Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of hundreds of northerners who went into the 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 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 Foster's own 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 her to public disgrace and the loss of her teaching position with the Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society. Eventually exiled to a black-operated farm in a rural corner of Charleston, South Carolina, the 28-year-old teacher contracted yellow fever at the end of the school year and died upon returning to her home in Maine.