The Georgia Social Studies Journal
Winter 2013, Volume 3, Number 1, pp. 7-15
Georgia Council for the Social Studies
Courage in the classroom: When teachers faced violence and worse
for their activism and advocacy on behalf of black freedom
Ronald E. Butchart
University of Georgia
Where do activist teachers turn to find examples of activist teaching? Teaching toward
social justice appeals to many social studies teachers, but what do we know of those who have
sought to extend social justice through their classrooms in the past? Do teachers who advocate for
their students and for a transformative curriculum have role models—even heroes—to whom they
can turn for inspiration and solace? Teachers’ shelves are filled with books that call on them to
embrace activism and advocacy, to teach for social justice, but what does history have to say about
such teaching and about such teachers? Can we find assurance that our efforts matter?
School teachers and their teaching practices are seldom the focus of historians’ attention or
the subjects of their narratives. When they have written about teachers in the last three or four
decades, they have tended to focus on the influence of gender in the U.S.’s teacher corps1 or on
processes of teacher professionalization and unionization.2 Some have worried about, or
celebrated, the changing patterns of teacher education.3 Too often, historians have told nostalgic
stories of individual intrepid teachers, usually on one frontier or another, without asking what
those intrepid teachers might have been teaching toward; virtually none of those teachers were
advocates or activists for much of anything beyond literacy, punctuality, and order.4 None of those
lines of historical inquiry shed light on what it meant historically to engage in social justice teaching
or in educational activism or advocacy.
There is one exception to those observations. The work and lives of one group of teachers
has generated enough books and articles to fill a long shelf. Every historian who has dealt with
them would agree that they were activists and advocates, though historians disagree, often quite
sharply, in their judgments about their activism and advocacy.
They were known as the freedmen’s teachers, those thousands of teachers who entered the
first schoolhouses built by the freed slaves of the American South. They taught in the fifteen years
between the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 and the collapse of Reconstruction. In those few years,
hundreds of thousands of African Americans who had been systematically and often brutally denied
access to literacy sought an end to their ignorance. Southern blacks, acting even before Union
forces had gained the first toehold on southern soil, created schools, found teachers, begged for
books, and let the world know they intended to be free of illiteracy just as they intended to be free
of slavery.5
The great socialist intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, was the first historian to take serious note
of the freedmen’s teachers. His poetic vision of them and their work remains classic:
Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and
after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor
they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more
than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the
white and black of the South. They did their work well.6
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Thirty years later, in his massive study of Reconstruction, Du Bois spoke of freedmen’s education as
the crowning achievement of Reconstruction. The post-Civil War educational advancement of
African Americans, “helped by the Abolitionists, was phenomenal...,” he wrote, “the gift of New
England to the black South.”7
Those two passages largely fixed the portrait of the teachers for most of the twentieth
century. For most subsequent historians, the teachers were young, female abolitionists from New
England, and by implication, activists and advocates of black schooling and public education. Many
of Du Bois’ contemporaries, however, read very different meanings into that portrait. Southern
white historians saw abolitionists as mindless zealots who had caused a needless war and poisoned
southern race relations; the notion of the teachers as youthful females, understood as immature
and in need of proper guidance, deepened the negativity those historians imputed to the teachers
and their work. Had New Englanders not crowded the field of southern black education, they
wrote, the “natural friends” of the former slaves would have welcomed the opportunity to be their
teachers. Activists and advocates, those historians were certain, but they were also certain that
they were activists for a mistaken, perhaps venal, cause, advocates for an education designed to
foment black hatred against southern whites, whether former slave owners or non-slaveholding
whites. The teachers were not engaged in social justice work; they were engaged in humiliating
and punishing the South for slavery and the Civil War.8
Working from the same portrait, the generation of historians who grew up with the modern
Civil Rights movement, the youth movement, the feminist movement, and the ideals of the Peace
Corps, took sharp exception to the interpretation of those southern white historians. Returning to
Du Bois, but adding much more detail to the story of the freedmen’s teachers, historians in the
latter quarter of the twentieth century characterized the teachers as “soldiers of light and love,”
“gentle invaders,” and the “real heroes of their age.”9 For them, abolitionists bore a proud heritage
as defenders of African Americans; youthfulness equated to idealism of the best sort; a
predominantly female teacher corps spoke to a proto-feminism.10 The teachers were courageous
activists for black emancipation and steadfast advocates for a liberatory curriculum in southern
black schools. They were on the right side of history, engaged in a solemn battle for social justice
for women and men who had suffered through two and a half centuries of human bondage.11
End of story? Do we turn to those young women from Connecticut and Vermont, Maine and
Massachusetts, for historical examples of advocacy and activism? Who were they, really? How did
their activism actually play itself out “on the ground?” What sorts of curriculum and pedagogy did
they advocate? What did their concern for social justice mean in their classrooms and in their lives
beyond the classroom? What if Du Bois did not intend for his poetic rendering to accurately depict
the entire corps of freedmen’s teachers; what if subsequent historians failed to study the teachers
closely enough?
Such questions, raised in the last few years, have yielded a far more complex picture of the
teachers who worked in the early southern black schools. It was true that the white teachers from
the North were more frequently female than male, about two to one, but of the entire group of
teachers in the early black schools, men slightly outnumbered women. What is more surprising is
that nearly fifteen percent of the northern teachers were not white, they were black. Given that
African Americans made up only two percent of the northern teachers, black teachers were
overrepresented by a factor of seven.12
Another striking fallacy in the traditional portrait of the freed people’s teachers is that more
than half were southerners, both black and white. The majority of the southern white teachers
were men; a striking minority of those had served in the Confederate Army, fighting to preserve
slavery and quite possibly wearing their Confederate uniforms into black classrooms. They were
certainly not advocates of black emancipation and a liberatory curriculum. Some explicitly spoke of
the necessity to occupy black classrooms to keep Yankee teachers from spreading ideas of social
equality; others made it clear that the only reason they would even darken the door of a black
8
Butchart, R. E.
school was because of their extreme poverty. Too often, southern white teachers were advocates
for white supremacy and activists for an early end to Reconstruction and a return to something as
close to slavery as could be managed.13
On the other hand, slightly more than half of all southern teachers were African Americans
who spoke of their desire to participate in assuring the fullest possible emancipation of their
people. Many were not well educated themselves, not surprisingly; it had long been established law
in the South that African Americans should not be taught. They had, for the most part, stolen their
literacy. Still, they knew more than their students and could share what they knew. They modeled
advocacy. They embodied activism. Their very presence as teachers in schools that, just years
prior, were illegal, must have spoken volumes to their students.14
Arguably, to be an authentic advocate, activist, and champion of social justice requires
dedication to the work. Thus, it is telling to learn that most of the teachers in the freed people’s
schools did not manage to spend very long in those schools. Southern white teachers were gone in
less than two years; the typical northern white teachers taught for less than two and a half years.15
Engaging in the deeply unpopular work of teaching former slaves certainly required a
measure of courage and self-sacrifice, but that may not equate to activism and advocacy on behalf of
a people just freed from slavery. Reading the teachers’ diaries and letters sheds light on questions
about their motivations and their understandings of the political and economic needs of the freed
people; connecting their words with their actions “on the ground” can be even more telling. Oddly
enough, of the hundreds of extant letters of application to northern groups that supported the
teachers, many made no mention of the freed people at all. H. C. Sanford, for example, applied for a
teaching position “under the long-settled determination to consecrate myself to the work of the
Lord in what ever way I could do most good....” That motivation kept him teaching the freed people
of Portsmouth, Virginia, for fewer than six months.16 John C. Tucker’s motivation was even more
self-referential: “My greatest desire is to do all the good I can while I live,” he wrote in 1864, “so that
as I advance in years I may be able to look back upon a life well spent to feel that I have been the
means of doing some good to my fellow men around me.” He taught for three terms in Louisiana.17
Even when applicants made reference to the freed people as the object of the work, the
commitment to them was equivocal. Eliza Twitchell, for instance, wrote that she was “very
anxious” to make herself useful in black education, but added that if the American Missionary
Association had no place for her in its schools, “I would accept of any situation you saw fit to give
me.”18
If many of the letters from the freed people’s teachers expressed little interest in the freed
people themselves before the teachers began their work, their diaries, written while they were
teaching, often betray a similar silence about their students, about their classrooms, and about what
they thought they were teaching toward. The diaries reveal much about the teachers’ social lives,
their curiosity about southern vegetation and wildlife, and their commentaries on their living
quarters. The lack of reflection on their daily work and its relationship to emancipation,
reconstruction, or the vast social injustice playing itself out around them, is eerie.19
It appears, then, that we should not turn to the nearly twelve thousand teachers who
worked in the freed people’s schools before 1876 to find models of activism and advocacy, much
less social justice pedagogy. On the other hand, it was doubtlessly naive to expect to find an entire
corps of teachers all seeking the same ends for their work. A closer look at the freedmen’s teachers
reveals an important counter-narrative, a different set of motivations and commitments. For an
important, committed minority of the teachers, black freedom, to be realized in the South in the
midst of a defeated, angry, embittered people, was the central educational problem. These were
teachers whose activism led them to spend long years, often amounting to decades and even full
lifetimes, in underfunded schools, teaching impoverished but intellectually hungry black students.
These were teachers whose advocacy for the black community and its needs remained strong in the
face of terrorism and violence. These were the teachers who matched their pedagogy and
9
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curriculum to the imperatives of black emancipation even as the nation bent its entire political
force to “reforge” the white republic, sacrificing Reconstruction and African Americans on the alter
of racial reconciliation after the Civil War.20
They were African American men and women, like the Highgate family from Syracuse, New
York. Three of them were teaching in the South by the end of the war; within five years, all six
living members of the family were establishing schools and teaching in Mississippi. The youngest
son, William Highgate, continued teaching until 1906, including thirteen years as president of the
black state normal school in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Sally Daffin, a graduate of Philadelphia’s
famous Institute for Colored Youth, established schools at many locations in the South, turning
them over to other black teachers once they were operating well. She taught for at least two
decades. Oberlin College-educated Sarah Jane Woodson Early administered southern black schools
for twenty years. Martha Briggs Bailey, an experienced teacher from Newport, Rhode Island, was a
teacher, principal, and Howard University faculty member from 1866 to her death in 1889. William
Gaston, a native of Huntsville, Alabama, became an officer in the U.S. Colored Troops during the
Civil War. After the war he returned to Huntsville to establish a school that he operated for more
than forty years. Such stories could be multiplied many times over; at least 370 black teachers who
started teaching in the 1860s taught for at least a decade, many for much longer.21
And they were white women like Laura Towne and Ellen Murray who established a school
for the freed people on the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1862 and remained in it without a break
until their deaths, Towne in 1902 and Murray in 1908. They insisted on a curriculum no different
from that given to any white child and taught year-round in order to be available to the students
whenever they could attend. They extended their schooling to the secondary level when South
Carolina refused to provide secondary education to its black citizens, and folded teacher education
into their curriculum to provide well-educated black teachers for the state. In addition to teaching,
Towne also worked as a public school trustee, advocating for greater support for black schools and
mentoring the area’s young black teachers.22
Or they were white women like Caroline F. Putnam and Sallie Holley, working in the school
that Putnam created in Lottsburg, Virginia, in 1868. They continued their labors there for life,
advising the black community on land ownership and political issues and teaching a rich, flexible
curriculum that gave particular attention to the lives and accomplishments of Africans and African
Americans. Holley died in 1893, but Putnam continued to teach, advise, and advocate until 1903
when she stepped aside to allow younger women to take over the school. She continued to live at
her school to her death in 1917, assisting with administrative duties and attending to the needs of
Lottsburg’s African Americans. She remained an activist for black rights on the national stage as
well, an uncompromising critic of Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s racial gradualism at Hampton
Institute and of Booker T. Washington and the accommodationism of his Tuskegee Institute.
Dozens of similar stories could be told of white teachers who gave lifetimes of service in southern
black schools. At least two hundred who began teaching in the 1860s remained in their schools at
least a full decade.23
These teachers, the authentic advocates and activists for black emancipation through
education, spoke very differently about their purposes and motivations than did most of the
teachers. The black teachers spoke in race-conscious terms in which the imperative of black
freedom was paramount. Hezekiah Hunter, one of the first teachers to enter Savannah, Georgia,
after it surrendered, asserted that black teachers “best can instruct our own people, knowing our
own peculiarities—needs—necessities.... I believe we ... owe it to our people to teach them as our
specialty.” He, his wife, and his three daughters taught for more than two decades in Georgia,
Missouri, and Louisiana; two of his daughters and a grandson were still teaching in Louisiana in
1900.24 Robert and Cicero Harris, whose school became North Carolina Colored Normal School,
sought “the elevation of our long oppressed race,” a goal they pursued for a combined 35 years.25
10
Butchart, R. E.
Edmonia Highgate, the first of her family to leave Syracuse for the South, hoped that her school was
“hastening the equalization of political and social recognition of manhood irrespective of color.”26
The minority of the northern white teachers who dedicated long careers to the education of
freed slaves also spoke differently about their work than the majority of the teachers. Rather than
vague platitudes about being of service or hoping for “more stars in my crown of rejoicing” as a
result of their efforts, these teachers spoke of their certainty that, through education, the freed
people could no longer “be subdued or held back from their rights,” or “hoped to lend a hand
toward undoing our country’s great wrong.”27 Twelve years into her forty year career in black
education, Laura Towne wrote, “My work is trying to fit them to themselves speak the word which
the world shall hear & believe....”28 Jane Briggs Smith, writing from her school in Hilton Head, South
Carolina to her fiancé in Massachusetts, explained that through northern support for schools such
as hers, “legal justice may be done; then social justice will follow in time: not soon, perhaps not for
generations, but in time.” Almost presciently, she added, “And it must be done, or the consequences
will be terrible beyond conception.”29
To be an activist and advocate for social justice through black education in the 1860s and
1870s required much more than dedication and commitment. It also demanded fierce courage and
unending sacrifice. These teachers’ work, both in the classroom and in the community, put them at
odds with all the brutal power the white South could muster. To teach toward black freedom was
to court intimidation, isolation, incendiarism, violence, and even death. Scores of schoolhouses
were burned down, often with the threat that, if rebuilt, they would be burned again with the
teacher inside. Teachers were harassed, intimidated, threatened, shot at, and beaten. Martha
Schofield, who established a school in Aiken, South Carolina in 1866 and taught there to her death
in 1916, faced down a Ku Klux Klan mob on her doorstep in the 1870s. Sarah Dickey, the founder
and long-time principal of Mount Hermon Seminary, a black women’s school in Mississippi
patterned after her alma mater, Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts, grew accustomed to
shots being fired through her door. Lewis A. Fuller, a northern black teacher in Baton Rouge for
seven years, was finally driven out of the South in 1876 after seven of his neighbors were hanged or
shot.30
Stories such as these were too common: Two black teachers in Dresden, Tennessee, were
awakened at gunpoint, roped together at the neck and “dragged more than a mile into the woods”
where twelve men took turns beating them “with whips and heavy rods....” After they were
released, they were ordered “to run and as they fled they were followed by a volley of bullets.”31 P.
H. Gillen, a white southern teacher in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, “was taken out in the night,
whipped nearly to death, and forced to leave” because he opened a school for the freed people.32
Even more horrific was the case of William and Alzina Haffa, Philadelphians who moved to
Mississippi in the late 1860s to take up farming. The local freed people begged them to open a
school and they soon had two in operation. In 1875, their house was raided by a large group of
white men who mortally wounded William. They held Alzina at gunpoint while they watched
William for several hours as he bled out. They then forced her to bury him and leave the state.
William Haffa was one of six teachers known to have been assassinated for facilitating literacy to
Reconstruction African Americans.33
The stories of this remarkable group of teachers demonstrate that activism and advocacy
has a long and distinguished history. They provide examples and inspiration, but they also tell us
that advocacy and activism is hard, daunting work. They tell us that to merely teach well is never
enough, that one must have the courage and intention to teach toward justice, emancipation, and
freedom. They teach us that teaching is never about us; it is always about the students we teach
and the world we hope they can construct. Their examples demonstrate that it is insufficient to say,
“I want to make a difference.” They ask us across these many decades, “What difference do you
want to make?” Those former Confederate soldiers who occupied black classrooms made a
difference; the teachers who taught to assure their own salvation made a difference; those whose
11
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brief year in black classrooms were most memorable for Spanish moss and moonlight rides with
dashing military officers made a difference. Few of them made a difference that approximated the
“social justice” Jane Briggs Smith spoke of and intentionally taught toward; some intended quite the
opposite, and they, too, made a difference.
The history of black education in the South tells us that the work of a small band of
committed teachers mattered; had they not established elementary schools, secondary schools,
normal schools, and colleges across the South, the condition of black America today would
doubtlessly be much worse than it is. But that subsequent history also reminds us that the struggle
for justice does not always end in favor of the just.
Notes
1
See, for example, Geraldine Joncich Clifford, “Man/Woman/Teacher: Gender, Family, and Career
in American Educational History,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed.
Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989), 293-343;Thomas Morain,
“Departure of Males from the Teaching Profession in Nineteenth-Century Iowa,” Civil War
History 26 (June 1980): 161-70; John G. Richardson and Brenda Wooden Hatcher, “The
Feminization of Public School Teaching, 1870-1920,” Work and Occupations 10 (February
1983): 81-99; John Rury, “Gender, Salaries and Career: American Teachers 1900-1910,” Issues
in Education 4 (Winter 1986): 215-35; Myra H. Strober and Audri Gordon Lanford, “The
Feminization of Public School Teaching: Cross-Sectional Analysis, 1850-1880,” Signs 11 (Winter
1986): 212-35.
2
Among others, see Marvin Lazerson, “Teachers Organize: What Margaret Haley Lost,” History of
Education Quarterly 24 (1984): 261-70; Karen Leroux, “‘Lady Teachers’ and the Genteel Roots
of Teacher Organization in Gilded Age Cities,” History of Education Quarterly 46 (Summer
2006): 164-91; Margorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Joseph W. Newman and Wayne J. Urban, “Communists in
the American Federation of Teachers: A Too Often Told Story,” History of Education Review 14
(1985): 15-24; Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1982).
3
For example, James W. Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (New York: Teachers
College Press, 2007); Jurgen Herbst, “Nineteenth-Century Normal Schools in the United States:
A Fresh Look,” History of Education 9 (1980): 219-27; Robert A. Levin, Educating Elementary
School Teachers: The Struggle for Coherent Visions, 1909-1978 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 1994); Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great
Good” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kathleen Underwood, “The Pace of Their Own
Lives: Teacher Training and the Life Course of Western Women,” Pacific Historical Review 55
(November 1986): 513-30.
4
This literature is voluminous, and too often vacuous. Among too many examples, see Kerry
William Bate, ed., “Diary of Mary Elizabeth (May) Stapley, a Schoolteacher in Virgin, Utah,” Utah
Historical Quarterly 60 (Spring 1992): 158-67; Mary Hurlbut Cordier, Schoolwomen of the
Prairies and Plains: Personal Narratives from Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, 1860s to 1920s
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Robert G. Fisk, “The Three Best Years:
Teaching School in Rural Bayfield County, 1935-1937,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 81
(Autumn 1997): 3-30; David A. Hales, “School Days and Schoolmarms,” Utah Historical
Quarterly 67 (Spring 1999): 100-10; Lucy Sophia Ransom, “Country Schoolma’am: Silver City:
Closing the Wild West Era,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 87 (Summer 1986): 205-24; Donna M.
12
Butchart, R. E.
Stephens, One-Room School: Teaching in 1930s Western Oklahoma (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1990).
5
Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black
Freedom, 1861-1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), esp. pp. 1-51; James
D. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 4-32; Christopher M. Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African
American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2009); and Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and
Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
6
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Modern Library Edition, 1996), p. 27.
7
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing
Co., 1964), p. 637.
8
The fullest expression of this interpretation of the freed people’s teachers is Henry Lee Swint,
Northern Teacher in the South, 1862-1870 (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1941).
See also J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton, “The Freedmen’s Bureau in North Carolina,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 8 (1909): 53-67, 154-63; Edgar W. Knight, The Influence of Reconstruction on
Education in the South (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1913); Knight, “The
‘Messianic’ Invasion of the South after 1865.” School and Society 57 (5 June 1943):645-51; and
Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).
9
Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Linda B. Selleck, Gentle Invaders: Quaker
Women Educators and Racial Issues During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Richmond, Ind.:
Friends United Press, 1995); Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and
Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).
Others writing in this tradition include Robert C. Morris, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction:
The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981); and Samuel L. Horst, Education for Manhood: The Education of Blacks in Virginia during
the Civil War (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987).
10
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and
Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964); Carol Faulkner, Women’s
Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004); Jacqueline Jones, “Women Who Were More than Men: Sex and Status in
Freedmen’s Teaching,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (1979): 47-59.
11
Maxine D. Jones, “‘They Are My People’: Black American Missionary Association Teachers in
North Carolina During the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Negro Educational Review 36 (April
1985): 78-89; Ronald E. Butchart, “Perspectives on Gender, Race, Calling, and Commitment in
Nineteenth-Century America: A Collective Biography of the Teachers of the Freedpeople, 18621875,” Vitae Scholastica 13 (Spring 1994): 15-32; Samuel L. Horst, “A Life of Unfailing Toil:
Jacob Eschbach Yoder,” Virginia Cavalcade 46 (Summer 1996): 24-33; Joe M. Richardson, “The
American Missionary Association and Blacks on the Gulf Coast During Reconstruction,” Gulf
Coast Historical Review 4 (Spring 1989): 152-61; Allis Wolfe, “Women Who Dared: Northern
Teachers of the Southern Freedmen, 1862-1872,” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York,
1982).
12
For the data reported above and in the following paragraphs, see Butchart, Schooling the Freed
People, passim and Appendix A, pp. 179-83.
13
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13
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, pp. 52-77.
14
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, pp. 17-51.
15
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, pp. 56-57; 80-81; 113-14.
16
H. C. Sanford to “My Dear Sir,” 15 August 1863, Papers of the American Missionary Association,
#86512, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Hereafter cited as AMA with item
number.
17
John C. Tucker to S. S. Jocelyn, 28 January 1864, AMA #86801.
18
Eliza H. Twitchell to Samuel Hunt, 27 August 1866, AMA #90134.
19
See, for example, Josephine W. Martin, ed., ”Dear Sister”: Letters Written on Hilton Head Island,
1867 (Beaufort, S.C.: Beaufort Book Co., 1977); “Diary of E. [Edward] Williams, 1869-1871,” and
letters of Williams to his family, in Stratton (Maule) Papers, Friends Historical Library,
Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, Penn.; Mary Ames, From a New England Woman’s Diary in
Dixie in 1865 (Springfield, Mass.: Mary Ames, 1906); “Diary of Lydia Atkinson,” Friends
Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, Penn.; “Diary” of J. B. in Willis, J. B. Papers,
1874-1877, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.
20
Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 18651898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005).
21
Ronald E. Butchart, “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, ed. Nina Mjagkij (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2003), 1-13;
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, pp. 37, 45-48,165; Ellen N. Lawson, “Sarah Woodson Early:
19th Century Black Nationalist ‘Sister’,” Umoja 2 (Summer 1981): 15-26; L. A. Scruggs, Women
of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character (Raleigh, N.C.: L. A. Scruggs,
1893), pp. 345-51; Butchart, “Troops to Teachers, Nineteenth Century Style: Civil War Veterans
as Teachers in the Freed People’s Schools, 1862-1876,” unpublished paper, in revision, p. 9.
22
Ronald E. Butchart, “Laura Towne and Ellen Murray: Northern Expatriates and the Foundations
of Black Education in South Carolina, 1862-1908,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and
Times, vol. 2, eds. Valinda W. Littlefield Marjorie Julian Spruill, and Joan Marie Johnson (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2010), 12-30.
23
Ronald E. Butchart, “Caroline F. Putnam,” in Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993: A
Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Maxine Seller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1994), 389-96.
24
Hezekiah H. Hunter and Lizzie R. Hunter to AMA, 25 February 1865, AMA Archives, No. 88340;
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, p. 22.
25
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, pp. 23, 43.
26
Highgate letter to the editor, 21 June 1866, Christian Recorder 6 (7 July 1866): 105.
27
Mary Bowers to F. A. Fiske, 11 April 1866, Unregistered Letters Received, N. C. Superintendent of
Education, BRFAL, M844; Sara G. Browne to J. Miller McKim, 17 November 1866; and Josephine
Smith to J. Miller McKim, 8 Aug 1866; both in American Freedmen’s Union Commission
Collection, Cornell University.
28
Laura M. Towne to William Channing Gannett, 15 November 1874, Gannett Papers, Box 3,
University of Rochester.
14
Butchart, R. E.
29
Jane Briggs Smith to Friend Fiske, 20 Aug 1865, Jane Briggs Smith Fiske Papers, American
Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
30
For these and scores more illustrations, see Ronald E. Butchart, “Black Hope, White Power:
Emancipation, Reconstruction and the Legacy of Unequal Schooling in the U.S. South, 18611880,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 1-2 (February-April 2010): 33-50.
31
H. S. Bennett to Michael E. Strieby, 13 September 1869, Letters Received, Superintendent of
Education for Tennessee, BRFAL, M1000: 5.
32
John W. Alvord, Ninth Semi-Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, January 1, 1870 (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1870), p. 28.
33
U. S. Senate, On Alleged Frauds in the Recent Election in Mississippi, Senate Reports, 44 Cong., 1
Sess., No. 527 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 483-90.
About the Author
Ronald E. Butchart ([email protected]) is the Aderhold Distinguished Professor and Department
Head in the Department of Elementary and Social Studies Education at the University of Georgia.
His scholarship has focused on the history of African American education, the history of teachers
and teaching, and other aspects of the history of education. His most recent publications include
Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876
(2010) and “Race, Social Studies, and Culturally Relevant Curriculum in Social Studies’ Prehistory: A
Cautionary Meditation,” in C. Woyshner & C. Bohan, Histories of Social Studies and Race, 1865-2000
(2012).
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