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1 Reconstruction and Its Reach,1865–1901 In the immediate wake of the Civil War—the period of so-called Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867)—Alabama’s General Assembly was primarily concerned with returning the state to a recognizable normality. This meant conservative white rule and the continued repression of its black population, which now included 439,000 former slaves or “freedmen.”1 A new constitution adopted in September 1865 reflected this goal of normalization and included a number of conditions required for Alabama to rejoin the Union.The assembly was granted authority to “enact necessary and proper laws for the encouragement of schools and the means of education” but otherwise was short on detail.2 Implicitly the schooling to be encouraged was to be for the benefit of the white population, which was significantly illiterate and experiencing a baby boom.3 In this same period the freedmen were starting to seek the schooling that they had been denied by law in slavery and with which they associated power and influence.4 Their requirements were often met by Northern schoolteachers operating under the auspices of agencies such as the American Missionary Association (AMA), and in conjunction with the Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands—the “Freedmen’s Bureau.”5 In October 1866, against a background of ugly race riots in Tennessee and Louisiana and an emerging pattern of harsh black repression all over the South, Radical Republicans swept the congressional elections. Determined not to see the achievements of the Civil War invalidated, they used their legislative dominance to pass the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867.6 This placed Alabama, along with Georgia and Florida, under the military rule of General John Pope, thus initiating “Congressional” or “Radical” Reconstruction in these states. The act also required the Southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—designed to ensure freedmen obtained all the rights and privileges of citizenship—and to prepare new state constitutions .7 To further safeguard black civil rights, Congress passed the second Re- Reconstruction and Its Reach 13 construction Act, which concerned voter registration arrangements and electoral supervision.8 The imposition of martial law and an externally prescribed political order upended all the normal interactions and customs that had long been part of Alabama’s cultural fabric. Many whites furiously resented the new status of former slaves and the congressional intervention on their behalf. It was within this sociopolitical context that the Northern teachers embarked upon their mission to assist Alabama’s freedmen. Some of the teachers had been schooled in the equalitarian ideas of abolitionism and, for a number of reasons, they ignored the fact that many whites regarded them as purveyors of alien notions that breached age-old conventions and taboos.9 The perceived threat posed by the Northern teachers was sometimes met with nothing less than terrorism. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for intimidation, arson, and even murder. When a Canadian missionary, William Luke, taught his Calhoun County pupils that black and white women were equal in God’s eyes, and that workers of both races should receive the same wages, he was promptly hanged by local vigilantes.10 Luke’s fate was a stark warning to those who might encourage talk of civil rights. Although white attitudes toward black schooling did not follow a simple trajectory from resistance to acceptance, overt hostility subsided somewhat after about 1868 when some white opinion leaders grudgingly acknowledged such schooling might be necessary.11 In some places “colored” schools seem to have been tentatively encouraged by whites—as long as they were in the reliable hands of Confederate veterans or local teachers.12 In November 1867 a constitutional convention elected on the extended franchise met in Montgomery to draft a state constitution.The convention’s “Committee on Education and the School Fund” comprised four Carpetbaggers (allegedly opportunistic Northerners who had moved South), two Scalawags (local Republicans), and one black representative, Peyton Finley. The chairman , Gustavus Horton, had assisted in organizing Mobile’s public schools in 1852 and three members of the committee—John Silsby, Benjamin Yordy, and Charles Buckley—were agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau.13 The committee proposed an entirely new model for the public schooling system based on an Iowan precedent. Its principal feature was a “Board of Education of the State of Alabama.”This board was to have legislative powers in relation to education and, in this respect, would rival the assembly.The system ’s principal...

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