Whites and the Schools for Freedmen

Whites and the Schools for Freedmen

 Note:  this is in a series of essays that I will be using to form the written version of the Tales.  Some are ideas and themes I am exploring -- others may be rough drafts of portions of the Tales.   

The Congressional Freedmen’s Bureau, northern philanthropists, and missionaries - including the American Missionary Association - were dedicated to improving educational opportunities for blacks during and after the Civil War. And yet in the most extensive archives of those efforts we find descriptions of issues related to whites and the schools for Freedmen.  This blog is about those records and how they relate to the Constitutional Convention of 1868 and continuing debates on public education.

Our best source of records is from the American Missionary Association.  The AMA had a detailed reporting system:  teachers submitted monthly statistical reports to the area superintendent who filed a composite statistical summary with AMA leaders.  Teachers also were expected to write narrative reports on the general progress of the schools, chief obstacles encountered, cases of insubordination, the mode of administering discipline, and any suggestions for its prosperity.  These reports and letters are part of the extensive archives of the AMA.  Here are some excerpts.  Just remember that terminology and the expressions of even more progressive people of their time may sound out of kilter with our words and views.

David Dickson is a teacher in Fayetteville.  At his school, “First Colored,” he reports having 119 students with an average daily attendance of 95 in February of 1866.  Of these, 103 can read and spell and 19 can write, study mental arithmetic, and geography.  In late January, Dickson writes,  “We have had some requests to admit poor white children.  What will we do in such cases?  We have in school now many called colored that would pass for white in any northern school.   I have been told that the whiter the scholar the smarter.  But I think this has exceptions, for I know one or more very black who keep at or near the head of the class.”

H.S. Beals of Beaufort writes to Rev. Hunt on February 28, 1866:  “We have had another prosperous month of labor.  The schools have been unbroken – each teacher in her accustomed place each day.  The schools have become so crowded that my wife in addition to the family cares, her evening class, and visiting among the sick, has assisted constantly in my department of the school.  I wrote to you, I think, some three months since, the great need of a teacher here for the poor whites.  At the commencement of this month, several of these people sought admission to the Col. Schools.  They pleaded so earnestly for these crumbs of knowledge, though they should gather them at the Freedmen’s table, that I had no heart to deny them.  So I have an entire class of them varying from nine years to forty-five in their ages and sitting side by side with colored children without seeming to know or care what is the complexion of their fellow students.”

H.S. Beals’ wife, Sara Beals, and Helen Todd are teachers at the school at Purvis Chapel in Beaufort, North Carolina. Purvis Chapel is the second oldest African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in the state and in the south, having switched from Methodist Episcopal to AMEZ after a visit from Rev. James Walker Hood in 1864.  On the monthly form for March, 1866, Sara and Helen complete the following information:

No. of different pupils:  122

No. of males:  59

No. of females:  63

No. of  mulattoes:  48

No. of pure blacks:  74

Do the mulattoes show any more capacity than the pure blacks?:  They do not.

Reverend Samuel S. Ashley came to the same conclusion.  In his November, 1865 report, in response to the question, “Do the mulattoes show any more capacity than blacks?” Ashley states, “I think not.”  (The form is slightly different in wording from blacks in November, 1865 to “pure blacks” on the form completed in March, 1866.)

Through these letters and forms we can see dynamics that will be significant in the 1868 Constitutional Convention and in debates on public education.  Poor whites were searching for schools because the public school system was on the verge of shutting down.  Indeed, in March of 1866, the General Assembly abolishes the system that had been in place, eliminating the state-level positions, allowing state-level education funds to be used for other purposes, and removing local requirements.  Whites with resources could look to private academies.  Poor whites virtually had nowhere else to turn than to schools being established for blacks with resources primarily from the north.  This is important because the coalition formed in the 1868 Constitutional Convention brought together race and class interests.  Forming a majority, northern whites, blacks, and local whites sought public schools that would be available to all students, regardless of race or ability to pay.  A coalition that brings together the interests of race and class continues to be important in ensuring equal educational opportunities for all students as guaranteed by the North Carolina Constitution.

It is worth noting that in just months after the Civil War is over, we have blacks and whites sitting next to each other learning.  We have integration. In the 1868 Constitutional Convention, delegates engage in intense arguments over whether to require separation of the races as a matter of the constitution.  James Walker Hood’s arguments prevail to prevent the language in the North Carolina Constitution, but it is added in the statutes and the Constitution is amended in 1875 to provide for this separation.  It then takes almost one hundred years to integrate our schools.  And now many of our schools have once again become segregated.

To our 21^st century eyes, a survey to determine whether mulattoes had more capacity than blacks may be offensive.  But the intelligence of the races was on the minds of many at this time and comparing mixed race children with black children was one way to examine the issue. Darwinian-based theories were commonly used at this time to assert superiority of the white race.  (Reverend Hood gives a long speech disputing this on the floor of the constitutional convention.)  Rather than be surprised that they are asking the question, what seems more significant is the response.  Here we have records from 1865 and 1866 indicating no racial differences. Yet it is not until the publication of the Black-White Test Score Gap in 1998 that we fully dispel theories of innate racial differences with scientific evidence.  Further, lower expectations of blacks continues to be identified as a part of the problem in the persistent racial gap in test scores, suggesting that almost 150 years later and with plenty of scientific data, we have not put this question to rest. 

We can connect the past to today – literally – with the headline story of today’s News & Observer, “Guidelines encourage minorities in math.”   The article reports that data from the SAS Institute show that half of minority students who qualified by their tests scores for advanced math courses were not placed in those courses under guidelines that gave greater weight to teacher judgment. Wake County Schools assistant superintendent Marvin Connelly says, “Sometimes we have to help staff realize what students can do.”  (N&O, August 31, 2010, A1.)

Your thoughts?

Primary Sources:

These documents will be posted to the Constitutional Tales Website soon.

David Dickson to Reverent Samuel Hunt, Supt. Of Educ., Fayetteville, NC., Jan. 26, 1866, No. 100275, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

H.S. Beals to Rev. Samuel Hunt, Beaufort, NC, February 28, 1866, No. 100345, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Monthly Report, Purvis Chapel, Helen Todd and Sara Beals, Beaufort, NC, March, 1868, No. 100420, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Teacher’s Monthly Report,  First Colored School, David Dickson, Fayetteville, NC, February, 1866, No. 100355, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Teacher’s Monthly Report, Night School, S.S. Ashley, Wilmington, NC, November, 1865, No. 100209, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Secondary Sources:

Christopher Jencks, Meredith Phillips, Eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington, D.C.:  Brookings Institution Press  1998).

Railroads and Constitutional Tales: progress, politics, and social inequities

Note:  this is in a series of essays that I will be using to form the written version of the Tales.  Some are ideas and themes I am exploring -- others may be rough drafts of portions of the Tales.  

Tales about the North Carolina Constitution would not seem to have much to do with railroads.  So I’ve been intrigued to uncover the many intersections in the lives and events that led to the 1868 Constitutional Convention.

There are the stories of railroads as a part of progress of North Carolina.  Our Rip Van Winkle reputation in the 1840s could well be characterized by not only our lack of interest in education but in our muddy, narrow roads that impeded the movement of ideas, people, and goods.

Our effort to switch to railroads was no fairy tale.  It was full of politics, bickering, and jealousy.  Even though the state took the majority ownership of the primary railroad line (North Carolina Railroad) it deferred to private interests.  Although the railway offered the promise of connecting the east to the west, transportation patterns to the north and south were instead reinforced through the Wilmington to Weldon line that ran up the eastern coast and the NCRR line that was added during the Civil War to connect the Piedmont to Virginia.

The location and uses of the rail lines became integral to the strategies of the Civil War:  New Bern went under Union control early in the war in part as an effort to control eastern shipments through the rail lines; Wilmington was a key city as supplies from blockade runners were loaded on trains headed to the fighting in Virginia and as a connecting point with railroads bringing supplies and soldiers from the deep South.  Goldsboro was a critical hub because it was one of the few places in the state where railroad lines met to allow transportation both east to west and north to south.  Salisbury was a central location on the piedmont railroad and become a key location for storing munitions, supplies, and for holding Union soldiers at the notorious military prison.

The weaknesses in the rail system also were deeply exposed during the Civil War.  The die-on-the sword beliefs around states rights meant that it was difficult to coordinate use of the railroads between the southern states.  Even within the state, the companies would not reach agreement on the gauge of the rails making it difficult if not impossible for trains to move across lines.  (For anyone with a drawer full of cell phone chargers, you may be able to relate to this issue.)

While inadequate in their coverage and condition, North Carolina’s railroads were critical and still the best transportation available during the War.   When forced to take the roads when the rails were destroyed, it took Jefferson Davis four days to travel from Greensboro to Charlotte.   Still, the rails also had their own stories of excruciatingly slow travel.  Especially as the war progressed and the rails suffered from deterioration and intentional assault, trips often were delayed. Traveling from Wilmington to Charleston - a trip that now could be made in between breakfast and lunch  - took one brigade of soldiers 55 hours.  And yet the confederate army was dependent on these rails.  Until another rail line was built in 1863, ‘“the feeding of the animals and men of the Army of Northern Virginia and of a large proportion of the city of Richmond depended on a shaky, rundown railroad system culminating in 85 miles of single track” between the capital and Weldon.’

And the inequities?  It begins with the building of the rails.  It was the job of slaves and after the War, freed blacks often continued to do the most difficult labor.    Blacks did not have equal access to the trains as passengers.  And indeed, the court case that defined the Jim Crow era principle of separate but equal – Plessy v. Ferguson – was about railroad accommodations. But not to be fooled by this phrase, the cars were intentionally designed with unequal accommodations: a visit to the Transportation Museum in Spencer, North Carolina, dispels any assumptions to the contrary.

So the connection to the Tales?

The Tales relate the story of the emergence of James Walker Hood as a leader at the Constitutional Convention.  Over his life, he has several significant connections to rails.  His first is with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company – the most powerful railroad company in the world.  It began the Jim Crow practices well before the Civil War of second-class separate accommodations for blacks and yet in the fifteen years that Hood road the train, he refused to move from the first class accommodations reserved for whites.  The same kind of action 100 years later is celebrated in our history books when Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on the bus. 

The Tales pick up railroads again in setting the stage for Hood’s arrival in New Bern.  The city was a target for Union control early in the war in part to disrupt the shipment of goods through the railroads.  With the protection of federal troops in place, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination sends Hood to New Bern to establish AMEZ churches for blacks.   And that begins his extraordinary leadership in North Carolina.

And the story is not over for Hood and rails.  In 1868, after the Constitutional Convention and state elections, Hood serves as the appointed associate superintendent of colored schools for the state.  One of his primary responsibilities is to canvass the state to determine the condition and availability of schools for blacks.  This he cannot do because, as he complains, he is denied the railroad passes he needs to travel across the state.  It is not clear in his reports why he is denied – whether it is the cost or racial prejudice. While his travels are impeded in this job, he later in life becomes a bishop of the AMEZ denomination and travels around the globe.

The rails also set up the story of Reverend Samuel Stanford Ashley coming to Wilmington in 1865.  As I mention above, Wilmington was a crucial depot on the rail line.  But it was Sherman’s March towards Goldsboro to destroy the rail lines that triggered the key event leading to Ashley’s arrival.  While in Fayetteville – on the way to Goldsboro – Sherman ordered 10,000 refugees to be sent to Wilmington so that they would no longer burden the troops.  To address their needs, the American Missionary Association sent missionaries to Wilmington.  One was Reverend Ashley, sent to build schools for the newly freed blacks.  As his story unfolds, he becomes one of the strongest advocates for public education in the state, takes a leadership role in the Constitutional Convention of 1868, and becomes our first constitutional officer in charge of the public schools.

And there’s at least one more personal connection.  Albion Tourgée, a lawyer, and later judge, comes to North Carolina from Ohio.  A leader in the 1868 Constitutional Convention, he becomes a well-known speaker and writer on social justice and race relations. Tourgée takes up the mantle of equal rights in the context of railroad accommodations:  he is the lawyer for the plaintiff, arguing that the railroad’s practices were unconstitutional, in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The plight of railroads in North Carolina in other ways foreshadow the kinds of disputes that occur in the Constitutional Convention:  sectionalism between the west, east and Piedmont; disagreements on how much power should be given to centralized government; accusations of delegates seeking personal gains over the interests of the people; and intense arguments over how to invest and how much to invest in North Carolina’s future.

Railroads – and more broadly transportation – continue as both a symbol and condition for progress and equality.  We are the “Good Roads” state.  We celebrate the advent of faster rail service between metropolitan areas.  Progress and educational opportunities also are linked.  It would not be difficult to create an overlay of our transportation systems with school districts to find the areas that suffer economically and educationally. And this will be the final link in the Tales – the relationship between economic progress and the constitutional right to the opportunity for a sound, basic education.

Ann McColl

August 24, 2010

Secondary Sources:

Black, III, Robert C., The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press 1998) (quoted material from page 185)

Trelease, Allen W., The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press 1991)

Constitutional Tales Update

A quick update on the Tales…

Constitutional Tales became a website in February of this year.

Thousands of visits to the site are recorded.

Presentations continued this year. With more than 30 performances across the state since its inception, hundreds of people have seen some version of the Tales.

In March, we gave our second full production with actors at the State Capitol.

This Spring also marked the first time of sharing it outside of the state with a presentation at the annual conference of the American Education Research Association.

The Tales now enjoy a non-profit status through its affiliation with the Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South (RCWMS), allowing it to receive tax-deductible donations and to be eligible to apply for organizational grants.

So what’s next?

It is time to begin writing the Tales in earnest.

I have six boxes of research and many times that amount in computer files.

My bookshelves are crammed with an assortment of books I never would have imagined owning – Abebooks.com has become my most frequented website even over my personal favorites of Amazon and Title Nine (not a legal website).

I am reestablishing my pattern with my family of being gone on Monday and Tuesday.  This time, instead of teaching at UNC Charlotte at the beginning of each week as I did for seven years, I will use our home at High Rock Lake as my residency for writing.   Not bad duty.

I hope to use the blog to introduce portions of what I’m writing.  The challenge with the Tales is to weave the historical and legal analysis in a way that maintains a sense of a story while explaining enough of the legal significance of events and documents to convey the importance of what transpired.  For those familiar with writing terms, I’m planning to take a postmodernistic approach to historical creative non-fiction.  For those with no reason to be acquainted with these categorizations, it means that I will tell a story using a structure that accommodates the fragmentation of working with historical records and that explores the lives of those understudied in official histories.  This approach also assumes that I will not be uncovering the one correct interpretation of these events, but rather that I will offer a perspective in order to engage the reader in considering the significance of the events and the North Carolina Constitution for him or herself.

So feel free to check out the blog this Fall.  Input is welcomed.

Ann McColl

August 24, 2010