Equipping the Freedman

Abstract

The confidence, so often expressed in the North during the three decades before the Civil War, that properly organized education would bring about a profound regeneration of society was quite naturally applied to the rebel South. “The North, a missionary spokesman wrote in the Atlanta Christian Index in 1866, ‘should teach the South … by military garrisons, by [Freedmen’s] Bureau courts, by Congregational churches, by Northern settlers, by constitutional amendments, by christian missionaries, by free schools, lectures, newspapers and reading rooms, what be the first principles of social order, political eminence, moral worth and industrial success.’”¹ On the eve of the war, in the preface for the latest of his widely read accounts of tours of inquiry through the South, Frederick Law Olmstead had suggested that both Blacks and Whites in the South would have to be educated before emancipation could be a success:

Popular prejudice, if not popular instinct, points to a separation of black from white as a condition of the abolition of slavery.…I think a happy and peaceful association of a large negro, with a large white population, can not at present be calculated on as a permanent thing. I think that the emancipation from slavery of such part of the existing actual negro population as shall remain in the country until the white population is sufficiently christianized and civilized, and properly educated to understand that its interests are identical with its duty, will take place gradually, and only after an intermediate period of systematic pupilage, restraint, and encouragement.²