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The prospects for a reformation in the post-emanicipation South seemed auspicious, even exhilarating. While the Union soldier completed the liberation of the slaves from physical bondage, the teacher would free them from mental indolence and the missionary would lead them out of the “Synagogues of Satan.” Both the teacher and the missionary would assume the responsibility for instilling in their minds the personal habits, moral values, and religious character deemed necessary to dignify and implement their new legal status. Although a formidable undertaking, the recruits were available and eager to begin their work—several thousand men and women of both races, some of them attached to the Freedmen’s Bureau, some the designated agents of a church or a freedmen’s aid society, and some initially unaffiliated but ready to serve in any capacity. “I dont ask position or money,” a chaplain in a black regiment wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. “But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race. My learning, my long experience as a teacher North, and my faithful service as Chaplain, demand that I seek such a place among my race.”4 For many of the recruits, their previous involvement in the abolitionist movement made this southern pilgrimage a particularly satisfying and fulfilling experience. No less gratified were those in the black contingent who were now returning to the places from which they had escaped as slaves or from which they had exiled themselves as free blacks.

The vision that bound them together was that of a redeemed South. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, with their vision of a “city on a hill,” this modern Gideon’s Band proposed to establish beachheads of Christian piety and Yankee know-how in the moral wilderness of the defeated Confederacy, dispelling the darkness which two centuries of human slavery had cast over the region. Teachers and missionaries alike, whatever their race or affiliation, could agree on the critical need to provide the recently freed slaves with prerequisites of civilization and citizenship, and these would be nothing less than the virtues esteemed by mid-nineteenth-century Americans and taught in nearly every school and from every pulpit—industry, frugality, honesty, sobriety, marital fidelity, self-reliance, self-control, godliness, and love of country. “Hitherto their masters have acted and done for them,” a black religious journal observed, “but now that they are free they must be taught how to be free.” A white missionary educator in South Carolina said as much when he defined what had to be done for the freedmen—“to unlearn them and learn them from, the vices, habits and associations of their former lives.” And if the white evangels could talk in terms of supplying enough teachers “to make a New England of the whole South,” a black bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church could anticipate that glorious day when “New England ideas, sentiments, and principles will ultimately rule the entire South.”5

Whatever the optimism and confidence with which the missionaries and teachers began their work, sectarian rivalries, racial tensions, personality clashes, and differences over tactics and roles would take their toll within the ranks of this strong-willed group of individuals. Even the most dedicated and best-intentioned of them experienced their moments of discouragement, not only in seeking to minimize native white opposition and internal dissension but in bridging the cultural gulf which separated them from the former slaves. To communicate with the freedmen could be in itself a tiring and exasperating ordeal. “We are not as yet like skilled in negro-talk,” one missionary teacher wrote home soon after arriving in Virginia. The wonder perhaps is not that so many problems surfaced or that some evangels fell from grace but rather that so many of them held on and persevered under the most formidable challenges, sustained by the depth of their commitment alone. “Ours is truly a missionary work,” C. M. Shackford reported from Mississippi,