Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Ante-bellum America by Hilary J. Moss (review)

A half century ago, Bernard Bailyn exhaled a long sigh of frustration over the history of education in Education in the Forming of American Society (1960). The story of schools, he wrote, had been told as if they were “self-contained entities” completely disconnected from other developments in American history. Schools were explained as democratic and progressive institutions, leaving scholars with virtually “no historical leverage on the problems of American education.” With this book, Bailyn, along with Lawrence Cremin, opened a riotous debate about the origins and results of public education in the 1960s and 1970s. A cadre of revisionists such as Michael Katz challenged the orthodoxy that school reform was democratic, progressive, and promoted social mobility. Their critics defended the idealism of reformers such as Horace Mann. Sadly, the energy and creativity of this debate failed to connect the history of schooling with the mainstream of American historiography as Bailyn had hoped. To this day, beyond the small group of scholars devoted to the history of education, remarkably little is known about schooling in early American society, especially beyond New England, which for many historians has meant Massachusetts.

Hilary J. Moss’s Schooling Citizens follows in the tradition of Bailyn and others who have argued that the history of education belongs at the heart of American history. Moss’s larger interest in race and citizenship in the early Republic led her to examine schools in three very different cities—New Haven, Baltimore, and Boston. Like earlier scholars, she finds the case study is best-suited to the history of education, and like them, she defines “education” primarily as “schooling.” Schooling in the nineteenth century, as today, was an intensely local matter, with local conditions and context making all the difference. Moss argues that the early Republic was “a critical moment when many of Americans’ most deeply held ideas about public education took root” (5). Why, she asks, did public schools and opposition to educating free black Americans expand simultaneously in the early nineteenth century? She explains this apparent paradox by arguing that, contrary to the enduring and heroic myth, “the promise of public schooling for all was a fiction from the start” (193). Her study thus confirms what scholars of education have long argued.

Moss holds out the intriguing possibility that “white opposition to African American education was never a foregone conclusion” (10). In the eighteenth century, she shows, black education was far less controversial than it was by 1830. So why did this change? Her answer is that by the mid-antebellum period, education was primarily intended to create citizens. In this new context, educating free black people became dangerous to white majority. The pattern has been repeated many times in American history. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the “prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated” (59). Through her careful study of three communities, Moss puts some historically specific flesh on white racism in the early U.S. Deep anxiety about notions of citizenship lay at the heart of the violent disputes about public schooling. White reformers never intended common schools to spread social equality. Instead, their vision of “universal” education was limited to citizens, and because black children were excluded from citizenship, they had little need for education. Against this narrow vision and fully comprehending its political significance, African American leaders energetically pursued access to public schools.

Moss’s most important contribution is to study black education in the slave city of Baltimore, relying on a careful reading of apprenticeship contracts, advertisements, and census records. Her findings confirm what historians have long argued—that the presence of slavery in the upper South sometimes afforded free black people there more (albeit sharply qualified) freedoms than free blacks enjoyed in free states. Unlike the white residents of New Haven and Boston, white Baltimoreans seemed relatively unconcerned about black academies because slavery guaranteed the continued subordination of...