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Introduction On December 14, 1819, Alabama was admitted to the Union. Between then and February 1854 when the General Assembly of Alabama passed a law establishing a statewide public schooling system, the state’s educational enactments were exceedingly modest and largely restricted to the chartering of private academies. Such action was barely sufficient to give substance to the constitutional piety that “Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged in this State.”1 This should not, however, be taken as a sign of any particular indolence. Before the Civil War (1861–1865) the socialization of children was regarded in most parts of the United States as a parental and community matter. In Alabama , community schools were organized and survived—or did not survive— according to the wishes and wherewithal of the people they served. Educational policy was the province of elected trustees who were also responsible for building schoolhouses, employing teachers, prescribing texts, and generally operating the schools within a local area termed a township. In 1929, when modernization was still a work in progress, Edgar W. Knight, professor of education at the University of North Carolina, claimed this early model of schooling inspired a “persistent devotion to and confidence in localism in education.” He saw this as a continuing blight and tut-tutted that localism “still commends itself to wide popular approval because of the deep democratic color it is believed to wear.”2 Geography goes some way toward explaining the localism that was Alabama ’s prevailing cultural condition during the nineteenth century. The state contains an area of 52,423 square miles, which, for comparative purposes, is about the same size as England. Within its borders are a number of fairly distinct regions, which are themselves composed of varying landscapes. Prior to the arrival of railroads and the later expansion of rail networks, these regions were often practically isolated from one another because, although Alabama has an extensive river system, this did not create a connecting transport link 1. Principal geographic areas of Alabama. Composite of maps produced by (i) Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Alabama. Downloaded from http:// alabamamaps.ua.ed/contemporarymaps/alabama/basemaps and (ii) Robert Stroud of Auburn University, Alabama. Stroud map included in Wayne Flynt, Alabama in the Twentieth Century: The Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), opposite page 292. Introduction 3 between the north of the state and the south. Moreover, there were few roads, and people living in a single county could be separated by natural barriers of ridges and valleys, rivers and plateaus, or dense forests of hardwood and pine. These factors limited options for social interaction in many areas. The consequent insularity strengthened self-reliance and allowed ancient traditions to develop local expression. In the white community these traditions had their origins in what was most frequently an Anglo-Celtic ethnicity, a Protestant Christianity of an evangelical strain, a shared pioneer experience and, all too often, economic deprivation. Apart from an early French presence in the south of the state from 1702, the European settlement of Alabama was largely undertaken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was particularly after the military defeat, and later removal, of most of Alabama’s Native American population.The settlers were generally either land-hungry farmers spilling south from Tennessee or moving west from Georgia or planters who had given up on the depleted soils of Virginia and the Carolinas and were looking for new opportunities for large-scale cotton production using enslaved labor.The restless movement was called “Alabama Fever.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French observer of early nineteenth-century American life, knew the symptoms. He called the migratory compulsion an “ardent and restless passion” for prosperity, a game of chance pursued “for the emotions it excites as much as for the gain it procures .”3 The destination of planters with slaves and capital was Alabama’s Black Belt—a twenty-five-mile wide swath of fertile clay soils (often black) bisecting the center of the state. These soils were ideal for large-scale cotton production and provided the means by which Black Belt planters became prosperous and politically powerful as Democrats and Whigs. Small farmers tended to take up land in the northern hill country of the Appalachian Ridge and Plateau area or in the southeastern Wiregrass Country. On the eve of the Civil War about 80 percent of these small farmers owned the land they tilled. They rarely possessed...

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