Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890

2. Wartime Expansion

Wartime Expansion ALTHOUGH the AMA focused its initial efforts upon contra- ~ I ~ bands in Virginia, it was intimately involved in the Port Royal experiment that Willie Lee Rose so perceptively treated in Rehearsal for Reconstruction. In January 1862 association officers Lewis Tappan and George Whipple dispatched the Reverend Mansfield French to Port Royal, South Carolina, to investigate the condition of blacks there. French, a Methodist evangelist, abolitionist, educator, and editor, easily secured a permit for the exploratory visit since he was a close friend of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. French quickly determined that contrabands needed reliefand medical care and that they earnestly desired "religious instruction, as well as all the common means ofcivilization and enlightenment." After discussing the Port Royal field with French, Tappan and Whipple decided that the job was too big for the AMA to handle alone. Or perhaps, as Rose suggested , they concluded "that there was no better way to advance antislavery in the opinion ofthe public at large than to enlist public interest in preparing the slave to be a free man." At any rate, they called a public meeting at Cooper Institute for 20 February that resulted in the organization of the New York National Freedmen's Relief Association. They acted in concert with the Boston Educational Commission, which had been organized on 7 February.1 A committee of six clergymen, with Whipple as chairman, was appointed to screen applicants for South Carolina. After three days of "faithful labor" the committee approved twenty-five men and six women. These teachers and missionaries were among those whom Boston businessmanJohn Murray Forbes described as odd-looking men and odder-looking women. "You would have doubted," he said, "whether it was the adjournment of a John Brown meeting or the fag end of a broken down phalanstery." On 3 March the New York and Boston 17 18 CHRISTIAN RECONSTR UCTION agents boarded the Atlantic and steamed through the fog and freezing rain to the Sea Islands "to strike a blow for freedom."2 It was a disparate group that embarked on the Atlantic. The Boston contingent included hardheaded businessmen and young university graduates, many of whom were Unitarians. The New Yorkers tended to be older, more nondescript, and evangelicals. Many of the Bostonians had an obvious disdain that bordered on contempt for their evangelical partners. Susan Walker found French gentle and kind, with the right spirit but with small business capacity and executive talent. When he asked her to act as his secretary, she confided to her diary that she did not wish to be "mixed up" with the New Yorkers as "there is no congeniality of taste and sentiment."3 Walker snidely remarked that she discerned a "discordant strain" when the evangelicals gathered on the deck and sang religious songs. For their part, some of the evangelicals believed that too many of the Massachusetts men viewed the trip as a money-making venture.4 That they drew such conclusions based on discussions during the trip was not surprising. The Bostonians seemed obsessed with farming and business, though they were not necessarily seeking personal profit. Edward Philbrick occupied his leisure time during the voyage reading about cotton culture. Edward Pierce, leader of the Boston Commission, warned his men that blacks must be taught responsibility and that any new possessions they gained must be paid for by their own labor. If it became necessary for them to punish blacks, he said, they should be punished by locking them up rather than by whipping. Pierce and his associates were trying to prove a free-labor thesis, to show they could successfully raise cotton with free black workers. They intended to organize farms and bring Yankee industriousness to the Sea Islands. What better way to demonstrate that blacks should be free, they asked, than by growing more cotton with free rather than slave labor? Of course, the Bostonians were interested in education and religion as well, but that apparently was not their major aim. To the AMA teachers and missionaries , on the other hand, growing cotton was secondary to inculcating good morals and faithful family life and teaching the alphabet to the freedmen. While the Boston Educational Commission stressed teaching blacks industriousness and acquisitiveness, the missionaries emphasized the debt owed blacks because of their enslavement. They, as much as the Bostonians, wished blacks to become independent land- Wartime Expansion 19 holders, but they thought land should...