Been in the Storm So Long (104 page)

To redeem the oppressed, the ignorant, and the fallen was the finest kind of missionary work, and since the early days of Union occupation various evangelical and nonsectarian societies in the North had begun to dispatch teachers to the South to instruct the newly freed slaves in the ways of “civilization” and freedom. The American Missionary Association, the most prominent of these societies, set the proper tone for the entire missionary effort when it called upon its people in 1863 to take the freedmen “by the hand, to guide, counsel and instruct them in their new life, protect them from the abuses of the wicked, and direct their energies so as to make them useful to themselves, their families and their country.” Recognizing the stabilizing influence of education, as well as the demonstrated eagerness for it, the Freedmen’s Bureau made its best effort in this field of activity, providing materials, facilities, rations, transportation for teachers, and considerable encouragement and supervision, while the northern freedmen’s aid societies supplied and paid the teachers.
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Like the Union soldiers who preceded them, the missionary teachers and educators came to the South with a number of assumptions and expectations about the people they sought to elevate to a higher level of intellect and morality. The effects of a lifetime of bondage, they suspected, had dulled the minds of its victims, debased their morals, demeaned their character, destroyed their self-respect, and rendered them incapable of taking care of themselves. Marcia Colton, a missionary worker in Virginia, claimed that her conversations with returned missionaries from Africa and her previous familiarity with Negroes as slaves permitted her to minister to the freedmen “with more Charity, & less expectation” than most of her co-workers. “I did not expect to find with them generally, any nice distinction of propriety or Chastity.” Nor did Lydia Maria Child, a veteran abolitionist, think any of her friends who chose to teach in the South should harbor any false illusions about what they would find there. “I doubt whether we
can
treat our colored brethren
exactly
as we would if they were white, though it is desirable to do so. But we have kept their minds in a state of infancy, and children
must
be treated with more patience and forbearance than grown people.” Much like their antislavery antecedents, the freedmen’s aid societies, as “the wisest and best friends” of the Negro, refused to claim that the African race was the equal of the Anglo-Saxon. But neither would they concede that blacks were necessarily inferior.
“They simply assert that the negro must be accorded an opportunity for development before his capacity for development can be known.” This was, of course, sound abolitionist gospel, steeped in the conviction of antebellum reform that untrammeled individual development alone should determine place in society.
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For many of the missionary teachers, this was their first visit to the South, and the initial impressions they formed of the blacks they encountered would tap a wide range of emotions. At the outset, the sheer numbers, blackness, and demeanor of these people would have to be absorbed. Elizabeth Botume, for one, tried hard.

Although experience would force the teachers to revise some of the assumptions they brought with them to the South, what they espied in the condition and moral deportment of the freed slaves tended to confirm the previous image of “helpless grown up children” with well-developed habits of indolence, dependency, and licentiousness and skilled in the arts of deception and thievery. But like any good abolitionist, the missionary teacher regarded these vices as the natural consequences of a lifetime of slavery, not innate racial characteristics. If these people were childlike, that was because they had been denied the necessary tools for development. If they were sometimes thieves, they had acquired the habit to supplement their meager rations. If they were easily led into unchastity, they had only modeled their behavior after their masters’. If they dissembled and shielded each other, they had developed those arts in order to survive. If they were ragged and dirty in appearance, they had “lived so long in a filthy condition they don’t know what it is to be clean.” Besides, much of what the teachers saw seemed almost surprisingly familiar, and they were quick to compare the freedmen with the Irish who inhabited the northern cities. After noting that the southern blacks looked “wretched and stupid,” a Boston teacher in South Carolina added that “to those who are accustomed to many Irish faces, these except by their
uniformity
c[oul]d suggest few new ideas of low humanity.”
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Even if the first impressions tended to confirm expectations, that did not always diminish the shock or revulsion a number of the teachers experienced in their daily encounters with the freedmen. “It is
one
thing to sit in ones office or drawing room and weave fine spun theories in regard to the Negro character,” a teacher wrote from Beaufort, North Carolina, “but it is quite another to come into actual contact with him. I fail to see those
beauties and excellencies, and the ‘Uncle Toms,’ that some do. Is it reasonable, in short, to suppose that people brought up, or rather who have come up under such influences, would be altogether lovely.” That was the kind of observation a Mary Chesnut might have pounced upon to prove her point that northern reformers dealt best with their wards at a distance. What she may not have been prepared for, however, was how these missionary teachers would act upon their feelings of shock and dismay. The more they saw and experienced, in fact, the more many of them came to believe that there could be no greater missionary field anywhere in the world; the shock and dismay many of them confessed to only seemed to heighten their sense of purpose, even driving them into outbursts of sheer exultation over their work. “The prattle of infancy has always been pleasant to me,” one teacher wrote, “yet to live in daily communion with two or three hundred of this infant race, to watch the latent fires of intelligence in their first development, is happiness.” No less inspired, a teacher in Louisiana found himself “happy when surrounded with their dusky faces and glistening eyes”; a teacher in South Carolina found her work to be “a joy and glory for which there are not words”; a teacher in North Carolina claimed to have overcome in two months the doubts and “personal antipathies” with which she began her mission; and a teacher in Virginia reported, “I think I shall stay here as long as I live, and teach this people. I have no love or taste for any other work, and am happy only here with them.”
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Neither the magnitude nor the complexity of the task they faced seemed nearly as awesome to the missionary teachers and educators as the opportunity to stamp their image on nearly four million newly freed slaves. “We can make them all that we desire them to be,” exulted a teacher in New Bern, North Carolina. That thought alone helped to sustain the northern emissaries in their daily labors and to overcome the disappointments and frustrations they would experience. To make the freedmen “all that we desire them to be” was to instruct them not only in the spelling book and the gospel but in every phase of intellectual and personal development—in the virtues of industry, self-reliance, frugality, and sobriety, in family relations and moral responsibility, and, most importantly, in how to conduct themselves as free men and women interacting with those who had only recently held them as slaves. In seeking to enlist the support of a prominent planter in his district, a freedmen’s educator in North Carolina phrased educational objectives in such a way as to disarm any potential critics.

Both the northern societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized the value of education in preparing the blacks for practical life, and neither would have understood the need to draw any distinctions between teaching freedmen to read and write and making productive free laborers of them. The education of the freedmen, as many a school official argued, should in fact be designed to ensure their diligence and faithfulness in the workplace. Any teacher, then, might be called upon to lecture the blacks on the need to comply with the terms of labor contracts. When field hands in the Sea Islands grew restive over a recent wage settlement, Laura Towne, along with several other teachers, found herself “borrowed and driven to the different plantations to talk to and appease the eager anxiety.” For the few teachers who felt ill-used when asked to perform such duties, the resentment might manifest itself in spending more time teaching the freedmen how to protect themselves from unscrupulous employers who manipulated figures and the language of contracts to keep their workers in perpetual debt. Had only more teachers addressed themselves to such concerns, a black North Carolinian argued some years later, the difficulties encountered by freedmen in the making and enforcing of contracts might have been minimized. “What we want among freedmen,” he added, “is an education that will not only look after their immortality, but also their corporeity. The denomination that will bless the freedmen most is the one that looks most after soul and body.”
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Although priorities differed among individual teachers, many of them did feel compelled not only to impart universal middle-class values but to attack the special deficiencies they perceived in a people who had been denied the barest rudiments of learning. Based on their assessment of the needs of their students, that would entail instruction in the days of the week, the months, weights, measures, and monetary values, how to calculate their ages, the shape of the world, proper forms of address, and the history of mankind. “Suffice it to say,” the Reverend Henry M. Turner counseled prospective teachers and missionaries, “they need instruction in every thing, and especially the little things of life, such points of attention as thousands would never stoop to surmise.” Moreover, a people “who had never had a country to love” needed to be taught sentiments of patriotism and an appreciation of how they came to be freed. Rather than separate such lessons from the basic skills of reading and writing, teachers would invariably combine them, much as the primers they used did. Through appropriate readings, songs, and exercises, positive moral and patriotic images would be implanted in the minds of the pupils. In teaching the alphabet, each letter might introduce a couplet conveying some moral or
value, and in at least one instance an elderly black student composed his own twenty-six verses, with the letters “G,” “K,” and “Q,” for example, communicating thoughts few of his classmates could have failed to comprehend.

Similarly, teachers devised dialogues which their pupils would memorize and then often recite to visitors, and many of these consisted of historical lessons with an undisguised New England bias.

To succeed in the classroom, many teachers felt they needed only to capitalize on the eagerness with which their pupils had grasped the opportunity to come to them. If additional incentives were deemed necessary, instructors and school officials were apt to differ whether or not these should be largely psychological, material, or corporal. To impress upon his students the need to learn their lessons well, a teacher in North Carolina warned them that they were being watched closely by enemies who wished to see the entire experiment in black education fail. Edwin S. Williams, teaching in St. Helena Village, South Carolina, claimed success in using more substantial rewards to emphasize certain lessons, as in accompanying “a piece of beef with an injunction to make it relish by industry,” or by providing the pupils with extra molasses while giving them “a vigorous stirring up about their smoky rooms & dirty clothes.” Nevertheless, some teachers frankly confessed their inability to maintain classroom discipline, and others felt their effectiveness impaired by the need to teach large numbers of pupils of various ages and grade levels in the same room. “I acknowledge that it was
not
a very pleasant one,” a black teacher wrote of her first day in the classroom. “Part of my scholars are very tiny,—babies, I call them—and it is hard to keep them quiet and interested while I am hearing the larger ones.”
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Traditionally, teachers seldom hesitated to mete out a sound thrashing to enforce their authority and maximize their instruction. But corporal punishment might have a very different meaning for a former slave than for a white youth, and that consideration alone prompted some freedmen’s school officials to forbid it. The reports of teachers, however, suggest that this prohibition was neither universally obeyed nor respected. In Charleston, a teacher insisted that whipping a freedman in the classroom could not be compared with whipping a slave in the field, especially if “a kind and serious talk” with the recalcitrant pupil followed the thrashing. That, she observed, “seems to astonish them into good behavior, for they appear to have been accustomed to threats rather than kindness, and have been driven to feel that anger rather than love governed those who whipped them.” Whether deservedly or not, black teachers were reputed to be the harshest disciplinarians, and some of them refused to be defensive about it. After all, a black teacher in New Orleans noted, many of his pupils had been plantation slaves and consequently knew no motive for obedience other than fear of punishment. “Coax ’em and they’ll laugh at you; you’ve got to knock ’em about, or they won’t think you’ve got any power over ’em.” Nor were black parents necessarily averse to seeing their children punished, if necessary to instill proper learning habits, but they made it clear that they would tolerate a whipping only if meted out by “a Yankee teacher” and not by a native white.
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