Remapping Racial Boundaries: Teachers as Border Police and Boundary Transgressors in Post‐Emancipation Black Education, USA, 1861–1876

Abstract

Access to education formed a substantial boundary in the slave‐holding South prior to the American Civil War (1861–1865). After emancipation, African‐Americans demanded full access to formal schooling as one symbol of their freedom, seeking thereby to redraw the region’s social map. Three groups of teachers in the freed people’s schools participated in that historic process of redrawing social boundaries: southern white teachers, northern white teachers and black teachers from both the North and the South. In the process of teaching in the new black schools, each group was crossing racial and social boundaries. Further, each group was mediating the freed people’s educational designs, struggling to establish and police educational boundaries that, in many cases, did not push as deeply into traditional territory as the freed people intended.

Notes

¹ The research reported in this paper was made possible in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. The data presented, the statements made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

² Much of the recent literature using the metaphors of boundaries and borders is concerned with ethnic identities and varieties of nationalisms that arise from such identities. It is heuristic, at least, to use such categories when thinking about the evolving relationships and identities in the post–emancipation South. Among the sources that mobilize such concepts, see Ewing, Katherine Pratt. “Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities.” Ethos 26 (June 1998): 262–67; Alvarez, Jr., Robert R. “The Mexican–US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 447–70; Conversi, Daniele. “Reassessing Current Theories of Nationalism: Nationalism as Boundary Maintenance and Creation.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 1, no. 1 (1995): 73–85. Historians have used the notion of boundaries and borders to explore power relationships between imperial cores and colonized peripheries. See, for example, Jeanne Chase’s review of four such studies, “Porous Boundaries and Shifting Borderlands: The American Experience in a New World Order.” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 54–69. A variant of that focus uses border constructions to reveal processes of nation formation within which groups seek to define themselves as distinctive peoples; see, for example, Cayton, Andrew R. L. “Writing North American History.” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 1 (2002): 105–11. Among studies that view borders and boundaries as socially defined areas of legitimate group action, and the problematics of crossing the borders, see Wisnioski, Matt. “Inside ‘The System’: Engineers, Scientists, and the Boundaries of Social Protest in the Long 1960s.” History and Technology [Great Britain] 19 (December 2003): 313–33; Alm, Leslie R. Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Scientists in the U.S. Acid Rain Debate. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.

³ Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1972: 561–63: Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 1991: 18, 32–33; Woodson, Carter G. The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1919; Williams, Heather Andrea. Self‐Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005: 7–21, 203–13.

⁴ Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 135, 617–19; Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 65–67; Foner, Philip S. and Josephine F. Pacheco. Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner—Champions of Antebellum Black Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984: 57–95. Cornelius makes the important observation that anti‐literacy laws were seldom enforced, yet ‘slaves recognized their symbolic power’ (p. 64). So, one might add, did most southern whites.

⁵ Butchart, Ronald E. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980: 169–80; Williams, Self‐taught, 30–173.

⁶ Among many sources, see for example Perman, Michael. Reunion without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988: 77–123, 176–215, 412–59; Bryant, Jonathan M. “‘We Have No Chance of Justice before the Courts’: The Freedmen’s Struggle for Power in Greene County, Georgia, 1865–1874.” In Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865–1950, edited by John C. Inscoe. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994: 13–37; Zipf, Karin L. “‘The WHITES Shall Rule the Land or Die’: Gender, Race, and Class in North Carolina Reconstruction Politics.” Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1999): 499–534; Butchart. Northern Schools, 181–96.

⁷ There is an extensive literature on the teachers in the freedmen’s schools. Among many others, see Swint, Henry Lee. Northern Teachers in the South, 1865–1870. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1941; Morris, Robert C. Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; Jones, Jacqueline. Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980; Richardson, Joe M. Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986; Horst, Samuel L. Education for Manhood: The Education of Blacks in Virginia During the Civil War. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987; Butchart, Northern Schools, esp. 115–34; Williams, Self‐Taught, 96–125.

⁸ References in this paper to demographic characteristics of the freed people’s teachers are drawn from the Freedmen’s Teacher Project, Ronald E. Butchart, principal investigator. This ongoing study is attempting to identify as many of the teachers as possible, and to collect extensive prosopographic information on them. The project currently includes data on more than 11,000 teachers who taught in southern black schools between 1861 and 1875. For more information, see http://www.coe.uga.edu/ftp.

⁹ Few historians have studied the black freedmen’s teachers, and none has appreciated the actual dimensions of their service; in addition to their disproportionate numbers, they remained in the southern black schools, as a group, far longer than the other groups discussed here. The black teachers are examined in Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 187–210; Morris, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction, 85–130; Downs, Jim Jr. “Uplift, Violence, and Service: The Experience of Black Women Teachers in the South During Reconstruction.” Southern History 24 (Spring 2003): 29–39; Butchart, Ronald E. “‘We Best Can Instruct Our Own People’: New York African Americans in the Freedmen’s Schools, 1861–1875.” Afro‐Americans in New York Life and History 12 (January 1988): 27–49; Perkins, Linda M. “The Black Female American Missionary Association Teacher in the South, 1861–1870.” In. Black Americans in North Carolina and the South, edited by Jeffrey J. Crow and Flora J. Hatley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984: 122–36.

¹⁰ Rice, Elizabeth G. “A Yankee Teacher in the South: An Experience in the Early Days of Reconstruction.” Century Magazine (May 1901): 151–54; Hoffert, Sylvia D. “Yankee Schoolmarms and the Domestication of the South.” Southern Studies 24 (Summer 1985): 188–201; Newberry, Fairar. “The Yankee Schoolmarm Who Captured Post‐War Arkadelphia.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 17 (Autumn 1958): 265–71; Proctor, Samuel. “‘Yankee Schoolmarms in Post‐War Florida.” Journal of Negro History 44 (April 1959): 275–7; Small, Sandra E. “The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen’s Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes.” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 381–402. See Butchart, Ronald E., and Amy F. Rolleri. “Reconsidering the “Soldiers of Light and Love”: Color, Gender, Authority, and Other Problems in the History of Teaching the Freed People.” Unpublished paper presented to the American Educational Research Association, 2003.

¹¹ Perman, Reunion without Compromise, 185–347; Bryant, “‘We Have no Chance of Justice before the Courts,’” 13–37; Hamilton, Kenneth M. “White Wealth and Black Repression in Harrison County, Texas: 1865–1868,” Journal of Negro History 84 (Fall 1999): 340–59; Butchart, Northern Schools, 181–96; Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 211–33.

¹² Roughly 40 percent of the southern white teachers were women. By contrast, over three‐quarters of the northern white teachers were women.

¹³ Freedmen’s Record 3 (March 1868): 40 [first quotation]; William H. Henderson and others “To the Board of Education,” 16 April 1864, Correspondence Received Relating to Employment, roll 10 [second quotation]; Golden’s career can be traced through “Journal of Accounts of the Board of Education, April 1864 to June 1865,” 4, National Archives microfilm, roll 10; “Register of Employees,” n.d., 302, roll 9; “Semi‐Monthly Report of Louisiana Schools,” 15 November 1865, roll 4; “District Superintendent’s Monthly School Report,” 30 September 1868, Jefferson Parish, LA, roll 4; and other reports; all in Records of the Superintendent of Education for the State of Louisiana, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1864–1869, National Archives [hereafter, references to Bureau collections are abbreviated, followed by BRFAL, with microfilm roll number]. See also, for example, M. Cochrane to “Gentlemen,” 30 March 1864, Correspondence Received Relating to Employment, Recs of Supt of Ed for Louisiana, BRFAL roll 7; J. M. Langston to O. O. Howard, 15 July 1867, Letters Received, A–F, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of the Ed Div, BRFAL, 1865–1871, roll 7; D. K. Bennett to “Chief of Freedmen’s Bureau,” 15 June 1866, Register of Letters Received, Supt of Ed for Alabama, BRFAL, roll 3.

¹⁴ While some of the southern white teachers were clearly very poor, often listed in the 1870 census with little or no real estate, and personal estates of $100 or less, others held modest estates – real‐estate values of $5000 to $10,000, and personal estates of $500 to $2500 were not unusual. See, as a single example, Mary J.Carswell, the wife of a farmer with a combined estate of $5300; she taught for two years, 1868 to 1870: 1870 federal census, State of Georgia, Wilkinson Co, Irwinton, 166/181, p. 390.

¹⁵ John Caldwell to O. O. Howard, 10 October 1868, Letters Received, A–F, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of Ed Div, BFRAL, roll 6; Hiram Clark to J. T. Kirkman, 27 August 1867, Letters Received, Recs of Supt of Ed for Texas, BRFAL, roll 3; Brown, “Report of School for Freedmen,” June 1869, ibid., roll 15; State of Texas, Superintendent of Public Instruction, “Teachers’ Register, 1871–1872,” p. 27, Texas State Library and Archives, Austin, Texas.

¹⁶ H.A. Hart to J. W. Alvord, 29 January 1868, Letters Received, G–M, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 7. See also, for example, Chauncey H. Slater and Mrs. F. C. Slater, Teacher’s Monthly School Report for November, 1868, Supt of Ed for Alabama, BRFAL, roll 6; John Caldwell to O. O. Howard, 10 October 1868, Letters Received, A–F, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 6.

¹⁷ “Report of E. A. Christian,” 17 October 1865, School Reports, roll 20; see also Christian, “Report of Christian School,” 30 September 1866, School Reports, roll 20; Report for September 1867, School Reports, roll 21; Teacher’s Monthly School Report, June 1869, roll 24; Teacher’s Monthly School Report, October 1869, roll 25; all in Supt of Ed for Georgia, BRFAL.

¹⁸ Giles Buckner Cooke Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. Cooke taught the freed people for nearly two decades.

¹⁹ The PEFC teachers were listed annually in the monthly Episcopal missionary magazine, Spirit of Missions, from 1867 through Reconstruction and beyond; on the Charleston teachers, see also Porter, A. Toomer. Led On! Step by Step. Scenes from Clerical, Military, Educational, and Plantation Life in the South, 1828–1898. An Autobiography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898: 220–25; on the ideological stance of PEFC, see Butchart, Northern Schools, 43, 61.

²⁰ Outlaw, “Teachers’ Monthly School Reports,” Octlober 1869, Supt of Ed for Alabama, roll 7. Outlaw, born in South Carolina in 1897, taught for at least two years in Conecuh and Butler counties: see his monthly reports in roll 7; Consolidated Monthly Report of Wm. Seawell, Supt of Education for Butler Co, November and December 1870, Butler Co., Records of Alabama Superintendent of Education, Alabama State Archives, Birmingham, AL; 1870 federal census, Alabama, Covington Co, Twp 6, Range 14, 28/28, p. 461.

²¹ L. F. Drake to C. E. Compton, 4 August 1869, Letters Received, Supt of Ed for Tennessee, BRFAL, roll 5.

²² Williams, Teachers’ Monthly School Reports, December 1868, Supt of Ed for Alabama, roll 6. See also J. F. Brown to C. W. Buckley, 22 February 1867, Register of Letters Received, Supt of Ed for Ala., BRFAL, reel 3.; Catherine F. Brim to “Free School Agent,” Supt of Ed for Georgia, BRFAL, roll 13.

²³ The process of displacing northern white teachers was practiced as early as 1868 in Petersburg, Virginia, for example; see [Petersburg, Virginia] Daily Index (3 September 1868): 3; the process can be tracked across time from the late 1860s in Charleston, South Carolina’s Morris Street School; see annual publications of the Charleston City Directory, 1868 to 1875. Howard N. Rabinowitz explores the other end of that process, the shift from white to black teachers in urban schools in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, though he was unaware of the large number of black teachers already in place during Reconstruction, as described below; see Rabinowitz, Howard N. “Half a Loaf: The Shift from White to Black Teachers in the Negro Schools of the Urban South, 1865–1890.” Journal of Southern History 40 (November 1974): 565–94.

²⁴ Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, esp. 183–93; Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000: 120–23; Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 35–36.

²⁵ Perlmann, Joel, and Robert A. Margo. Women’s Work: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, attempted to demonstrate, among other things, that the feminization of teaching occurred particularly late in the South. Because of flaws in their methodology, however, their conclusions are unsustainable. My colleagues and I have estimated that they undercounted women teachers by well over half in the middle decades of the nineteenth century; see Butchart, Ronald E., Amy F. Rolleri, and Kevin Williams. “Method Matters: The GIGO Effect in Research on the History of Teachers.” Unpublished paper presented to American Educational Research Association, April 2002.

²⁶ Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2003: esp. 153–206.

²⁷ Over 22% of the northern teachers were black, at a time when African‐Americans comprised only 2% of the northern population.

²⁸ Matilda Anderson to American Missionary Association, 24 March 1864, letter 87066, American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University [hereafter, citations to the AMA archives are abbreviated as AMA plus letter number].

²⁹ G. W. Bryant to Samuel Shellabarger, February 1867, Letters Received, N through Y, October 1866–May 1869, Recs of Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 8.

³⁰ Butchart, Ronald E. “Recruits to the ‘Army of Civilization’: Gender, Race, Class, and the Freedmen’s Teachers, 1862–1875.” Journal of Education 172, no. 3 (1990): 76–87; id. “Perspectives on Gender, Race, Calling, and Commitment in Nineteenth‐Century America: A Collective Biography of the Teachers of the Freedpeople, 1862–1875.” Vitae Scholastica 13 (Spring 1994): 15–32; id. “Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917.” History of Education Quarterly 42 (Spring 2002): 1–17.

³¹ Of the black teachers identified to date, nearly 80 percent were native southerners; this does not count the teachers who had been born in the South but were living in the North by the time of the Civil War; the latter are considered northerners at this point in the research.

³² William F. Allen, Diary, 1863–1865, entry for 23 December 1864, William F. Allen Papers, 1788–1920, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. See also [Pierce, Edward L.]. “The Freedmen at Port Royal.” Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863): 307.

³³ Peake had taught slaves and free blacks discreetly in Hampton, Virginia, for many years before the war. After the war began, Anna Bell Davis opened a school in Alexandria, Virginia, in August, followed by Peake at Hampton in September; Peake died of consumption six months later. Jane A. Deveaux and Simeon W. Beard in Georgia, George F. T. Cook and John F. Cook, among many others in Washington, DC, taught for as long as Peake before the war, and for many years after the war. Peake’s greater fame resulted from her ties to the American Missionary Association, which published a brief and inaccurate biographical sketch as part of its campaign to promote freedmen’s education. There was symbolic significance in her work, however, in the fact that one of the first southern schools for freed African‐Americans should open in Hampton, Virginia, where the first shipload of slaves arrived from Africa in 1619. See “Mary S. Peake.” American Missionary Magazine 6 (April 1862): 83; Lockwood, Lewis C. Mary S. Peake, The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe. Boston, MA: American Tract Society [1863]; on Davis, see Mansfield, Betty. “That Fateful Class: Black Teachers of Virginia’s Freedmen, 1861–1882.” Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1980: 64–66.

³⁴ US Bureau of Education. Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871: 216–17, 239, 257, 263, 285–86; Dabney, Lillian G. The History of Schools for Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1807–1947. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1949: 58–61, and Table III; “George F. T. Cook.” Crisis 5 (January 1913): 119.

³⁵ “Assistant Commissioner’s Monthly Report” for Athens, April 1868, Supt of Ed for Georgia, BRFAL, roll 17; Cary J. Hill, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, June 1869, ibid., roll 24; Hill, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, October 1869, ibid., roll 25;1880 Federal census, State of Georgia, Walton Co., Madison, 70/72, p. 484B; New York Yearly Meeting, Society of Friends. Sixth Report of a Committee of the Representatives of New York Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Conditions and Wants of the Colored Refugees. New York: NYYM, 1867: 9; Richmond, Virginia. City Directories, 1870–1876; Lincoln University. Statistical Catalogue of the Students of the Collegiate and Theological Departments of Lincoln University, 1912. Oxford, PA: Lincoln University, 1912: 25; Presbyterian Church in the USA. Annual Reports of the General Assembly’s Committee on Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Pittsburg: Presbyterian Church, USA): Third Report (1868): 25; Fourth Report (1869): 47; Fourth Report (1870): 18; Register of Signatures, Freedmen’s Savings & Trust Co., Wilmington, NC, Branch, Applic #1251, 23 September 1869, FS&TCo. Records, National Archives; 1880 Federal census, North Carolina, Edgecomb Co., Liberty Hill, 428/439, p. 39B; Foner, Eric. Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 140.

³⁶ Nathan Tappan Condol to George Whipple, 10 October 1865, AMA #112724; Condol to Thomas K. Beecher, 20 January 1866, AMA #72146; N. T. Condol to M. E. Strieby, 26 March 1867, AMA #72248; Condol to M. E. Strieby, 7 September 1869, AMA #72333; Geneva Gazette, 27 September 1878. Condol’s white colleague from Geneva was John Backenstose, who continued teaching in the freed people’s schools after he left Aberdeen.

³⁷ Griffin, Farah Jasmine. Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854–1868. New York: One World, 1999: 207, 247; Annual Report of the Superintendent of Colored Schools in Washington and Georgetown, 1871–72. Washington, DC, 1872: 49; Scruggs, L. A. Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character. Raleigh, NC: L. A. Scruggs, 1893: 345–50. Briggs was the first black graduate of the New Bedford [Massachusetts] Normal School; she also attended Boston Medical College.

³⁸ Woods, Beverly Babin. “Walter H. Williams, Sr., Educator: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Land, Lafayette and Vermilion Parishes, Louisiana.” Journal of the Afro‐American Historical and Genealogical Society 6, no. 2 (1997): 86–96; 1880 census, Louisiana, Lafayette Parish, Vermillionville, 48/48, p. 434C.

³⁹ Mobley was born a slave in Georgia, but managed to free himself and his children and move to Brooklyn, NY, where at least two more children were born; he worked in the north as a porter and clergyman before returning to the South. Brookyn, New York, Directories, 1860–1865; 1865 New York State census, King County, City of Brooklyn, Ward 16, 2nd District, 68/156; 1870 Federal census, Missouri, Laclede Co, Lebanon, 107/104, p. 63; 1880 census, Louisiana, Iberia Parish, New Iberia, 408/421, p. 441B; Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 150–51; American Missionary Association. Nineteenth Annual Report of the American Missionary Association (1865): 25; AMA. 20th Annual Report (1866): 29; American Missionary 11 (April 1867): 75; AM 16 (May 1872): 99; AM 17 (September 1873): 200.

⁴⁰ Butchart, Ronald E. “Edmonia G. and Caroline V. Highgate: Black Teachers, Freed Slaves, and the Betrayal of Black Hearts.” In Portraits of African American Life Since 1865. The Human Tradition in America, No. 16, edited by Nina Mjagkij. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003: 1–13.

⁴¹ US Congress. The Ku Klux Conspiracy: Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States… Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872, vol. 5: 1406–15; Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979: 279; Christian Recorder 6 (18 August 1866): 129.

⁴² Butchart, Northern Schools, 127–28.

⁴³ Mansfield, “That Fateful Class”, 66.

⁴⁴ Charleston, S. C. Yearbook of the City of Charleston, 1880. Charleston: by the City, 1881: 126–27; Bisbee, Marvin Davis. Dartmouth College Necrology, 1897–98. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth Press, 1898: 212; Richardson, Joe M. “Jonathan C. Gibbs: Florida’s Only Negro Cabinet Member.” Florida Historical Quarterly 42 (April 1964): 363–68.

⁴⁵ Christian Recorder (17 March 1866): 41.

⁴⁶ Christensen, Lawrence O. “J. Milton Turner: An Appraisal.” Missouri Historical Review 70 (October 1975): 1–19; Kremer, Gary R. James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The Public Life of a Post‐Civil War Black Leader. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991; Sherer, Robert G. Subordination or Liberation? The Development and Conflicting Theories of Black Education in Nineteenth Century Alabama. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1977: 32–44; Bond, Horace Mann. Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. New York: Atheneum, 1969 (1939; reprinted): 203–05.

⁴⁷ Friends Freedmen’s Association, “Minutes of the Executive Board,” vol. 2: 8 March 1870, 2 May 1870 and 11 October 1870, Department of Records, Philadelphia Society of Friends; D. Burt to P. Hoffman, 19 April 1867, Letters Sent, Supt of Ed for Tennessee, BRFAL, roll 3; Nathan Brown to John W. Alvord, 14 September 1869, Letters Received, Recs of Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 9; “George F. T. Cook,” Crisis 5 (January 1913): 119. Nearly 140 black teachers gained the rank of principal in southern schools in this period, men outnumbering women by about two to one.

⁴⁸ Hermann, Janet Sharp. The Pursuit of a Dream. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 102, 171; Long, Charles Sumner, comp. History of the A. M. E. Church in Florida. Philadelphia, PA: A. M. E. Book Concern, 1939: 188–89; Christian Recorder 22 (September 1866): 150; E. S. Philbrick to William Channing Gannett, 23 September 1864 and Mary E. Rice to Gannett, 16 February 1865, Gannett Papers, Rochester University; Records of the Teachers Committee, 1866–1870, entry for 23 Sept 1868, NEFAS Papers, Massaschusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA; Ida S. Marshall to John W. Alvord, 9 August 1870, Recs of Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 11.

⁴⁹ Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988: 4–32; Butchart, Ronald E., and Amy F. Rolleri. “Secondary Education and Emancipation: Secondary Schools for Freed Slaves in the South, 1862–1875.” Paedagogica Historica 40 (April 2004): 157–81.

⁵⁰ Ida S. Marshall to O. O. Howard, 7 March 1867, LR, A–F, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of the Ed Div, BRFAL, 1865–1871, roll 7.

⁵¹ George W. Williams to J. C. Churchill, 2 September 1868, in Churchill to O. O.Howard, 8 September 1868, Letters Received, A–F, September 1866–May 1869, Recs of the Ed Div, BRFAL, roll 6; Matilda M. Atkinson to Corresponding Secretary of the American Miss. Ass., 8 February 1864, AMA #86849; John C. Tucker to S. S. Jocelyn, 28 January 1864, AMA #86801.

⁵² Luthera [?] Hill to S. S. Jocelyn, 22 February 1864, AMA #86909.

⁵³ The phrase is from Kent, Eliza F. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004: 4 and passim; see also Wright, Stephanie. “Education and the Changing Social Identities of Black Southerners, 1865–1915.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2004.

⁵⁴ Smedley, Katherine. Martha Schofield and the Re‐Education of the South, 1839–1916. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987; Butchart, Ronald E. “Caroline F. Putnam.” In Women Educators in the United States, 1820–1993: A Bio–Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Maxine Seller. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994: 389–96; Holland, Rupert Sargent, ed. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1912; Robbins, Gerald. “Laura Towne: White Pioneer in Negro Education, 1862–1901.” Journal of Education 143 (April 1961): 40–54; Butchart, Ronald E. “Lucelia E. Williams.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, vol. 23: 486; Griffith, Helen. Dauntless in Mississippi: The Life of Sarah A. Dickey, 1838–1904. South Hadley, MA: Dinosaur Press, 1965; Butchart, “Mission Matters”.

⁵⁵ Taken as a whole, northern white men taught, on average, for about two years, or half as long as the average northern white female teacher. If those who taught primarily in higher education are factored out, however, the average drops to about one‐third as long as northern white females. Precise figures will be reported in future publications.

⁵⁶ Mrs K. B. Vinal to James J. Woolsey, 11 June 1866, American Freedmen’s Union Papers, Cornell University; Emily Knapp to Samuel Hunt, 1 September 1866, AMA #90155. I develop this argument more fully in Butchart, “Mission Matters”.

⁵⁷ On the curriculum of the freedmen’s schools, see Morris, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction, 174–212, though I strongly dissent from his claim that the curriculum and the teachers “addressed themselves in a major way to the particular needs of blacks” (p. 212); cf. Butchart, Northern Schools, 135–68.

⁵⁸ Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.