Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (review)

Historians have substantially documented the rapid increase in African American literacy immediately following Emancipation. For decades, the standard narrative has centered on white female teachers who traveled from the North to the South to facilitate freed people's education—until now. Historian Ronald Butchart's excellent book, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876, substantiates historians' earlier arguments about African Americans' quest for education and political inclusion, but it also skillfully overturns long-held beliefs about the critical players involved in such education projects.

A number of teachers involved in African American education were, in fact, young, white, single women from New England. Many even fit the descriptions used by previous historians—"Yankee schoolmarm," "soldiers of light and love," and "gentle invaders." Butchart argues against this prototype showing that in the post-Civil War South, teachers as a group tended to be older and more southern (in fact, over half); they were also more diverse in terms of both race and gender. Indeed, one of Butchart's most important points is that "teachers were far more interracial than historians have realized" (p. xi). In six chapters, Schooling the Freed People broadens the examination of African American education in the South to emphasize the importance of African American teachers (from both the North and the South), white southern teachers, and African American students. White northern teachers have their own chapter, but Butchart's intent is to deemphasize their importance in the overall project of African American education. In Butchart's skillful hands, the focus is shifted to a larger historical context that especially highlights the importance of black teachers and students in their own tenacious fight for literacy from slavery though Reconstruction and Redemption.

Although Schooling the Freed People's tables draws on thousands of letters and other archival sources, its charts and appendices highlight Butchart's reliance on the statistical evidence that he amassed in a database called the Freedmen's Teacher Project. Examining more than 11,600 individuals, representing approximately two-thirds of all teachers who worked in African American schools between 1861 and 1876, Butchart shows that African American teachers tended to be younger than their white counterparts. They also faced more financial challenges than white teachers, especially those from the North, because black teachers were not often sponsored by aid societies.

In addition to drawing these general conclusions, Butchart deeply samples certain states in specific time periods. For example, to bolster his point that more southerners than northerners were involved in African American education, Butchart points to the 1868-69 school year in South Carolina, where the ratio of southern to northern teachers was two to one. Approximately one-sixth of this teaching force was African American. Three years later the number of southern teachers (both white and black) increased from two hundred to eleven hundred. Readers concerned that such statistical analysis leads to a dry read can rest assured that Butchart's chapters come to life with detailed stories of individual teachers and students, including an African American woman who served as a Union spy before becoming a teacher, and white southerners who were Confederate veterans or former slave owners before finding jobs as teachers in black schools.

Despite the inclusion of all this information about teachers, Schooling the Freed People is ultimately about African American students and communities. Throughout his study Butchart emphasizes the importance of African American uplift and the political importance of literacy: "Freed people's education was . . . emphatically a work performed by African Americans for their own emancipation" (p. 19). Therefore, Schooling the Freed People emphasizes African American social and financial contributions, including a black regiment's contribution of $700 for its own school and another $60 for a school for African American children. Butchart also highlights the roles of black teachers, who were "by any measure the most important of...