• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1497 0

arts in order to survive. If they were ragged and dirty in appearance, they had “lived so long in a filthy condition they don’t know what it is to be clean.” Besides, much of what the teachers saw seemed almost surprisingly familiar, and they were quick to compare the freedmen with the Irish who inhabited the northern cities. After noting that the southern blacks looked “wretched and stupid,” a Boston teacher in South Carolina added that “to those who are accustomed to many Irish faces, these except by their uniformity c[oul]d suggest few new ideas of low humanity.”55

Even if the first impressions tended to confirm expectations, that did not always diminish the shock or revulsion a number of the teachers experienced in their daily encounters with the freedmen. “It is one thing to sit in ones office or drawing room and weave fine spun theories in regard to the Negro character,” a teacher wrote from Beaufort, North Carolina, “but it is quite another to come into actual contact with him. I fail to see those beauties and excellencies, and the ‘Uncle Toms,’ that some do. Is it reasonable, in short, to suppose that people brought up, or rather who have come up under such influences, would be altogether lovely.” That was the kind of observation a Mary Chesnut might have pounced upon to prove her point that northern reformers dealt best with their wards at a distance. What she may not have been prepared for, however, was how these missionary teachers would act upon their feelings of shock and dismay. The more they saw and experienced, in fact, the more many of them came to believe that there could be no greater missionary field anywhere in the world; the shock and dismay many of them confessed to only seemed to heighten their sense of purpose, even driving them into outbursts of sheer exultation over their work. “The prattle of infancy has always been pleasant to me,” one teacher wrote, “yet to live in daily communion with two or three hundred of this infant race, to watch the latent fires of intelligence in their first development, is happiness.” No less inspired, a teacher in Louisiana found himself “happy when surrounded with their dusky faces and glistening eyes”; a teacher in South Carolina found her work to be “a joy and glory for which there are not words”; a teacher in North Carolina claimed to have overcome in two months the doubts and “personal antipathies” with which she began her mission; and a teacher in Virginia reported, “I think I shall stay here as long as I live, and teach this people. I have no love or taste for any other work, and am happy only here with them.”56

Neither the magnitude nor the complexity of the task they faced seemed nearly as awesome to the missionary teachers and educators as the opportunity to stamp their image on nearly four million newly freed slaves. “We can make them all that we desire them to be,” exulted a teacher in New Bern, North Carolina. That thought alone helped to sustain the northern emissaries in their daily labors and to overcome the disappointments and frustrations they would experience. To make the freedmen “all that we desire them to be” was to instruct them not only in the spelling book and the gospel but in every phase of intellectual and personal development—in the virtues of industry, self-reliance, frugality, and sobriety, in family relations and moral responsibility, and, most importantly, in how to conduct themselves as free men and women interacting with those who had only recently held them as slaves. In seeking to enlist the support of a prominent planter in his district, a freedmen’s educator in North Carolina phrased educational objectives in such a way as to disarm any potential critics.

We start with the principle that to rescue the Freedmen from vice and crime, they must be intelligent and virtuous. To become intelligent and virtuous they must be taught.… Their [the teachers’] business is not only to teach a knowledge of letters, but to instruct them in the duties which now devolve upon them in their new relations—to make clear to their understanding the