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Although some of Eberhart’s associates in the educational movement might have chosen to be more circumspect in voicing their views on this delicate matter, few of them would have denied the logic or the necessity of his position. To listen to some of the missionary educators, the initial call of their societies to take the black man “by the hand” was to be exercised with considerable restraint. Any ostentatious display of affection for the freedmen or violation of local racial codes suggested, in their view, self-indulgence rather than genuine commitment to the cause and helped neither the blacks nor the image of the teacher. But to advise teachers, as did one educational officer, to “conform to local customs and practices wherever such conformity will not compromise principle” was to invite disagreement and controversy over the precise point at which principle had been compromised. Rather than submit to an order that she refrain from social intercourse with blacks outside the school (such as receiving them in the parlor or eating or walking with them), Martha L. Kellogg, a teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, requested a new assignment, even if it be “an isolated position.” And if she could be boarded with a black family in her new post, that would be all the better. “I desire not [to] be identified with any policy that ignores or repudiates social equality, and I desire to be, where I can act freely in the matter, according to conscience and the gospel idea—to treat the colored people as I should whites in the same circumstances.… It seems to me that unless one engaged in mission work does feel this freedom, true effort is in a measure paralysed.”83

Any veteran of the antislavery movement, remembering those abolitionists who made a point of parading their fraternization with blacks before a hostile northern public, would have recognized the problem instantly. He would have recalled how that question had plagued them throughout their history, producing divisiveness and even sundering numerous friendships. He might have named the prominent abolitionists who despite their zealous commitment to the cause, or because of it, scorned social relations with Negroes as impolitic and detrimental to the objectives for which both white and black activists fought. But for those who chose to question such tactics, whether in the abolitionist movement or in the freedmen’s aid movement, the implications remained absolutely clear. Would not the measures deemed necessary to make the movement palatable to a hostile public reinforce the very conditions and attitudes the movement had initially set out to undermine? That question defied any easy resolution in the 1860s, much as it had in antislavery circles before the war.84

Having struggled through such problems in the old antislavery days, and eager to bury the sources of divisiveness, Lewis Tappan, who had made the transition from abolitionism to the freedmen’s aid movement, drew upon his experience to advise prospective missionary teachers in the South.

People of color have an intuitive apprehension of the feelings of those who profess to labor for their instruction and moral elevation. They are quick to distinguish between affected and real zeal on their behalf, between condescension and true regard, between outward conduct and the emotions of the heart, and, while confiding, they are also very jealous lest the inward should not correspond to the outward in our treatment of them. Little things often betray the actual state of the mind. Unsympathetic, cold and selfish persons can not, with all their pretense, deceive the instincts of those unsophisticated children of nature.

No matter how well-intended the advice, this veteran abolitionist failed to appreciate the still larger problem that would surface again in the postwar years and, even more forcefully, during Radical Reconstruction. For all of its good works and sacrifices, the freedmen’s aid movement, like its anti-slavery predecessor,