Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [360]
Both the northern societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized the value of education in preparing the blacks for practical life, and neither would have understood the need to draw any distinctions between teaching freedmen to read and write and making productive free laborers of them. The education of the freedmen, as many a school official argued, should in fact be designed to ensure their diligence and faithfulness in the workplace. Any teacher, then, might be called upon to lecture the blacks on the need to comply with the terms of labor contracts. When field hands in the Sea Islands grew restive over a recent wage settlement, Laura Towne, along with several other teachers, found herself “borrowed and driven to the different plantations to talk to and appease the eager anxiety.” For the few teachers who felt ill-used when asked to perform such duties, the resentment might manifest itself in spending more time teaching the freedmen how to protect themselves from unscrupulous employers who manipulated figures and the language of contracts to keep their workers in perpetual debt. Had only more teachers addressed themselves to such concerns, a black North Carolinian argued some years later, the difficulties encountered by freedmen in the making and enforcing of contracts might have been minimized. “What we want among freedmen,” he added, “is an education that will not only look after their immortality, but also their corporeity. The denomination that will bless the freedmen most is the one that looks most after soul and body.”58
Although priorities differed among individual teachers, many of them did feel compelled not only to impart universal middle-class values but to attack the special deficiencies they perceived in a people who had been denied the barest rudiments of learning. Based on their assessment of the needs of their students, that would entail instruction in the days of the week, the months, weights, measures, and monetary values, how to calculate their ages, the shape of the world, proper forms of address, and the history of mankind. “Suffice it to say,” the Reverend Henry M. Turner counseled prospective teachers and missionaries, “they need instruction in every thing, and especially the little things of life, such points of attention as thousands would never stoop to surmise.” Moreover, a people “who had never had a country to love” needed to be taught sentiments of patriotism and an appreciation of how they came to be freed. Rather than separate such lessons from the basic skills of reading and writing, teachers would invariably combine them, much as the primers they used did. Through appropriate readings, songs, and exercises, positive moral and patriotic images would be implanted in the minds of the pupils. In teaching the alphabet, each letter might introduce a couplet conveying some moral or value, and in at least one instance an elderly black student composed his own twenty-six verses, with the letters “G,” “K,” and “Q,” for example, communicating thoughts few of his classmates could have failed to comprehend.
God fix all right
Twix’ black and white.
King Cotton’s ded
And Sambo’s fled.
Quashee was sold
When blind and old.
Similarly, teachers devised dialogues which their pupils would memorize and then often recite to visitors, and many of these consisted of historical lessons with an undisguised New England bias.
Q. Where were slaves brought to this country?
A. Virginia.
Q. When?
A. 1620.
Q. Who brought them?
A. Dutchmen.
Q. Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?
A. Pilgrims.
Q. Did they bring