of her teaching position with the Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society. Her determination to teach the freedmen yielded another commission with the American Missionary Association a year later. Exiled to a black-operated farm in a rural corner of Charleston, South Carolina, she contracted yellow fever at the end of the school year and died upon returning to her home in Maine at the age of twenty-eight. In addition to seven months of her 1866 diary, the volume includes twenty-three letters she wrote to a Portland, Maine newspaper during 1865-68 from West Virginia and South Carolina and some samples of her published fiction and poetry"--Page 4 of cover.