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A. No.59

To succeed in the classroom, many teachers felt they needed only to capitalize on the eagerness with which their pupils had grasped the opportunity to come to them. If additional incentives were deemed necessary, instructors and school officials were apt to differ whether or not these should be largely psychological, material, or corporal. To impress upon his students the need to learn their lessons well, a teacher in North Carolina warned them that they were being watched closely by enemies who wished to see the entire experiment in black education fail. Edwin S. Williams, teaching in St. Helena Village, South Carolina, claimed success in using more substantial rewards to emphasize certain lessons, as in accompanying “a piece of beef with an injunction to make it relish by industry,” or by providing the pupils with extra molasses while giving them “a vigorous stirring up about their smoky rooms & dirty clothes.” Nevertheless, some teachers frankly confessed their inability to maintain classroom discipline, and others felt their effectiveness impaired by the need to teach large numbers of pupils of various ages and grade levels in the same room. “I acknowledge that it was not a very pleasant one,” a black teacher wrote of her first day in the classroom. “Part of my scholars are very tiny,—babies, I call them—and it is hard to keep them quiet and interested while I am hearing the larger ones.”60

Traditionally, teachers seldom hesitated to mete out a sound thrashing to enforce their authority and maximize their instruction. But corporal punishment might have a very different meaning for a former slave than for a white youth, and that consideration alone prompted some freedmen’s school officials to forbid it. The reports of teachers, however, suggest that this prohibition was neither universally obeyed nor respected. In Charleston, a teacher insisted that whipping a freedman in the classroom could not be compared with whipping a slave in the field, especially if “a kind and serious talk” with the recalcitrant pupil followed the thrashing. That, she observed, “seems to astonish them into good behavior, for they appear to have been accustomed to threats rather than kindness, and have been driven to feel that anger rather than love governed those who whipped them.” Whether deservedly or not, black teachers were reputed to be the harshest disciplinarians, and some of them refused to be defensive about it. After all, a black teacher in New Orleans noted, many of his pupils had been plantation slaves and consequently knew no motive for obedience other than fear of punishment. “Coax ’em and they’ll laugh at you; you’ve got to knock ’em about, or they won’t think you’ve got any power over ’em.” Nor were black parents necessarily averse to seeing their children punished, if necessary to instill proper learning habits, but they made it clear that they would tolerate a whipping only if meted out by “a Yankee teacher” and not by a native white.61

Fully aware of the pervasive theories in American society which assumed the mental inferiority of the African race, the teachers and supervisors in the freedmen’s schools needed periodically to assess the results of their efforts and to report them to a curious and skeptical public. But measuring success and progress was not always easy, and each teacher had different priorities. For many, the acquisition of basic learning skills—reading and writing—was sufficient proof of success; still others looked to the performance of black pupils in advanced subjects or chose to stress perceptible improvements in physical appearance, demeanor, and personal habits. “We now see civilization stamped on these schools,” a superintendent reported from Fernandina, Florida. “Instead of rags and filth, there is decent clothes and cleanliness; instead of the vacant half-frightened stare and low slavish tone, there is an intelligent eye and more erect bearing, and full tone.” Antoinette Turner, a teacher in New Bern, North Carolina, derived particular satisfaction from the efforts her pupils