A History of Education in Kentucky

Chapter 3. Elementary and Secondary Education

Chapter 3 Elementary and Secondary Education From 1860 and the election to the presidency of native son Abraham Lincoln, to 1900 and the turmoil surrounding the assassination of William Goebel, Kentuckians faced increasing challenges. The Commonwealth of Kentucky, based on its population, its economy, and its location, declined from being one of the major states in the Union to being one of the poorest, bypassed by many of the important changes of the latter nineteenth century. White and black Kentuckians struggled with the social, political, and economic issues that accompanied the end of slavery. Many people sought to improve education at all levels in the state. But questions had to be answered. Could Kentuckians agree on what needed to be done? Was there enough public will to build on the surprising educational advances made before the Civil War? Could the commonwealth’s often self-seeking and sometimes corrupt political structure follow through on needed reform? Would Kentuckians be willing to pay for an adequate public school education for all the children in the state? Moreover, beneath a thin veneer of civility after the Civil War, a culture of violence seemed to vitiate signs of progress in the state. From the bushwhackers of postwar days, to lynching of blacks, to mountain feuds, Kentucky developed a reputation as one of the more violent places in America. The aptly named history of this era by Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865–1900, chronicles this period when Kentuckians somewhat blindly reacted to modernity and the changing forces of the late nineteenth century. Raw statistics tell something about the condition of Kentucky education just before the Civil War. The 1860 census reported 4,507 public schools in the commonwealth with 4,646 teachers and a total income from all sources of nearly $500,000. Clearly, the typical public school on the eve of the Civil War was a one-room structure with one teacher. A perusal of other states at 65 66 A History of Education in Kentucky the time indicates much the same pattern. For example, among the original states, even Massachusetts had only 5,308 teachers for 4,134 public schools. The census for Kentucky also enumerated 223 private academies and “other schools,” with 639 teachers and an income of nearly $450,000. Another indicator of educational opportunities was the presence of libraries and the numbers of volumes held. The Eighth Census for Kentucky listed 95 public libraries with a grand total of 106,175 volumes. With schools, Sunday schools, colleges, and churches added in, more than 148,000 books were available for the readers in Kentucky. However, Massachusetts libraries held nearly 2 million volumes, Indiana had more than 467,000 books, and even Tennessee outnumbered Kentucky with 245,000 books.1 During the election of 1860 and afterward, the compromises of the past failed. Republican Abraham Lincoln’s stated ambition to hem in the expansion of the peculiar institution into the new western territories did not set well with Kentucky voters, who rewarded him with less than 1 percent of the votes cast. Kentucky’s slavocracy dominated, splitting the state’s vote between John Bell, the candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, and John C. Breckinridge, a native son and a southern Democrat. After the election, new attempts at compromise, led by such stalwarts as Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden, also failed, as did the Peace Commission held in the nation’s capital just before Lincoln’s inauguration.2 With the firing on Fort Sumter, all institutions in Kentucky faced the terrible consequences of war. At first, Governor Beriah Magoffin (1859–1862) tried to steer a neutral course, believing, perhaps quixotically, that Kentucky and Kentuckians could remain above the fray. Could Kentucky be the mediating point where a bloody war was ended in its early months? Many Union-leaning Kentucky slave-owners, hoping they could keep their slaves, followed this path. Both Confederate and Union governments and armies understood the importance of borderland Kentucky, with its long Ohio River shoreline and plentiful population and farm products. In September 1861, Abraham Lincoln said it best: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of the capital.”3 The war in Kentucky ebbed and...