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VIII Education II I have always been cheated most by men who could write," explained a Southerner, who owned forty slaves and considerable landed property but could not read or write; nor could his nine grown sons. "Send my sons to school to learn to read and write? No Sir," he informed a visitor. "It would make just such devils out of them as you Yankees are!" To prove his point this Cracker told how a Connecticut drummer had sold him a clock for ten dollars that was "warranted to last ninety-nine years." When a forty-dollar clock arrived, instead of what the old man had ordered, he refused to pay for it and was sued. He got no satisfaction in court: the judge insisted that the written order called for a forty-dollar clock; furthermore, the paper that supposedly guaranteed the clock for ninety-nine years (the clock had stopped running within a week) only warranted it to last ninetynine years, not to keep time. "Now," asked the old man, "do you suppose I am fool enough, since that, to believe there is any benefit in learning to write?"! Most Southerners, whether or not they considered literacy compatible with honesty, had far less regard for formal education than did the average Northerner. As early as 1753 the governor of South Carolina observed that the people of the upcountry "abound in Children, but none of them bestow the least Education on them, they take so much care in raising a Litter of Piggs, their Children are equally naked and full as Nasty." On the eve of the American Revolution the Reverend Charles Woodmason described backcountry Carolinians as being ignorant and impudent. "Very few can read-fewer write," he noted. "Few or no Books are to be found in all this vast Country. . .. Nor do they delight in Historical Books or I. Charles G. Parsons, Inside View of ICleveland, 18551, 180-85. Slavery: or, a Tour Among the Planters 193 Cracker Culture in having them read to them, as do our Vulgar in England for these People despise Knowledge, and instead of honouring a Learned Person , or anyone of Wit or Knowledge be it in the Arts, Sciences, or Languages, they despise and III treat them-And this Spirit prevail~ even among the Principals of this Province."2 Formal education enjoyed scarcely more respect among plain Southerners at the end of the antebellum period than it had in colonial times. In 1 834 a Virginian reported that fewer than half of his neighbors ever looked at a newspaper, and about this same time a South Carolinian confessed that more than a third of the white people in his state were illiterate. Some scholars have argued that the white folk of the Old South received relatively more schooling than is often acknowledged, and it is true that by 1861 there were more children in school in the South than at any previous time, but most of these schools were privately and inadequately supported. Rarely did they provide quality or effective instruction. For example, Georgia had a state university as well as academies in each county, but some of these were as poorly conducted as the elementary schools, over which the state exercised no control. A school could be started by anyone inspired to teach and able to find an empty building and enough paying pupils. One such instructor, a deserter from the British navy, established military discipline and whipped accordingly, but he did not last long. In his unheated school, he would place students in a circle and make them dance around the room to keep warm, and he would encourage the boys to wrestle so their blood would circulate faster. He was replaced by a "wandering, drunken Irishman," who "knocked, kicked, cuffed, and whipped at a great rate." He, in turn, was followed by two other drunks who frequently dismissed classes so they could go on binges.3 Most southern schools were primitive compared to those in the North. "A majority of our farmers' daughters," boasted a Yankee, "can walk from their dwellings to schools of a quality such as at the South can be maintained not twice in five hundred square miles." "The standard of education in [southern] ... academies has always been far below that of the common schools in the New England States," stated another Northerner. "I visited several acad2 . Governor James Glen quoted in Mary Katerine Davis, "The Feather Bed Aristocracy: Abbeville District in the 1790S," South...

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