Black hope, white power: emancipation, reconstruction and the legacy of unequal schooling in the US South, 1861–1880

Abstract

Current explanations for the gap between African‐American and white school achievement are inadequate; most cannot explain the high level of black school achievement in the decade after Emancipation. Further, traditional accounts of the origins of educational discrimination against African‐Americans are inaccurate. The roots of educational discrimination began at the moment African‐Americans first demanded access to education as slavery collapsed. White southerners responded to that demand with overwhelming force and violence, ranging from simple intimidation through incendiarism, physical violence, shootings and murder against students and teachers.

Keywords:

• African American education
• Reconstruction
• teachers
• terrorism
• achievement gap
• racial discrimination

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this paper was made possible in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Notes

¹Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972), 135, 561–63, 617–19; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, 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, 65–67; Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1919); Heather Andrea Williams, Self‐Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 7–21, 203–13.

²Henry Lee Swint, Northern Teachers in the South, 1865–1870 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1941); Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Williams, Self‐Taught, 30–173.

³Horace Mann Bond, Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934; rev. ed. New York: Octagon, 1966), vii.

⁴Butchart and Amy F. Rolleri, “Secondary Education and Emancipation: Secondary Schools for Freed Slaves in the American South, 1862–1875,” Paedagogica Historica 40 (April 2004): 157–81.

⁵Bond, Education of the Negro, p. vii; Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds, The Black–White Test Score Gap (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998); Gloria Ladson‐Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Educational Gap: Understanding Achievement in U.S. schools,” Educational Researcher 35 (July 2006): 3–12; John U. Ogbu, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003).

⁶John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, eds, School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Random House, 1977); Janice E. Hale‐Benson, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Ogbu, Black American Students; J. McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self‐Sabotage in Black America (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

⁷Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901–1915 (1958; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968), 3–44; Davis S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

⁸Bullock, History of Negro Education, 66 (quotation), 89–93; Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901–1915 (1958; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968), 75–92 ; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 20–23.

⁹Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Faustine Jones‐Wilson, A Traditional Model of Educational Excellence: Dunbar High School of Little Rock, Arkansas (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981).

¹⁰Historians increasingly understand Reconstruction as a battle for white supremacy in which terrorism was a central tool. See LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006); George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Thomas A. DeBlack, With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), esp. 174–233; and Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), esp. 23–43.

¹¹William H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); Anderson, Black Education in the South, esp. 791–99.

¹²Swint, Northern Teachers in the South, 1862–1870, 94–142. Other writers who took a similarly negative view of the teachers and blame the teachers for their dangerous meddling include Edgar W. Knight, “The ‘Messianic’ Invasion of the South after 1865,” School and Society 57 (5 June 1943): 645, 649; and Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 140.

¹³William Preston Vaughn, Schools for All: Blacks and Public Education in the South, 1865–1877 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 25–38, quotation p. 25. See also Bertram Wyatt‐Brown, “Black Schooling during Reconstruction,” in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education, ed. Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr. and Jon L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 146–65. Other recent historians have been more sympathetic to the teachers; see Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love; Linda B. Selleck, Gentle Invaders: Quaker Women Educators and Racial Issues during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1995); Butchart, “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.

¹⁴Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Viking, 2002); Cecelski, Along Freedom Road.

¹⁵ Liberator, April 8, 1864, 57; A.L. Snow to C.E. Compton, November 7, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives (hereafter cited as BRFAL); [Mary S. Osborne], “Among the Freedmen in Maryland. No. 5,” Zion’s Herald, March 14, 1866, 44; C.M. Cummings, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, January 1, 1866, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL; Jesse H. Rupert, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, March 1870, Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL; Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin (December 1866): 2.

¹⁶G. Bowles to D. Burt, November 22, 1866, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; Warren Norton to Louis W. Stevenson, March 8, 1870, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; [Friends’] Freedmen’s Record 1 (December 1865): 9; Jennie E. Howard to R.M. Manly, June 15, 1866, Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL; Edmonia G. Highgate to M. E. Strieby, December 17, 1866, Archives of the American Missionary Association, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (hereafter cited as AMA); Margaret S. Clark to F.A. Fiske, May 30, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL; Esther A. Christian, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, October 27, 1865, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL.

¹⁷Clarence Kenneth Gregory, “The Education of Blacks in Maryland: An Historical Survey,” (PhD dissertation, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1976), 154; Vaughn, Schools for All, 47; Horace James, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina. 1864 (Boston: W. F. Brown & Co., [1865]), 20–21; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 39; R.M. Manly to William George Hawkins, April 4, 1866, LS, Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL; C.F. Brim to “Free School Agent,” June 29, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL; T. McHugh, letter M160, September 19, 1871, 252, Register of LR, Vol. 1, Texas Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ms. 2–7/760, Texas State Archives; C.H. Prowell, letter P126, November 30, 1871, 309, ibid.; J.J. Strong to E.M. Cravath, August 14, 1871, AMA; New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, “Daily Journal, 18 May 1871–Sept 1873,” 111. New England Freedmen’s Aid Society Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society [hereafter cited as NEFAS Coll.]

¹⁸S. Daffin to J. Thompson, March 7, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; G.D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1873), 63–67; J.B.T. Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers, With their Songs, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, [1880]), 93–95; D.W. Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature or a Cyclopedia of Thought (Naperville, IL: J.L. Nichols, 1902), n.p.; Christian Recorder 6 (18 August 1866): 129; Daniel McGee, Teachers’ Monthly School Report, September 1868, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL; H.H. Burt to O.L. Sheppard, April 9, 1868, Register of LR, Supt. of Ed., Alabama, BRFAL; John W. Alvord, Seventh Semi‐Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, January 1869), 44; E. Gay to Charles A. Vernon, June 30, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Samuel Walker to James Thomson, March 9, 1869, ibid. (first quotation); H.E. Brown to E.M. Cravath, September 19, 1870, AMA; H.E. Brown to E.M. Cravath, October 13, 1870, AMA (second quotation).

¹⁹G. Bowles to D. Burt, November 22, 1866, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; William Payne, Teachers’ Monthly School Report, November 1867, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL; Jordan K. Parker to Dear Sir [H.C. Vogell], October 25, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL; H.C. Vogell to Parker, November 24, 1869, LS, ibid.; Thomas C. Griffin to Joseph Welch, September 9, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Louis W. Stevenson to C.S. Roberts, April, 26, 1869, ibid. (quotation).

²⁰Lawrence O. Christensen, “Schools for Blacks: J. Milton Turner in Reconstruction Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 76 (1982): 35; see also William Smith to “Sir,” November 22, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL.

²¹The bureau papers are filled with requests by teachers and agents applying for funds to replace schools destroyed by fire and describing the economic loss to the black community. See for example Alvord, Seventh Semi‐Annual Report, 12; Samuel Walker to James Thompson, March 9, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; H.H. Burt to O.L. Sheppard, April 9, 1868, Register of LR, Supt. of Ed., Alabama, BRFAL.

²²W.H. Stilwell to C.E. Compton, January 29, 1870, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL. In Virginia, an arsonist attempted to burn down the house in which teachers were sleeping: see Sarah Cadbury to John W. Cadbury, April 6, 1866, Sarah Cadbury Correspondence, Quaker Miscellany, Haverford College. See also, for example, Jessie H. Rupert, Teachers’ Monthly School Report, March 1870, Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL; Sarah A. Dickey to “My Dear Classmates,” March 4, 1872, Correspondence File; Dickey, Sarah A., Class of 1869, Alumnae File, Archives, Mount Holyoke College Library; Alvord, 7th Semi‐Annual Report, 46.

²³Edmonia G. Highgate to M.E. Strieby, December 17, 1866, AMA; Gregory, “Education of Blacks in Maryland,” 154; N.H. Randlett to Joseph Welch, LR, August 20, 1867, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Frank R. Chase to Lucius H. Warren, May 19, 1868, LR, Records of the Education Division, BRFAL; James Fitz Allen Sisson to J.R. Lewis, September 2, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL.

²⁴Thomas B. Barton to F.A. Fiske, March 24, 1867, Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL; Edwin Barnetson to Fredrick S. Palmer, August 11, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; Palmer to Barnetson, August 13, 1869, ibid.; R.M. Thompson to Palmer, August 28, 1869, ibid.; Mark Edwards to C.E. Compton, September 20, 1869, ibid.; N.H. Randlett to Joseph Welch, August 20, 1867, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Franklin Shelden to E.M. Gregory, May 15, 1866, Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Lemann, Redemption, 117–18; R.S. Rust to J.W. Alvord, May 28, 1869, LR, Records of the Ed. Div., BRFAL; Margaret S. Clark to F.A. Fiske, May 30, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL; Thomas C. Griffin to Joseph Welch, September 9, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; James Ramsay to Joseph Welch, September 29, 1869, ibid.; Daniel Broomfield to J.P. Beard, March 23, 1866, John Emory Bryant Papers, Duke University; New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, “Daily Journal, 18 May 1971–Sept 1873,” 5, NEFAS Coll.; Lewis A. Fuller, “Claimant’s affidavit,” December 14, 1897, Pension Certificate #l508403, Pension Bureau Files, Department of War, National Archives, Washington, DC.

²⁵A.W. Pegues, Our Baptist Ministers and Schools (Springfield, MA: Willey, 1892), 260; Lizzie A. Wilson to General Reynolds, November 16, 1868, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Alvord, 7th Semi‐Annual Report, 32; “Record of Schools,” 87, Miscellaneous Records, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32, 167; US Senate, On Alleged Frauds in the Recent Election in Mississippi, Senate Reports, 44 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 527 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1876), vol. 1, 483–90.

²⁶John Scott to C.C. Morse, February 23, 1866, Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL (first quotation); Samuel C. Sloan to Chauncy C. Morse, February 20, 1866, Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL (second quotation); M. O’Regan to E.M. Wheelock, September 30, 1866, in monthly “Report of Schools for Freedmen,” September 1866, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL (third quotation); “Sub‐Assistant Commissioner’s (or Agent’s) Monthly Report … for the Month of February, 1868…,” ibid.; John Scott to C.C. Morse, February 23, 1866, Unregistered LR, ibid.

²⁷Rable, But There Was No Peace, 33–58; longevity data derive from Butchart, Freedmen’s Teacher Project (see note 36).

²⁸On Steward, see Albert George Miller, Elevating the Race: Theophilus G. Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American Civil Religion, 1865–1924 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003).

²⁹T.G. Steward to E.M. Cravath, April 5, 1871, AMA; see also Caroline Alfred to Mrs Ednah Dow Cheney, April 4, 1875, NEFAS Coll.

³⁰William Aikman in Alvord, 7th Semi‐Annual Report, 12. On education in Reconstruction and Redemption, see, among others, Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 172–210; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), esp. 365–68, 422, 424.

³¹All claims regarding the profile of the freedmen’s teachers are drawn from analyses of the data collected in the Freedmen’s Teacher Project, directed by the author. The project attempted to identify as many as possible of the freedmen’s teachers by name, location taught and years of teaching; it then sought a broad range of prosopographic data on each teacher, including where they were from, their age when they began teaching, race, gender, education, occupation before and after teaching, military experience, total years teaching the freed people and other factors.

³²“Report of Freedmen’s Schools in North Carolina, For the month ending Feb. 28, 1866,” State Superintendent’s Monthly School Reports, August 1865–June 1869, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL (first quotation); Mary Bowers to F.A. Fiske, September 20, 1866, and Bowers to Fisk, October 10, 1866 [emphases in original; punctuation sic], Unregistered LR, Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BRFAL, (second quotation); see also testimony of William G. Bowers, Orange City, N.C., Report #7, Office # 507, Denied Claim, Papers of the Southern Claims Commission, National Archives, particularly response to question 19; W.H. Howard to Joseph Welch, August 26, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL (third quotation); Haughn to “My dear Sir” [probably Joseph Welch], March 24, 1869, ibid.; Orndorf to C.S. Roberts, March 22, 1869, and Orndorf to H.L. Dicks, May 23, 1869, ibid., (fourth quotation); among others, see also Silas Outlaw, “Teachers’ Monthly School Report,” October 1869, Supt. of Ed., Alabama, BRFAL; H.H. Mitchell, May 10, 1867, Register of LR, vol. 1, 84, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL; Thomas Collins, January 16, 1867, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; C.S. Roberts to J.T. Kirkman, August 23, 1867, ibid.; Charles Goldberg to Roberts, May 30, 1868, LR, ibid.; Charles F. Rand to Joseph Welch, June 30, 1868, ibid.; Roberts to Kirkman, August 23, 1867, ibid.

³³[US Army], Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department of the Gulf (New Orleans: True Delta, 1865), 7–12.

³⁴L.F. Drake to C.E. Compton, August 4, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL (first quotation); similarly, Dr W.W. Lewis, a native white physician teaching in Brunswick Co., Virginia, described public sentiment toward his school with one word: “Unfriendly.” W.W. Lewis, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, January 1869, Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL; Georgia A. Grimes to Superintendent of F.A. Society of M.E. Church, May 13, 1870, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL (second quotation); Grimes: 1860 census, Georgia., Heard Co., Franklin PO, 809/794, 781; 1870 census, Tenn., Wilson Co., Dist. 5, Lebanon PO, 160/160, 412; Robert P. Lindsey, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, June 1869, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL (third quotation) (Lindsey’s father had been a small planter, holding 10 enslaved African‐Americans in 1850, and 12 by 1860; by 1870, the family had lost over 90% of its prewar wealth; see 1850 Federal Slave Schedule, Georgia, Butts Co., Dist. 8, 780; 1860 Federal Slave Schedule, Georgia, Butts Co., Dublin District, 250; 1860 census, Ga., Butts Co., Dublin Dist., Indian Springs, 111/113, 117; 1870 census, Ga., Butts Co., Subdivision 13, Indian Springs, 829/841, 528. Lindsey had served in the 35th Georgia Infantry: Historical Data Systems, comp., American Civil War Soldiers [database online] (Provo, UT: The Generations Network, 1999); James W. Reese, Teacher’s Monthly School Report, April 1869, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL (fourth quotation); James W. Reese, Pension application filed in Morgan County, Georgia, 6 February 1902, Pension Applications and Supporting Documents, Pension Office, Record Group 58, Georgia Confederate Pensions and Records Department, Georgia State Archives.

³⁵F. Tolman to “Sir,” March 31, 1867, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL, (first quotation); William A. Jones to George W. Whipple, October 14, 1868, AMA (second quotation); American Missionary 13 (May 1869): 101; Am Miss 14 (June 1870): 128; Am Miss 15 (May 1871): 100; Am Miss 16 (May 1872): 100. Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 192, 196, misidentifies Jones as the William A. Jones who attended Oberlin College, graduating in 1857. Both were black, but the latter was a dentist by 1864, and made his fortune in British Columbia. Our William A. Jones was from Elmira, NY, where he had spent his life. In 1867 he went to Mississippi to teach, without a sponsoring agency; the following year he went to Darien, GA under AMA, then to Brazoria, TX, where he remained until at least 1872, when he was still listed on AMA’s rolls, though his school was receiving state support; it is highly likely that he continued to teach in Texas. See also, among many others, P.H. Gillen to J.R. Lewis, August 30, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL; J.W. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; or, the Centennial of African Methodism (New York: A.M.E. Zion Book Concern, 1895), 370–74; Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 15–16, 32, 165; Lemann, Redemption, 151; D.W. Culp, Twentieth Century Negro Literature, n.p.; Clarence Kenneth Gregory, “The Education of Blacks in Maryland: An Historical Survey” (EdD dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1976), 154; Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Twenty‐Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia: Records of Negro and Indian Graduates and Ex‐Students (Hampton: Normal School Press, 1893), 24; letter of S.G. Cross, American Freedman 2 (June 1868): 427; William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland, OH: Geo. M. Rewell & Co., 1887), 145; L.A. Scruggs, Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character (Raleigh, 1893), 359; Vaughn, Schools for All, 71–72; William Smith to “Sir,” November 22, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., BRFAL; H.S. Bennett to Michael E. Strieby, September 13, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Tennessee, BRFAL.

³⁶On southern indifference to black education, see James P. Butler, “Sub‐Assistant Commissioner’s (or Agent’s) Monthly Report … for the Month of February, 1868…,” Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; see also for example “Sub‐Assistant Commissioner’s (or Agent’s) Monthly Report … for the month of March 1868…,” Supt. of Ed., North Carolina, BFRFAL; Thomas Jackson, “Sub‐Assistant Commissioner’s (or Agent’s) Monthly Report … for the month of April 1868,” Supt. of Ed., Virginia, BRFAL. On occasional southern white support for black education, see Anthony Bryant to Charles Garretson, September 30, 1867, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; A.H. Mayer to J.T. Kirkman, May 10, 1867, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Mrs F.A.M. Shaver, Teachers’ Monthly School Reports, January 1870, Supt. of Ed., Alabama, BRFAL. On the economic desperation of some southern teachers, see for example Stacy Mayfield to Joseph Welch August, 13, 1869, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; W.H. Howard to Joseph Welch, August 26, 1868, LR, Supt. of Ed., Texas, BRFAL; Maria Cochrane to “Gentlemen,” March 30, 1864, Supt. of Ed., Louisiana, BRFAL; James Fitz Allen Sisson to J.R. Lewis, September 2, 1869, Supt. of Ed., Georgia, BRFAL.

³⁷Thomas Nast cartoon, October 1874, http://www.csubak.edu/~gsantos/img0053.html (retrieved July 9, 2007).

³⁸Bertram Wyatt‐Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Wyatt‐Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black–White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–43; Rable, But There Was no Peace; Friedman, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1970), esp. 3–76.

³⁹Butchart, “Remapping Racial Boundaries in Reconstruction: Teachers as Border Police and Boundary Transgressors in Post‐Emancipation Black Education, USA, 1861–1876,” Paedagogica Historica 43 (February 2007): 621–78.

⁴⁰Roberta Sue Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–67 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 154.

⁴¹US Senate, On Alleged Frauds, 488.