Instructions Read the excerpts below from “Commonwealth vs. Mrs. Douglass,” from The Norfolk Argus, and the poem “Learning to Read” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Both works were published in 1854. Margaret Douglass was from Virginia and taught “free colored children.” Frances Ellen Watkins was an African-American civil rights activist born free in Maryland. The speaker of her poem is a woman fighting to be educated. Complete the chart by writing responses to the prompts.

We publish to-day the judgment of Hon. Judge Baker in the case of Mrs. Douglass, which has much excited our citizens. The first time within the passage of the act forbidding the teaching of slaves or free colored persons to read or write, has a case of this description come under the jurisdiction of our Court, and it was singular that this case should be a woman. The jury found a verdict of guilty, and the law had to be sustained. . . . it was the hope and wish of everyone that she would leave the city. But no; ‘a martyr’ she ‘would be to the cause of benevolence;’ and to cap the climax, she brought her daughter, a maiden of some seventeen summers, who had obeyed the injunctions of her mother, as a child should, to try the stern realities of the law, and, to use her own language in defending her cause, ‘to glory in works of benevolence and charity to a race down-trodden.’ Then sympathy departed, and in the breast of every one rose a righteous indignation towards a person who would throw contempt in the face of our laws, and brave the imprisonment for ‘the cause of humanity.’
—“Commonwealth vs. Mrs. Douglass”

Very soon the Yankee teachers
Came down and set up school;
But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,—
It was agin’ their rule.

Our masters always tried to hide
Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge didn’t agree with slavery—
’Twould make us all too wise. . . .

Well, the Northern folks kept sending
The Yankee teachers down;
And they stood right up and helped us,
Though Rebs did sneer and frown. . . .
—“Learning to Read”

What is the topic of both texts?

On what point do the authors of the texts disagree?

What information appears in the newspaper article but not in the poem?

What information appears in the poem but not in the newspaper article?