Brought from the African wilds to constitute the laboring class of
a pioneering society in the new world, the heathen slaves had to be
trained to meet the needs of their environment. It required little
argument to convince intelligent masters that slaves who had some
conception of modern civilization and understood the language of their
owners would be more valuable than rude men with whom one could not
communicate. The questions, however, as to exactly what kind of
training these Negroes should have, and how far it should go, were to
the white race then as much a matter of perplexity as they are now.
Yet, believing that slaves could not be enlightened without developing
in them a longing for liberty, not a few masters maintained that the
more brutish the bondmen the more pliant they become for purposes of
exploitation. It was this class of slaveholders that finally won the
majority of southerners to their way of thinking and determined that
Negroes should not be educated.
The history of the education of the ante-bellum Negroes, therefore,
falls into two periods. The first extends from the time of the
introduction of slavery to the climax of the insurrectionary movement
about 1835, when the majority of the people in this country answered
in the affirmative the question whether or not it was prudent to
educate their slaves. Then followed the second period, when the
industrial revolution changed slavery from a patriarchal to an
economic institution, and when intelligent Negroes, encouraged by
abolitionists, made so many attempts to organize servile insurrections
that the pendulum began to swing the other way. By this time most
southern white people reached the conclusion that it was impossible
to cultivate the minds of Negroes without arousing overmuch
self-assertion.
The early advocates of the education of Negroes were of three classes:
first, masters who desired to increase the economic efficiency of
their labor supply; second, sympathetic persons who wished to help the
oppressed; and third, zealous missionaries who, believing that the
message of divine love came equally to all, taught slaves the English
language that they might learn the principles of the Christian
religion. Through the kindness of the first class, slaves had their
best chance for mental improvement. Each slaveholder dealt with the
situation to suit himself, regardless of public opinion. Later,
when measures were passed to prohibit the education of slaves, some
masters, always a law unto themselves, continued to teach their
Negroes in defiance of the hostile legislation. Sympathetic persons
were not able to accomplish much because they were usually reformers,
who not only did not own slaves, but dwelt in practically free
settlements far from the plantations on which the bondmen lived.
The Spanish and French missionaries, the first to face this problem,
set an example which influenced the education of the Negroes
throughout America. Some of these early heralds of Catholicism
manifested more interest in the Indians than in the Negroes, and
advocated the enslavement of the Africans rather than that of the Red
Men. But being anxious to see the Negroes enlightened and brought into
the Church, they courageously directed their attention to the teaching
of their slaves, provided for the instruction of the numerous
mixed-breed offspring, and granted freedmen the educational privileges
of the highest classes. Put to shame by this noble example of the
Catholics, the English colonists had to find a way to overcome the
objections of those who, granting that the enlightenment of the slaves
might not lead to servile insurrection, nevertheless feared that their
conversion might work manumission. To meet this exigency the
colonists secured, through legislation by their assemblies and formal
declarations of the Bishop of London, the abrogation of the law that
a Christian could not be held as a slave. Then allowed access to the
bondmen, the missionaries of the Church of England, sent out by the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Heathen in Foreign
Parts, undertook to educate the slaves for the purpose of extensive
proselyting.
Contemporaneous with these early workers of the Established Church of
England were the liberal Puritans, who directed their attention to the
conversion of the slaves long before this sect advocated abolition.
Many of this connection justified slavery as established by the
precedent of the Hebrews, but they felt that persons held to service
should be instructed as were the servants of the household of Abraham.
The progress of the cause was impeded, however, by the bigoted class
of Puritans, who did not think well of the policy of incorporating
undesirable persons into the Church so closely connected then with the
state. The first settlers of the American colonies to offer Negroes
the same educational and religious privileges they provided for
persons of their own race, were the Quakers. Believing in the
brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, they taught the colored
people to read their own "instruction in the book of the law that they
might be wise unto salvation."
Encouraging as was the aspect of things after these early efforts, the
contemporary complaints about the neglect to instruct the slaves show
that the cause lacked something to make the movement general. Then
came the days when the struggle for the rights of man was arousing the
civilized world. After 1760 the nascent social doctrine found response
among the American colonists. They looked with opened eyes at the
Negroes. A new day then dawned for the dark-skinned race. Men like
Patrick Henry and James Otis, who demanded liberty for themselves,
could not but concede that slaves were entitled at least to freedom of
body. The frequent acts of manumission and emancipation which followed
upon this change in attitude toward persons of color, turned loose
upon society a large number of men whose chief needs were education
and training in the duties of citizenship. To enlighten these freedmen
schools, missions, and churches were established by benevolent and
religious workers. These colaborers included at this time the Baptists
and Methodists who, thanks to the spirit of toleration incident to the
Revolution, were allowed access to Negroes bond and free.
With all of these new opportunities Negroes exhibited a rapid
mental development. Intelligent colored men proved to be useful and
trustworthy servants; they became much better laborers and artisans,
and many of them showed administrative ability adequate to the
management of business establishments and large plantations. Moreover,
better rudimentary education served many ambitious persons of color as
a stepping-stone to higher attainments. Negroes learned to appreciate
and write poetry and contributed something to mathematics, science,
and philosophy. Furthermore, having disproved the theories of
their mental inferiority, some of the race, in conformity with the
suggestion of Cotton Mather, were employed to teach white children.
Observing these evidences of a general uplift of the Negroes, certain
educators advocated the establishment of special colored schools. The
founding of these institutions, however, must not be understood as a
movement to separate the children of the races on account of caste
prejudice. The dual system resulted from an effort to meet the needs
peculiar to a people just emerging from bondage. It was easily seen
that their education should no longer be dominated by religion.
Keeping the past of the Negroes in mind, their friends tried to unite
the benefits of practical and cultural education. The teachers of
colored schools offered courses in the industries along with advanced
work in literature, mathematics, and science. Girls who specialized in
sewing took lessons in French.
So startling were the rapid strides made by the colored people in
their mental development after the revolutionary era that certain
southerners who had not seriously objected to the enlightenment of the
Negroes began to favor the half reactionary policy of educating them
only on the condition that they should be colonized. The colonization
movement, however, was supported also by some white men who, seeing
the educational progress of the colored people during the period of
better beginnings, felt that they should be given an opportunity to
be transplanted to a free country where they might develop without
restriction.
Timorous southerners, however, soon had other reasons for their
uncharitable attitude. During the first quarter of the nineteenth
century two effective forces were rapidly increasing the number of
reactionaries who by public opinion gradually prohibited the education
of the colored people in all places except certain urban communities
where progressive Negroes had been sufficiently enlightened to provide
their own school facilities. The first of these forces was the
worldwide industrial movement. It so revolutionized spinning and
weaving that the resulting increased demand for cotton fiber gave rise
to the plantation system of the South, which required a larger number
of slaves. Becoming too numerous to be considered as included in the
body politic as conceived by Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone,
the slaves were generally doomed to live without any enlightenment
whatever. Thereafter rich planters not only thought it unwise to
educate men thus destined to live on a plane with beasts, but
considered it more profitable to work a slave to death during seven
years and buy another in his stead than to teach and humanize him with
a view to increasing his efficiency.
The other force conducive to reaction was the circulation through
intelligent Negroes of antislavery accounts of the wrongs to colored
people and the well portrayed exploits of Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Furthermore, refugees from Haiti settled in Baltimore, Norfolk,
Charleston, and New Orleans, where they gave Negroes a first-hand
story of how black men of the West Indies had righted their wrongs. At
the same time certain abolitionists and not a few slaveholders were
praising, in the presence of slaves, the bloody methods of the
French Revolution. When this enlightenment became productive of
such disorders that slaveholders lived in eternal dread of servile
insurrection, Southern States adopted the thoroughly reactionary
policy of making the education of Negroes impossible.
The prohibitive legislation extended over a period of more than a
century, beginning with the act of South Carolina in 1740. But with
the exception of the action of this State and that of Georgia the
important measures which actually proscribed the teaching of Negroes
were enacted during the first four decades of the nineteenth century.
The States attacked the problem in various ways. Colored people beyond
a certain number were not allowed to assemble for social or religious
purposes, unless in the presence of certain "discreet" white men;
slaves were deprived of the helpful contact of free persons of color
by driving them out of some Southern States; masters who had employed
their favorite blacks in positions which required a knowledge of
bookkeeping, printing, and the like, were commanded by law to
discontinue that custom; and private and public teachers were
prohibited from assisting Negroes to acquire knowledge in any manner
whatever.
The majority of the people of the South had by this time come to the
conclusion that, as intellectual elevation unfits men for servitude
and renders it impossible to retain them in this condition, it should
be interdicted. In other words, the more you cultivate the minds of
slaves, the more unserviceable you make them; you give them a higher
relish for those privileges which they cannot attain and turn what you
intend for a blessing into a curse. If they are to remain in slavery
they should be kept in the lowest state of ignorance and degradation,
and the nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes the better
chance they have to retain their apathy. It had thus been brought to
pass that the measures enacted to prevent the education of Negroes had
not only forbidden association with their fellows for mutual help and
closed up most colored schools in the South, but had in several States
made it a crime for a Negro to teach his own children.
The contrast of conditions at the close of this period with those
of former days is striking. Most slaves who were once counted as
valuable, on account of their ability to read and write the English
language, were thereafter considered unfit for service in the
South and branded as objects of suspicion. Moreover, when within a
generation or so the Negroes began to retrograde because they had been
deprived of every elevating influence, the white people of the South
resorted to their old habit of answering their critics with the bold
assertion that the effort to enlighten the blacks would prove futile
on account of their mental inferiority. The apathy which these
bondmen, inured to hardships, consequently developed was referred to
as adequate evidence that they were content with their lot, and
that any effort to teach them to know their real condition would be
productive of mischief both to the slaves and their masters.
The reactionary movement, however, was not confined to the South. The
increased migration of fugitives and free Negroes to the asylum of
Northern States, caused certain communities of that section to feel
that they were about to be overrun by undesirable persons who could
not be easily assimilated. The subsequent anti-abolition riots in the
North made it difficult for friends of the Negroes to raise funds to
educate them. Free persons of color were not allowed to open schools
in some places, teachers of Negroes were driven from their stations,
and colored schoolhouses were burned.
Ashamed to play the role of a Christian clergy guarding silence on the
indispensable duty of saving the souls of the colored people, certain
of the most influential southern ministers hit upon the scheme of
teaching illiterate Negroes the principles of Christianity by memory
training or the teaching of religion without letters. This the clergy
were wont to call religious instruction. The word instruction,
however, as used in various documents, is rather confusing. Before the
reactionary period all instruction of the colored people included the
teaching of the rudiments of education as a means to convey Christian
thought. But with the exception of a few Christians the southerners
thereafter used the word instruction to signify the mere memorizing of
principles from the most simplified books. The sections of the South
in which the word instruction was not used in this restricted sense
were mainly the settlements of Quakers and Catholics who, in defiance
of the law, persisted in teaching Negroes to read and write. Yet it
was not uncommon to find others who, after having unsuccessfully used
their influence against the enactment of these reactionary laws,
boldly defied them by instructing the Negroes of their communities.
Often opponents to this custom winked at it as an indulgence to the
clerical profession. Many Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian Mountains
and liberal Methodists and Baptists of the Western slave States did
not materially change their attitude toward the enlightenment of the
colored people during the reactionary period. The Negroes among
these people continued to study books and hear religious instruction
conveyed to maturing minds.
Yet little as seemed this enlightenment by means of verbal
instruction, some slaveholders became sufficiently inhuman to object
to it on the grounds that the teaching of religion would lead to the
teaching of letters. In fact, by 1835 certain parts of the South
reached the third stage in the development of the education of the
Negroes. At first they were taught the common branches to enable them
to understand the principles of Christianity; next the colored people
as an enlightened class became such a menace to southern institutions
that it was deemed unwise to allow them any instruction beyond that
of memory training; and finally, when it was discovered that many
ambitious blacks were still learning to stir up their fellows, it was
decreed that they should not receive any instruction at all. Reduced
thus to the plane of beasts, where they remained for generations,
Negroes developed bad traits which since their emancipation have been
removed only with great difficulty.
Dark as the future of the Negro students seemed, all hope was not yet
gone. Certain white men in every southern community made it possible
for many of them to learn in spite of opposition. Slaveholders were
not long in discovering that a thorough execution of the law was
impossible when Negroes were following practically all the higher
pursuits of labor in the South. Masters who had children known to be
teaching slaves protected their benevolent sons and daughters from the
rigors of the law. Preachers, on finding out that the effort at verbal
education could not convey Christian truths to an undeveloped mind,
overcame the opposition in their localities and taught the colored
people as before. Negroes themselves, regarding learning as forbidden
fruit, stole away to secret places at night to study under the
direction of friends. Some learned by intuition without having had the
guidance of an instructor. The fact is that these drastic laws were
not passed to restrain "discreet" southerners from doing whatever they
desired for the betterment of their Negroes. The aim was to cut off
their communication with northern teachers and abolitionists, whose
activity had caused the South to believe that if such precaution were
not taken these agents would teach their slaves principles subversive
of southern institutions. Thereafter the documents which mention the
teaching of Negroes to read and write seldom even state that the
southern white teacher was so much as censured for his benevolence.
In the rare cases of arrest of such instructors they were usually
acquitted after receiving a reprimand.
With this winking at the teaching of Negroes in defiance of the law a
better day for their education brightened certain parts of the
South about the middle of the nineteenth century. Believing that an
enlightened laboring class might stop the decline of that section,
some slaveholders changed their attitude toward the elevation of
the colored people. Certain others came to think that the policy of
keeping Negroes in ignorance to prevent servile insurrections was
unwise. It was observed that the most loyal and subordinate slaves
were those who could read the Bible and learn the truth for
themselves. Private teachers of colored persons, therefore, were often
left undisturbed, little effort was made to break up the Negroes'
secret schools in different parts, and many influential white men took
it upon themselves to instruct the blacks who were anxious to learn.
Other Negroes who had no such opportunities were then finding a way of
escape through the philanthropy of those abolitionists who colonized
some freedmen and fugitives in the Northwest Territory and promoted
the migration of others to the East. These Negroes were often
fortunate. Many of them settled where they could take up land and had
access to schools and churches conducted by the best white people
of the country. This migration, however, made matters worse for the
Negroes who were left in the South. As only the most enlightened
blacks left the slave States, the bondmen and the indigent free
persons of color were thereby deprived of helpful contact. The
preponderance of intelligent Negroes, therefore, was by 1840 on the
side of the North. Thereafter the actual education of the colored
people was largely confined to eastern cities and northern communities
of transplanted freedmen. The pioneers of these groups organized
churches and established and maintained a number of successful
elementary schools.
In addition to providing for rudimentary instruction, the free Negroes
of the North helped their friends to make possible what we now call
higher education. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century
the advanced training of the colored people was almost prohibited by
the refusals of academies and colleges to admit persons of African
blood. In consequence of these conditions, the long-put-forth efforts
to found Negro colleges began to be crowned with success before the
Civil War. Institutions of the North admitted Negroes later for
various reasons. Some colleges endeavored to prepare them for service
in Liberia, while others, proclaiming their conversion to the doctrine
of democratic education, opened their doors to all.
The advocates of higher education, however, met with no little
opposition. The concentration in northern communities of the crude
fugitives driven from the South necessitated a readjustment of things.
The training of Negroes in any manner whatever was then very unpopular
in many parts of the North. When prejudice, however, lost some of its
sting, the friends of the colored people did more than ever for
their education. But in view of the changed conditions most of these
philanthropists concluded that the Negroes were very much in need
of practical education. Educators first attempted to provide such
training by offering classical and vocational courses in what they
called the "manual labor schools." When these failed to meet the
emergency they advocated actual vocational training. To make this new
system extensive the Negroes freely coöperated with their benefactors,
sharing no small part of the real burden. They were at the same time
paying taxes to support public schools which they could not attend.
This very condition was what enabled the abolitionists to see that
they had erred in advocating the establishment of separate schools for
Negroes. At first the segregation of pupils of African blood was, as
stated above, intended as a special provision to bring the colored
youth into contact with sympathetic teachers, who knew the needs of
their students. When the public schools, however, developed at the
expense of the state into a desirable system better equipped than
private institutions, the antislavery organizations in many Northern
States began to demand that the Negroes be admitted to the public
schools. After extensive discussion certain States of New England
finally decided the question in the affirmative, experiencing no great
inconvenience from the change. In most other States of the North,
however, separate schools for Negroes did not cease to exist until
after the Civil War. It was the liberated Negroes themselves who,
during the Reconstruction, gave the Southern States their first
effective system of free public schools.
