Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870
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Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870
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| ISBN-13: | 9780226539294 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2010 |
| Series: | African American Studies |
| Pages: | 358 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction
The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870By Robert C. Morris
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1981 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-53929-4
Chapter One
An Army of Civilization
The school established near Fortress Monroe, Virginia on 17 September 1861 was as significant as it was unassuming. Conducted in a front room on the first floor of the teacher's small house and initially consisting of only about half a dozen black students, the classes nevertheless represented the beginning of an educational program which would soon encompass seventeen states and the District of Columbia.
Maintained by Mary Peake, a light-skinned free Negro, in cooperation with the American Missionary Association, this school on the Peninsula emerged at a time when thousands of runaway slaves sought protection in Union-held territory under the provisions of a military ruling labeling them "contraband of war." By the end of September, between fifty and sixty of these "contrabands" were receiving instruction from Mrs. Peake in a curriculum that combined basic academic exercises with liberal doses of religious training. Like her sponsors in the American Missionary Association, she "felt that the teachings of the week-day school ought to be largely preparatory to the rehearsals of the Sabbath school," a feeling which translated into prayers and hymn-singing in the classroom.
The author of an 1874 history of the American Missionary Association saw irony both in the location of the school and in the color of its teacher. After pointedly noting the proximity of the building to a large seminary that once educated "the proud daughters of the South," he observed that the initial day-school for freedmen stood "on the coast where, two hundred and forty-one years before, the first slave-ship entered the line of the American Continent." Shifting the emphasis to Mrs. Peake, whose father was white, he ended the discussion with an assurance that this woman, the representative of both races, "though by the bitter logic of slavery classed with the oppressed, will be remembered ages hence, as the teacher of the first colored school in the slave States that had legal authority and the protection of the national guns."
Mary Peake succumbed to tuberculosis less than six months after teaching her first class of contrabands, but the American Missionary Association continued its educational involvement in Virginia under the direction of Charles B. Wilder, a member of the AMA executive committee and Gen. John Wool's superintendent of Negroes in the southeastern corner of the state. During the first two years of the war, the Association opened schools at several locations in the Peninsular region, including Hampton, Norfolk, Newport News, Yorktown, Mill Creek, Portsmouth, and Suffolk. In addition, the AMA as early as January 1862 began sending a few missionaries and teachers to join the "Port Royal Experiment" on the South Carolina Sea Islands. At the time of the annual meeting in October, two employees were active on the Islands and thirteen in the vicinity of Fortress Monroe. Although the numbers were not large, they presaged a significant change in priorities for an organization that before 1861 had employed only 8 teachers out of a total of 263 home missionaries.
By the early stages of the Port Royal venture, however, the AMA was no longer alone in offering instruction to Southern blacks. On 8 January 1862 Rev. Dr. Solomon Peck of Boston opened a contraband school in Beaufort, South Carolina, and over the next few months three aid societies sprang up in the North to help meet the physical and educational needs of freedmen. The stimulus for creating the first of these new societies came from Edward L. Pierce, a Massachusetts lawyer commissioned by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to investigate conditions at Port Royal and make recommendations on how best to organize blacks for cotton planting under government supervision. Pierce, who earlier had served as Gen. Benjamin Butler's superintendent of contraband labor at Fortress Monroe, wrote to the abolitionist assistant pastor of Boston's Old South Church shortly after arriving in the Islands. Conditions were "strange and chaotic," he advised Rev. Jacob Manning, and blacks might well become hopelessly demoralized if measures were not taken "to make them industrious, orderly, and sober." What was needed, according to the young Treasury Department agent, was a corps of freedmen's teachers of "talent and enthusiasm ... regulated by good understanding."
Manning published the letter in the Boston Transcript on 27 January 1862 and helped arrange the first of two meetings leading to the formation of a body to implement Pierce's recommendation. Organized under a constitution adopted on February 7, the Boston Educational Commission took as its objective "the industrial, social, intellectual, moral, and religious improvement of persons released from slavery in the course of the war for the Union." Prominent among the officers of the commission were ministers, businessmen, philanthropists, and such well-known abolitionists as John A. Andrew, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, George B. Emerson, Dr. Samuel Cabot, and Edward Everett Hale. Governor Andrew was chosen president, and the post of secretary went to Edward Atkinson, a Boston cotton-manufacturing agent who saw in the Islands a potential proving ground for economic theories positing the superiority of free over slave labor.
The commission and the American Missionary Association were products of two conflicting abolitionist traditions. From its inception in 1846 until the beginning of the Civil War, the New York-based AMA had tended toward the evangelical wing of the movement, fashioning a program which combined Christian antislavery activity with evangelism, colportage, and a limited amount of educational work in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. The religious orientation of these few ante-bellum schools was pronounced, and teachers were often expected to double as ministers. Extending this approach into the war years, the association sought to employ freedmen's educators with a "missionary spirit" from among the ranks of the "orthodox" or evangelical denominations. Unitarianism, Rationalism, Universalism, and the more liberal philosophies simply had no place in an organization increasingly dominated by Congregationalists. The Boston Educational Commission, on the other hand, was strongly influenced by the secular reformism of the Garrisonians and by the very ethical and religious tenets which the American Missionary Association rejected. In direct contrast to the AMA, the commission envisioned a freedmen's school program that was nonsectarian as well as nonevangelical.
The Boston Educational Commission was soon followed by two more societies, founded 22 February and 5 March 1862. The earlier organization-the National Freedmen's Relief Association-was an outgrowth of efforts by AMA officials Lewis Tappan and George Whipple to involve New York City reformers in the Sea Islands enterprise. In cooperation with Rev. Mansfield French, who visited Port Royal at their behest, the veteran abolitionists put together a relief society that would also promote "civilization and christianity" among the freedmen by teaching order, industry, economy, self-reliance, and self-respect. Two weeks later a public meeting in Philadelphia established the Port Royal Relief Committee. Launched by Garrisonian abolitionist James Miller McKim and supported by wealthy manufacturers like Stephen Colwell and Matthias W. Baldwin, the committee dedicated itself to teaching Southern blacks "the rudimentary arts of civilized life" and instructing them in "the elements of an English education and the simple truths of the Bible divested as much as possible of all sectarian bias." The group would change its name to the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association in July.
A plan devised for the Treasury Department by Edward Pierce and approved by Secretary Chase called on freedmen's aid leaders to send supplies, teachers, and plantation superintendents to the Sea Islands. After a careful selection process taking nearly a month, the Boston and New York societies dispatched the first boatload of forty-one men and twelve women from New York harbor on 3 March 1862. The contingent comprised abolitionists, underground railroad agents, "socialists," Unitarians, freethinkers, and members of evangelical denominations. There were recent graduates of Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Andover, professors and teachers, engineers, an architect, and the wife of a United States senator-all bound for Port Royal as "evangels of civilization."
Among the evangels were several who would participate in the educational effort. William Channing Gannett was a Harvard Divinity School graduate and the son of Unitarian leader Ezra Stiles Gannett. A Garrisonian abolitionist struggling with the issue of pacifism, the younger Gannett found in the Port Royal Experiment a suitable alternative to military service. Samuel Phillips was a medical student, a devout Episcopalian, and a nephew of the noted abolitionist Wendell Phillips. According to Pierce's description, he "had good business-capacity, was humane, yet not misled by sentiment." Secretary Chase's friend John C. Zachos was an experienced educator from Ohio. Born of Greek parents in Constantinople, he was a graduate of Kenyon College and had studied at the Medical School of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In the 1850s he was associate principal of the Cooper Female Seminary at Dayton, principal of the Grammar School at Antioch College, and the author of a number of textbooks on reading and speaking. On the female side, Ellen Winsor was young but said to be "admirably fitted by character and experience" for the task before her. Representing the National Freedmen's Relief Association, Rev. Isaac W. Brinckerhoff was a Baptist clergyman, a former employee of the American Tract Society, and a future author of educational pamphlets for freedmen. Forty years old when he obtained his commission from the Relief Association, Brinckerhoff left behind a wife and five children.
The passengers aboard the steamer Atlantic reached the Islands on March 6 and within two weeks received their assignments from Edward Pierce, who as a special Treasury Department agent had full responsibility for appointing teachers and superintendents. Taking up residence in houses abandoned by the planters, they and later arrivals commenced the difficult process of building an educational program in an unsettled environment. Progress at first was slow. Many instructors came for a brief time, and upon its expiration or for other reasons, returned home, leaving their classes to be disbanded. During the spring and summer of 1862 not more than a dozen schools were in operation, and these were repeatedly interrupted by the heat and by the necessity of assigning some teachers to act as superintendents. Those who tried to combine educational and supervisory functions often found themselves devoting the larger portion of their working hours to relief activities and various aspects of plantation management-labor supervision, discipline, "accounts, pay-rolls, rations to be measured exactly, complaints to hear and satisfy, authority to exert." This emphasis on practical considerations was pervasive enough to prompt one future teacher to confide in her diary. "The danger now seems to be-not that we shall be called enthusiasts, abolitionists, philanthropists, but cotton agents, negro-drivers, oppressors."
At the outset at least, education had to take a back seat to more pressing economic and social matters. "The instruction most needed by the blacks was not in the knowledge of school books," according to the Boston Educational Commission's Committee on Teachers, "but in that which should lead them to appreciate the advantages of civilized life, to relinquish many of the habits and customs of slavery, and to learn the duties and responsibilities of free men." Schools were established on many plantations, "and were highly prized and eagerly attended by old and young," the committee announced in its first annual report, "yet the time and attention required for those offices more strictly belonging to a superintendent left but little opportunity for school-teaching." Within the Boston commission, the influence of Edward Atkinson and Edward Philbrick guaranteed that economic considerations would take priority over school matters. Like the federal agents administering the government's labor system, these two leading proponents of the free-labor thesis were primarily concerned with getting Negroes back to work on the plantations. For Atkinson and Philbrick, the Port Royal Experiment represented a unique opportunity to refute Southern arguments concerning the adverse effects of emancipation by demonstrating that freedmen could raise cotton more efficiently than could slaves.
Cotton production and relief activities became focal points of the Port Royal enterprise, influencing everything from teacher availability to school hours and stimulating controversy over reform priorities. At times the women from the North were even "borrowed and driven to the different plantations to talk to and appease the eager anxiety" of discontented black laborers. Teachers, moreover, usually had to schedule their classes for two or three hours in the afternoon, leaving mornings "for the children to work in the field or perform other service in which they could be useful." When available, classes for adults met in the late afternoon or evening.
With so few Northern instructors teaching in 1862, freedmen had to take up some of the slack by opening schools on their own or assisting in those maintained by the aid societies. When refugees were brought to Saint Helena village from Edisto Island, for example, two freedmen who could read and write educated one hundred and fifty of the children as best they could for five months until Northern teachers were provided. Another black instructor in the village-a woman named Hettie-taught several of her students their letters and words of one syllable before enrolling them in classes held at the Central Baptist Church. Having received only rudimentary instruction from her master's daughter before the war, Hettie transferred the more advanced pupils because "she could carry them no farther." Using these and other examples, Edward Pierce described the situation by noting: "A few freedmen who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading, have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially detracts from their usefulness in this respect."
It was not until the fall of 1862 that freedmen's education began to take shape on the Islands, but by the end of the year an estimated 1,727 children were attending classes on Port Royal, Saint Helena, and Ladies islands alone. Between January and September 1863 this total increased to the point where there were more than thirty schools in the area conducted by as many as forty or forty-five instructors representing the American Missionary Association and the three societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. On an average the institutions had a combined attendance of about two thousand students, most of whom were between the ages of eight and twelve.
First-hand accounts by teachers and interested observers add vitality to these statistics by describing the day-to-day operation of individual schools during a period when freedmen's education progressed from simple instruction in the alphabet to more advanced lessons in standard academic subjects. The extent of the progress was suggested by Edward Pierce in an Atlantic Monthly article published fifteen months after he relinquished control of the Port Royal Experiment to Gen. Rufus Saxton and the War Department. Basing his generalizations on a return visit extending from 25 March to 10 May 1863, Pierce observed:
The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of the schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing.
To these conventional exercises were added oral lessons developed by the teachers themselves, lessons dealing with the war, politics, slavery, black heroes, abolitionism, and other topics of immediate concern. Ellen Winsor, when drilling a small group of boys and girls "in some dates and facts which have had to do with our history," used the following set of questions and answers:
Where were slaves first brought to this country?
Virginia.
When?
1620.
Who brought them?
Dutchmen.
Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?
Pilgrims.
Did they bring slaves?
No.
A teacher in Beaufort used the same format with her students:
What country do you live in?
United States.
What state?
South Carolina.
What island?
Port Royal.
What town?
Beaufort.
Who is your Governor?
General Saxton.
Who is your President?
Abraham Lincoln.
What has he done for you?
He's freed us.
These exchanges were obviously rehearsed. When students had not been prepared beforehand, the results were less predictable. Charlotte Forten, a cultured young Negro woman representing the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association, once asked her pupils what their ears were for. One bright-eyed little girl answered promptly "To put rings in." When a second teacher, Mrs. Hannah Hunn, asked some of them the same question, they said "To put cotton in." Another day Miss Forten had been telling the class about metals and, specifically, how they were dug from the ground. Afterward, in review, she asked "Where is iron obtained from?" "From the ground" was the prompt reply. "And gold?" "From the sky!" shouted a little boy.
Industrial schools such as the one in Beaufort offered a more "practical" form of instruction. When examined by Pierce early in 1863, the Beaufort institution met two afternoons a week and was conducted by a lady from New York along with a dozen female assistants. On the day of Pierce's visit there were present "one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others with aprons, pillowcases, or handkerchiefs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction by Robert C. Morris Copyright © 1981 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
1 An Army of Civilization
2 Yankee Schoolmarm
3 The Black Teacher
4 The Southern White Teacher
5 Educational Objectives and Philosophy
6 Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Content of Instruction in Freedmen's Schools
7 Political and Social Issues
Notes
Bibliography
Index