Our YankeeThe Uncertain Fate of Northern Teachers in the Seceded South

Following Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops in April 1861, war fever swept across the seceded (and about to secede) southern states. Sam Watkins, then a twenty-one-year-old from Tennessee, remembered well the excitement of those early days: "Every person, almost, was eager for the war, and we were all afraid it would be over and we not be in the fight. . . . we wanted to march right off and whip twenty Yankees."¹ Had he looked around, Watkins would have discovered that he need not march far to find Yankees. Long before Confederate soldiers clashed with their rivals in blue on distant battlefields, southerners had to deal with northerners much closer to home, and while Watkins drilled, other Confederates turned their attention to the Yankees in their own midst.

Given the prevalence of northerners working and living in the Old South, their removal would be a formidable task. Nevertheless, Confederate nationalists declared, southern independence required that "every vestige of Yankeeism . . . be purged away from our systems of commerce, manufactures, politics and education," starting with the northern interlopers themselves.² Prior to secession, northerners had taken up residence throughout the slave states, working as merchants, shopkeepers, peddlers, book agents, editors, missionaries, ministers, craftsmen, and laborers.³ Enemies within, these itinerant Yankees posed an immediate threat, or so their detractors claimed. In a speech before his fellow "Laboring Men of Georgia," B. W. Rumney called for the "purification" of the South and the "uncompromising exclusion of the alien" even as Georgia still debated its secession. "Let us be united as one man," he thundered, to "drive out those of our enemies that have squatted in our midst."⁴

Of all "aliens" to be found in the South, the most ubiquitous and conspicuous was the northern schoolmaster.⁵ In the decades leading up to the Civil War, white southerners had looked largely to the North to supply their teachers.⁶ Teaching was not a highly esteemed profession in the antebellum South, and there were never enough educated southerners willing to teach to meet the demand.⁷ Consequently, southern parents had hired the many young, well-educated northerners (men and women) who flocked south seeking employment as teachers and private tutors. Driven by financial necessity, fierce competition for teaching jobs in the North, and, quite often, a lack of direction in their young lives, and drawn by plentiful southern jobs, the relatively high pay (southern teaching positions generally included full room and board while northern ones often did not), lighter workloads, much smaller classrooms, shorter school days and school years, as well as a spirit of adventure—"for the romance of it," as one New York woman teaching in Mississippi put it—northern teachers had come by the thousands and spread throughout the entire slaveholding South, particularly the plantation regions.⁸ Some ran small schoolhouses or worked for private academies, others were college professors or university presidents, and many served as tutors and governesses, living with their often wealthy employers and receiving an intimate glimpse into the lives of slaves and slaveowners.

Drawing on their records and experiences, this article examines what happened to 503 teachers and former teachers of northern origin who resided in the southern states between 1859 and 1865 analyzes how they were viewed as a group and how they were treated as individuals by the southerners among whom they lived. It also explores how northern teachers perceived and reacted to the outbreak of hostilities. Given the decentralized nature of southern education, the ad hoc employment of so many transient teachers, and the consequent scattering of their archival records, it is impossible to establish the representativeness of these northerners (see table 1). Among this group, 54 percent came from one of the New England states, with another 18 percent hailing from New York (mostly upstate). Of the total, 295 (59 percent) were male, 208 (41 percent) female, and they were to be found in significant numbers in all eleven Confederate States as well as the four border slave states (439 in the...