Freedmen, Schools and “Middle-Class” Racism

Freedmen, Schoolsand "Middle-Class" Racism Ronald E. Butchart. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks. andReconstruction: Freedom '.s Education, 1862-1875. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1980.309 + xiv pp. RobertFrancis Engs. Freedom '.s First Generation. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 236 +xxpp. JacquelineJones. Soldiers of'Light and Love: No1them Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873. ChapelHill:University of North CarolinaPress, 1980.273 + xiiipp. Richard Reid Northern abolitionists, particularly those missionaries and teachers who maintainedtheir concern for the newly freed black throughout Reconstruction, became accustomed to bitter invectives from their white countrymen both North and South. They might have been angry or merely bemused had they beenable to foresee arguments a centu,rylater that they were merely responding to a loss of social status. Recently a more damning accusation has been leveled at the teachers and missionaries involved in the black education movement, an accusation which would presumably bewilder and outrage them. Implicitly and explicitly, historians such as Robert Francis Engs, Jacqueline Jones and Ronald Butchart accuse the Northerners of being middle-class racists who wished to create a pliant, obedient black, molded according to Northern expectations. Their goals, at best, were to solve the "Negro problem" by transforming the rural Southern freedmen, chiefly through education, into people who were culturally no different from the majority of Americans. At worst, the Northerners deliberately selected education as the means of subverting black liberation. In reaching these general conclusions, these three historians have looked at very different aspectsof the experiences forced upon Southern blacks during Reconstruction. In some ways Engs's Freedom '.sFirst Generation is the most valuable of the three studies because it most clearly reveals the complex dynamics between freedmen, Southern whites, Federal troops and Northern missionaries. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14. Number 1, Spring 1983,89-95 90 Richard Reid The New South which would emerge from the war was the product of the conflicting goals, aspirations and limitations of these forces. Events during Reconstruction become understandable only when seen in the light of these complex relationships. Hampton, Virginia, a small town on the Peninsula which by 1868housed the Hampton Institute, is an ideal case study in which to examine the changing South. Hampton, however, was not a typical Southern town. The slave system here was more relaxed before the war than elsewhere in the South. Fewer blacks were simply fieldhands and many-oystermen, fishermen and skilled craftsmen-were allowed to "hire their own time.'' Miscegenation, Engs alleges, had produced an unusual degree of "cordiality" between blacks and whites in Hampton. After the war the Hampton blacks continued to benefit from unusual conditions. The economic diversity, the heavy American Missionary Association activity, and the continued presence of federal soldiers at Fortress Monroe, combined to make Reconstruction a less tragic experience here than elsewhere in the South. Indeed, Hampton is portrayed as a model "of what might have been' had other blacks had the city's resources, had the Northern missionaries been more stalwart allies, had the federal government kept even a few of its promises, and had white Southerners been less effective, after 1890,in blocking and reversing black advancement. While the achievements of the Hampton blacks were remarkable given the problems which they faced, the seeds of Reconstruction failure were sown early on the Virginia Peninsula. The treatment of "contrabands ofwar" by the federal troops in 1862, especially the forced laborer system, full of fraud and corruption, instituted by General Wood, produced distrust and bitterness among the freedmen who had expected freedom under Northern control. In turn, the apathy, lack of ambition and what Samuel Armstrong later called "the shiftless propensity;' were interpreted bymany Northerners, including the missionaries, not as the effects of white action but rather as proof of black inferiority and as sufficient cause for white paternalism. A further reason that interracial harmony broke down by 1862, Engs contends, was the missionaries' lack of tolerance for black religion and their differing set of moral values. Although Engs agrees that the character of the freedmen in Hampton altered as more and more upcountry fieldhands joined the more sophisticated city blacks, the real problem lay in "changing white perceptions." "The missionaries never conceeded that blacks had the right to...