Been in the Storm So Long (107 page)

The problem did not lie in liaisons between Yankee schoolmarms and black men, for these were rare. But the question of social intercourse between teachers and freedmen outside the classroom and how far professed principles needed to be compromised to appease native whites surfaced frequently enough to become divisive issues within the ranks of the freedmen’s aid movement. Nor were those who challenged the wisdom of such fraternization necessarily any less zealous in their efforts to educate the freedman or less dedicated to the ideal of equal rights. This was a matter of tactics, they insisted, not principle. Few stated the view more clearly than G. L. Eberhart, superintendent of the freedmen’s schools in Georgia and also a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. To disarm the white critics, he maintained, “[w]e must be governed in this work by great prudence, and, so far as we possibly can without any compr[om]ise of principle, or conflict with truth, be controlled by policy and expediency.” It was not a matter of rights but of whether the exercise of those rights helped or hindered the cause to which they had dedicated themselves in the South.

For Eberhart, this was no abstract issue; he voiced his views in a letter requesting the transfer of several teachers under his jurisdiction who, in
his estimation, had exceeded “the limits of prudence and propriety.” Among them was a teacher who had “totally disqualified” herself, not only by her arrogant manner in and out of the classroom but by the easy familiarity she had assumed with the blacks, totally disregarding local feelings and customs. “For a white Northern lady here to kiss a colored child is very
imprudent
to say the least of it, and, in reply to an insulting remark made by a white person, to say that the negroes are as good as that white person, is
entirely unnecessary.
”
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Although some of Eberhart’s associates in the educational movement might have chosen to be more circumspect in voicing their views on this delicate matter, few of them would have denied the logic or the necessity of his position. To listen to some of the missionary educators, the initial call of their societies to take the black man “by the hand” was to be exercised with considerable restraint. Any ostentatious display of affection for the freedmen or violation of local racial codes suggested, in their view, self-indulgence rather than genuine commitment to the cause and helped neither the blacks nor the image of the teacher. But to advise teachers, as did one educational officer, to “conform to local customs and practices wherever such conformity will not compromise principle” was to invite disagreement and controversy over the precise point at which principle had been compromised. Rather than submit to an order that she refrain from social intercourse with blacks outside the school (such as receiving them in the parlor or eating or walking with them), Martha L. Kellogg, a teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, requested a new assignment, even if it be “an isolated position.” And if she could be boarded with a black family in her new post, that would be all the better. “I desire not [to] be identified with any policy that ignores or repudiates social equality, and I desire to be, where I can act freely in the matter, according to conscience and the gospel idea—to treat the colored people as I should whites in the same circumstances.… It seems to me that unless one engaged in mission work does feel this freedom, true effort is in a measure paralysed.”
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Any veteran of the antislavery movement, remembering those abolitionists who made a point of parading their fraternization with blacks before a hostile northern public, would have recognized the problem instantly. He would have recalled how that question had plagued them throughout their history, producing divisiveness and even sundering numerous friendships. He might have named the prominent abolitionists who despite their zealous commitment to the cause, or because of it, scorned social relations with Negroes as impolitic and detrimental to the objectives for which both white and black activists fought. But for those who chose to question such tactics, whether in the abolitionist movement or in the freedmen’s aid movement, the implications remained absolutely clear. Would not the measures deemed necessary to make the movement palatable to a hostile public reinforce the very conditions and attitudes the movement had initially set out to undermine? That question defied any easy resolution in the 1860s, much as it had in antislavery circles before the war.
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Having struggled through such problems in the old antislavery days, and eager to bury the sources of divisiveness, Lewis Tappan, who had made the transition from abolitionism to the freedmen’s aid movement, drew upon his experience to advise prospective missionary teachers in the South.

No matter how well-intended the advice, this veteran abolitionist failed to appreciate the still larger problem that would surface again in the postwar years and, even more forcefully, during Radical Reconstruction. For all of its good works and sacrifices, the freedmen’s aid movement, like its anti-slavery predecessor, did little to reduce the dependency of blacks on white men and women for counsel and leadership. While Tappan was sharing his thoughts and experience with the white missionary teachers destined for the South, Richard H. Cain, the black minister, who would soon set out on that same pilgrimage, also drew on the past to urge that the traditional relationship between white and black reformers be reexamined. “We know how to serve others,” the Reverend Cain observed in early 1865, “but, have not learned how to serve ourselves.”

With emancipation, such questions assumed a new and critical importance. Few understood that more clearly than the Reverend Cain. If southern blacks needed instruction in how to act as free men and women, he suggested, both northern and southern blacks were desperately in need of experience “in the affairs of direction and government.” The church and the schoolhouse seemed like ideal places in which to begin this necessary training. “We must take into our own hands the education of our race.… Honest, dignified whites may teach ever so well, it has not the effect to exalt the black man’s opinion of his own race, because they have always been in the habit of seeing white men in honored positions, and respected.” Anticipating by nearly half a century W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for a “talented tenth” of educated, professional blacks whose leadership and example would help to uplift the mass of their people, the Reverend Cain, on the eve
of his departure for Charleston, envisaged “an infusion of the intellectual development of the Northern colored men and women” into the South.

B
EFORE THE MISSIONARY SOCIETIES
had dispatched their first schoolmarms to the South, and even as Union Army officers wrestled with the legal status of the contrabands, southern blacks had taken the first steps to teach themselves. Some of these pioneers belonged to the free Negro class, but among the early teachers were also newly freed or escaped slaves who had managed to acquire some rudimentary skills and now sought to share their knowledge with the less fortunate. In Hampton, Virginia, an elderly black who had been a slave of ex-President John Tyler opened a school in the basement of the abandoned Tyler mansion, while in that same neighborhood Mary Peake, a free Negro who had taught clandestinely before the war, seized the opportunity afforded by Union occupation to expand her teaching to include the newly created class of contrabands. “Some say we have not the same faculties and feelings with white folks,” one of her pupils would observe. “What would the best soil produce without cultivation? We want to get wisdom. That is all we need. Let us get that, and we are made for time and eternity.”
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The migration of black teachers from the North would gain headway later in the war, most of them the agents of black churches and the freedmen’s aid societies. Charlotte Forten, who had previously taught school in New England and whose father had been active in the cause of black abolitionism and civil rights, accompanied the mostly white contingent of missionary teachers from Philadelphia to the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where she would spend nearly two years imparting not only basic reading and writing skills to her pupils but also an appreciation for the achievements of their race. “Talked to the children a little while to-day about the noble Toussaint [L’Ouverture],” she noted in her journal. “They listened very attentively. It is well that they sh’ld know what one of their color c’ld do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage and ambition (of a noble sort,) and high purpose.” Perhaps more typical of the black missionary teachers was Virginia C. Green, who came to the Wood’s plantation, on Davis Bend, Mississippi, where she set about organizing classes for 120 children. The freedmen sustained the school, four trustees chosen from
among them controlled its operations, and in Miss Green they appear to have found a dedicated teacher. “I class myself with the freedmen,” she wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. “Though I have never known servitude they are … my people. Born as far north as the lakes I have felt no freer because so many were less fortunate.… I look forward with impatience to the time when my people shall be strong, blest with education, purified and made prosperous by virtue and industry. The people on the plantation where I have labored I see tending slowly but steadily to this point.”
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Not all the blacks who taught in the postwar South would have qualified for membership in Richard H. Cain’s projected black intellectual elite. Fortunately for the Reverend Cain, who assumed a pastorate in Charleston, the individual who answered to the fullest his call for a talented elite to descend upon the South chose to settle in the same city. The credentials of Francis L. Cardozo were, indeed, impressive, exceeding those of most of the white teachers and superintendents. A freeborn mulatto, reputedly the son of a prominent Charleston economist and editor, Cardozo attended the University of Glasgow (from which he graduated with distinction), studied theology in Edinburgh and London, and returned to the United States to serve as pastor of the Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut. Within weeks after the fall of Charleston, he resigned his pastorate to return to his native city as the principal of a Negro school operated under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. A complex and ambitious person, who found it difficult to brook any criticism, Cardozo shared with many of the white school officials a relatively low estimation of black teachers—at least in their present state of preparation. Presumably, the several blacks he employed on his own staff must have been distinguished, since Cardozo took considerable care in the selection and assignment of teachers and vowed to hire no blacks rather than one who might “disgrace” the entire cause. “I have placed the educated and experienced white Northern teachers in the highest and most responsible positions,” he informed a northern AMA official, “and the colored ones in the lower and less responsible ones, where they may improve by the superiority of their
white
fellow-laborers, and whose positions afterwards they may be able to occupy.” When subsequently confronted by two northern black teachers with his previously expressed preference for whites, Cardozo replied that he had always insisted upon competence in his staff members, regardless of color, and any reports to the contrary should be squelched since “it would hurt my influence very much.”
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