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By Root 1053 0

simply drew on their own experiences and observations, they had come to recognize that power, influence, and wealth in southern society were invariably associated with literacy and monopolized by the better-educated class of whites. “My Lord, ma’am, what a great thing larning is!” a freed slave exclaimed to a white teacher in South Carolina. “White folks can do what they likes, for they know so much more’na we.” No less impressed were some “contraband” children at Fortress Monroe early in the war. When placed in schools, one freed slave suggested, these children “thought it was so much like the way master’s children used to be treated, that they believed they were getting white.”45

The practical value of education never seemed clearer than in the aftermath of emancipation, when illiterate black laborers learned from bitter experience, especially on payday and at contract time, how white people used “book-larnin’ ” to take advantage of them. To an elderly Louisiana freedman, that was reason enough to send the children to school, even if their absence from the fields deprived the parents of their earnings. “Leaving learning to your children was better than leaving them a fortune; because if you left them even five hundred dollars, some man having more education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.” Nearly every convention of freedmen in the postwar years dwelled incessantly on this point, seeking to drive home to every black family that “knowledge is power.” Of course, nearly every black family that had survived slavery could readily understand that maxim. “They had seen the magic of a scrap of writing sent from a master to an overseer,” a missionary in the Sea Islands noted, “and they were eager to share such power if there were any chance.”46

To remain in ignorance was to remain in bondage. That conviction alone drew hundreds of thousands, adults and children alike, to the freedmen’s schools from the moment they opened, some of the prospective students making a pilgrimage of several miles, and many of them forced to combine their schooling with rigorous work schedules. The very intensity of their commitment caught both teachers and native whites by surprise. “They will endure almost any penance rather than be deprived of this privilege,” a missionary educator in North Carolina observed. To a school official in Virginia, trying to convey his thoughts about the freedmen’s enthusiasm for education, the phrase “anxious to learn” was insufficient; “they are crazy to learn,” he reported, as if their very salvation depended on it. No doubt many ex-slaves were certain that it did. When asked why he wished to enroll in a school, an elderly black man quickly replied, “Because I want to read de Word of de Lord.” That would permit him, moreover, as an old Mississippi black man noted, to read all of the Bible, not simply the portions the master and mistress had always selected for their slaves.

Ole missus used tu read de good book tu us, black ’uns, on Sunday evening, but she mostly read dem places whar it says, “Sarvints obey your masters,” an’ didn’t stop tu splane it like de teachers; an’ now we is free, dar’s heaps o’ tings in dat ole book, we is jes’ sufferin’ tu larn.47

If some southern blacks viewed with suspicion the ministers from the North who presumed to “civilize” their religious worship, they usually extended an effusive welcome to both white and black teachers. Unable in many regions to pay the salaries of the teachers, black parents did what they could to sustain them with gifts of eggs, vegetables, and fruit—anything that might persuade them to remain. “The people sent for tuition 5 eggs and a chicken,” a black teacher in Virginia noted. Delighted that a school had been opened in her neighborhood, a freedwoman vowed to “work her fingers off” if necessary to send her children there. This was the first time in her life, she told the teacher, that any white person had shown any interest in her or in her children; until now, she had been driven, kicked about, and made to work for others for