Education of the Negro in the military department of the South, 1861-1965

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Authors Mount, Helen Frances, 1914-

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317883 EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO IN THE MILITARY

DEPARTMENT OF THE SOUTH, 1861-1865

by

Helen F . Mount

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

19 6 5 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfill­ ment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library»

Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission^ provided that accurate acknowl­ edgment of source is made o Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the inter­ ests of scholarshipo In all other instances 9 however, permission must be obtained from the author <,

SIGNED:

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:

Professor of History TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ...... iv

CHAPTER

I. PERIOD OF UNION CONFUSION, NOVEMBER, 1860- MAY, l86l ...... 1

II. THE CONTRABAND PERIOD ...... 10

111. THE NEGRO AND FEDERAL GUARDIANSHIP . . . . . 30

IV. EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE DEPARTMENT OF VIRGINIA AND NORTH CAROLINA ...... 42

V. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT AT PORT ROYAL IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THE SOUTH ...... 66

VI. EATON AND EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY ...... 94

VII. EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF ...... 117

VIII. THE EDUCATION OF THE FREEDMEN IN THE UNION ARMY 00000000....0000.0.0 13 5

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 149 ABSTRACT

The Civil War created a vast number of freed people

of coloro The policy of the Federal government regarding

the Negro held in slavery in the States rebelling against

the Union evolved as the War progressed. The United States

Army undertook the humanitarian task of educating the

illiterate freedmen for participation as citizens in a

free society.

This thesis proposes that the first system of free

education for Negroes in the South was that created by the

Union Army during the Civil War, and that this system

furnished both the impetus and pattern for free public

education in the South following the War. c The development of the attitudes and policies of

the United States Government is traced from the Constitu­

tional recognition of slavery to the acknowledgment of the

Negro as an emancipated person. Research for this informa­

tion centered in the Official Records of the War of the

Rebellion, House and Senate Executive Records, the Congres­

sional Globe, writings and speeches of President Lincoln,

and various secondary materials.

Information pertaining to the educational system

set up by the Union Army was gathered from annual and

quarterly reports of numerous benevolent societies of the

iv V

North, reports and orders of the War Department found in the Records of the Rebellion, official documents from the various Congressional records, first-hand accounts of teachers and supervisors, plus selected secondary sources ® CHAPTER I

PERIOD OF UNION CONFUSION, NOVEMBER, 1860-MAY, l86l

A long history of controversy over slavery and civil rights preceded the election of i860« Abolition of slavery by state action had ceased at the northern boundaries of Maryland and Virginia in the years following the Revolution and had never been renewed« Instead^ the power of the slave-holders in the government had steadily increased through the years; the defense of slavery as a beneficent institution had become more vocal; and the constitutional authority of the Congress to restrict or control slavery had been challenged increasingly by devotees of the doctrine of state rights*

Meanwhile, the opposition to slavery and the defense of the prerogatives of the Federal Government had likewise intensified through the years. By the time of the i860 presidential election, antislavery people controlled the Republican party. They demanded the exclusion of slav­ ery from the territories. The inevitable direction of public policy would be toward abolition of slavery and toward nationalism. In ever increasing numbers the champions of slavery and decentralization had demanded some sort of political machinery which would permit them to protect slavery in the Union and had endorsed immediate independence for the slave states if a Republican President should be elected. Lincoln was elected, and in February, l86l, at Montgomery, Alabama, representatives of seven slave states, whose conventions had passed acts of seces­ sion, formed the Confederate States of America.

The preservation of the Union was paramount.

President James Buchanan, sympathetic to the South, had four months to serve after Lincolnf s election. He was determined to do nothing to provoke war. In his annual message to Congress in December, i860, he recommended the passage of a constitutional amendment to recognize the

South’s right of property in slaves, the duty of the

Federal Government to protect this right in all common territories, the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the nullification of state laws which interfered with the 1 recovery of slaves. Further conciliatory actions to avoid war were taken by legislative bodies and individuals.

Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts modified their personal liberty laws. In some areas abolitionist meetings were barred by police action. Newspaper editors avoided the controversial issue of slavery, and religious leaders

^Message from the President, December k , i860, House Journal, 36 Cong., 2 Sess® (l860-6l), pp. 21-22; James Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan1s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York, I866), pp. 131-32° pleaded for the people of the nation to be calm and patient ® ^

In Congress, Senator Crittenden of Kentucky intro­ duced an amendment to restore and extend the old Missouri

Compromise line and to prevent Congress from interfering with slavery in any state or in the District of Columbia,

These measures, written into the Constitution, would not be subject to future amendment, 3 Both Houses of Congress appointed committees to consider ways and means for a peaceful settlement of the difficulties between the North 4 and South, Forty years of compromise had not been enough»

No one seemed willing to face up to a final settlement of the basic issue, No one except President-elect Lincoln seemed to realize that compromise would mark the end of constitutional government•

The President-elect refused the requests of party politicians and partisan groups to speak or write during these troubled months, He could not apologize to the South for being elected. The Republican Party Platform and the speeches he had delivered before his election fully

2 Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962), p. 6l.

^Congressional Globe, 36 Cong,, 2 Sess» (l860-6l), p o ll4*

^Ibid, , p . 63 ; Buchanan, Mr, Buchanan's Administra­ tion, pp, 134-33 ; Hous e J ournal, 3*5 Cong.', 2 Sess, (i860- 6l), p „ 380 5 expressed his views. Lincoln was adamantly against the extension of slavery as proposed in the Crittenden Amend­ ment 5 andhe urged Senator Lyman Trumbull and Representa­ tive William Kellogg«, in almost identical terms, to stand firm against compromise on this question. uThe tug has to come and better now than Lat er»

Congress, in a last desperate effort, passed a completely worthless amendment two days before Lincoln1s inauguration which would have prevented that body from ever interfering with the domestic institutions of any state, including state laws concerning persons held to service or labor. Seven states of the deep South already had seceded from the Union, and Lincoln, knowing certainly that it could never be ratified, signed this amendment the day after the Union forces had surrendered Fort Sumter to the 7 Confederacy.

In his Inaugural Address, Lincoln assured the eight slave states which still remained loyal that the new administration had no intention of endangering the property, peace, and security of any section of the country. The

5 Abraham Lincoln to John A . Gilmer, December 1 5 ? i860, Roy P. Easier (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953)? IV? p p . 151-52• 6 Abraham Lincoln to William Kellogg, December 11, i860, ibid., p. 150.

^Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p. 6 3 ; Senate Journal, 36 Cong., 2 Sess. (I86O-6I), pp. 381-8 2 . Fugitive Slave Law would be enforced because it was the 8 law® Constitutionally, the slave was property and the new

President had vowed to uphold the Union, the Constitution, and the laws® Historians have questioned whether or not

Lincoln, at this juncture, desired war. In his Inaugural address he did not state that the Union was intended to be perpetual; he omitted from his address any declaration of intent to coerce the Southern states to remain in the

Union. However, the seceded states regarded such coercion as a certainty, and the firing on Fort Sumter followed.

Lincolnf s assumption of executive office only compounded confusion in the North. The Republicans were not in the majority, and some leaders of the party seemed to have little confidence in the President® Antislavery leaders were angry about Lincoln’s postponement of a positive program to advance the welfare of free Negroes and to emancipate the slaves. Farmers were interested in an

Increase in free land, immigrants wanted work, and Northern

Democrats seemed to want peace at any price. The free

Negroes of the North were completely frustrated. They thought that the great issue was clearly that of freedom for their enslaved kinsmen and the recognition of the Negro as a citizen. 9 Prominent as a spokesman for the northern

^First Inaugural Address, March 4, l86l, Easier, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV, pp. 250-51®

^Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p . 65® Negro, Frederick Douglass Favored separation from the

South, certain that Negro leaders would rise up and lead 10 the slaves to freedom® Horace Greeley, William Lloyd

Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and many others were also initially in favor of separation®

The military situation was equally unstable and distressing o Some Union forts in the South were being handed over to the Confederate government and ultimatums were being issued for the surrender of others, few of which could be defended in the event of war ® Commander Armstrong of Fort Barrancas and the Navy Yard at Pensacola, Florida, surrendered to the Confederate forces without a struggle on

January 12, 1861® Lieutenant Slemmer, commanding nearby

Fort Pickens, defied his senior officer’s orders to sur- 11 render and held this location for the Union® Two months later, four fugitive slaves, seeking refuge in the fort,

10 Speech of Frederick Douglass, Boston, December 3, i860, as cited in James M® McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the Civil War (New York, 1965) 9 pp @ 12-13• '

11Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, T860-63 (2 voIs«, Hartford, 1867) 5 I , pp « 421, 601® were returned to their masters by Slemmer ® He was faith­ fully following the policy of his Commander-in-Chief-- the Union^ the Constitution, and enforcement of the laws o

The Confederate attack and seizure of Fort Sumter and Lincolnf s call for seventy-five thousand state militia pulled the people of the North together in a great outburst of patriotism* Recruits flocked to the enlistment centers, anxious to preserve the Union® Northern Negroes offered their allegiance, wealth, and the service of Negro regi­ ments already organized at their own expense, but these offerings were in all cases refused. 13 This was to be a white ma n ’s war to restore the Union. The slavery issue which had been the cause of sectional strife in the United

States for forty years was for the present ignored. There were many reasons for this position, all of them plausible: fear of a slave insurrection, alienation of support from

12 Adam J ® Slemmer to Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas, March l6, l86l, in The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Union and Confederate Armies, R. N. Scott et all (eds) (130 voisl, Washington, 1880-1901)9 Series II, Vol. I, p . 750. Hereafter cited as Official Records . • . Armies. The return of fugitives by the military authorities soured Negroes on the Union cause. Rev. J. Sella Martin, in a letter to Frederick Douglass, wrote, !tI received a letter from Mobile, in which the writer states that the returning of those slaves by Slemmer has made the slaves determined to fight for the South, in the hope that their masters may set them free after the war, and when remonstrated with, they say that the North will not let them fight for them.” McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, p. 23®

^Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, pp. 66-68® loyal slave states and Northern Democrats, uncertainty of

army attitudes, foreign affairs, and so forth* No positive

interpretation is possible *

Fear arose in areas close to the border states that

the enslaved Negro might endeavor to free himself by violent means * Brigadier-General. Benjamin A® Butler, in

command of a Massachusetts regiment on its way to

Washington, D * C ®, assured Governor Thomas H® Hicks of

Maryland that his forces stood ready to help put down any 14 insurrection of slaves in that state® In a Proclamation

of May l4, l86l, Butler declared that there would be no

interference with private property by the men under his

command or by other persons, and that any soldier who did

so would be vigorously punished®/*"^ George B * McClellan, in

the Department of Ohio, and Robert Patterson, commanding

the Department of Pennsylvania, ordered all attempts at l6 insurrection by Negroes to be suppressed by armed force.

There was no evidence, however, of any such danger/

The loyalty of the people of the border states of

Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri was torn between the Union

14 Brigadier-General Benjamin A® Butler to Governor Thomas. H® Hicks, "April 23, l86l, in Official Records . * * Armies, Series XI, Vol. I, p. 750®

^General Butler1 s Proclamation, May l4, l86l, in Official Records * ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol. II, pp . 31” 32.

^Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p . 70® and the Confederacy® The balance seemed to tip toward the

Union side in the early part of l86lbut any official indication that the^institution of slavery in these areas might be endangered could easily have turned them to the

Confederate cause® Congress gave the President its support in a resolution of July 22, l86l, which declared that the purpose of the conflict was to restore the Union and preserve the Constitution® 17

^^Ibido, p . 68• CHAPTER II

. THE CONTRABAND PERIOD

Whether' the people of the North or the Lincoln

Administration wanted it or not, the Negroes as free men, fugitives, and slaves soon became deeply involved in the 1 War« Law and custom had decreed that the slaves should foe kept in a state of ignorance; but many slaves had learned to read and write and shared their information with those 2 who were illiterate <* News of the world outside the plantations was often obtained by eavesdropping„ A young house servant, for example, whose master and mistress spelled out words they did not wish her to understand, kept the spelling in her head to be interpreted by a literate

3 Negro at a later time* The slaves seemed to know what was happening in the free states regarding their race, whether

Bruce Catton, A Stillness At Appomattox (Garden City, 1954) , p- 19.;' 2 A fugitive slave, entering the Union lines in October of 1862 with military information, had read the recent Emancipation Proclamation, the life of Frederick Douglass, a history of Santa Domingo, the story of John Brown, and had read this to many other colored people, but his master was unaware of his ability to reado Herbert Aptheker, Essays in the History of the American Negro (New York, 1945), p. 188. 3 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953)> P • 53 -

10 11 it concerned schools for children of color or the election of a President® Sometimes this news traveled from the

North by way of the Underground Railroad ®

Their masters* concern and agitation over the colonization and abolition movements «, together with their active encouragement of religion for the slaves, served to educate these Negroes to an awareness of something better, whether that something was to be realized in a different country, in the North, or ultimately in heaven, The constant demand of Southern Congressmen for a more stringent fugitive slave law indicated the bondsmen * s desire for freedom® Slaves were restless and masters were always fearful of insurrections® Slavery was dependent upon quietude for its existence; war was exceedingly dis­ turbing* Once it began, the greatest confusion ensued in

, k slave-holding areas*

Whenever it was possible, slave owners moved their property in slaves deeper into the Confederacy out of the reach of Union forces which had taken control of the coastal area east of Richmond in the early months of the

War * Slaveholders who could not move their slaves tried to frighten them® Yankees were pictured as devils intent on selling them into a hell called Cuba * While many of the

r — ; ■ ■ . "'The Negro Race in America,u' Edinburgh Review (1864), CXIX, pp. 211-12. 12

Negroes half believed the stories told to them, they soon lost their fears when Union soldiers appeared«

In the first weeks that followed the loss of Fort

Sumter, the Union Navy secured the peninsula between the

James and York rivers, including Norfolk and the important entrance to Hampton Roads. On May l8, Brigadier-General

Benjamin Butler assumed command of the Department of

Virginia with headquarters at Fortress Monroe * ^ Soon afterward he devised the most successful method of pre­ venting the recapture of slaves by their masters® Three fugitive slaves who had been working to strengthen the position of an enemy battery sought freedom within the

Union lines* Informed of the fact that these slaves had been used to build enemy fortifications and were about to be taken to Carolina by their master to work on Confederate defenses, Butler retained them and set them to work in the

Quartermaster Department which needed laborers. The

General, who such a short while ago had offered to put down a slave insurrection and had ordered punishment for soldiers who aided fugitive slaves in Maryland, now

5Ibid., p. 220.

^Benjamin F , Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler: Butlerys Book, Review of His Legal, Political and Military Career (Boston, 1892), pi 2 4 0 . Hereafter cited as Butlerfs Book. 13 justified his actions by claiming the fugitives as

7 "contraband^ in time of war»

The next day a Confederate officer came to claim the slaves and chided Butler for not obeying the Fugitive

Slave Lawo^ Butler*s reply was that the law applied only to States, and by ordinance of secession, Virginia had declared itself a foreign country* 9 Uncertain of the point of law in his position, Butler appealed to the War Depart­ ment, asking, "Shall they be allowed the use of this property against the United States, and we not be allowed 10 its use in aid of the United States?" On May 30,

Secretary of War Cameron directed the General not to surrender the fugitive slaves to their disloyal masters, but to use them and to keep an accurate account of the 11 value of their work« By late summer, more than nine

7 Ibid *, p . 2 5 8 ; American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events (New York, 1B62-1875)\ l86l, p p ® b 1 — 4:2 * 8 Butler and this officer, Major Cary, had been delegates to the Democratic Conventions at Charleston and Baltimore in i860 and were friends* See James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans: History of the Administra­ tion of the Department of the Gulf in the Year 1862 (Boston, I 8 6 3 ) \ pi 12 7 «

^Butler, Butlerys Book, p® 257 ®

"^Benjamin F.• Butler to Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott, May 24, l86l, in Official Records *00 * Armies, Series IT, Vol® I, p * 650 * 11 Simon Cameron to Major-General Butler, May 30, l86l, in ibid*, pp * 754-55® A question could be raised as to why an account would be kept; perhaps as a security against future claims of the slave owners or as a record of labor performed by persons deserving of wages * 14 hundred contrabands had fled to Butler1 s lines to the fort i p they called ^Freedom»"

Many Union commanders, meanwhile, had resisted or ignored government policy of returning fugitives« They knew, as Butler said, that the Confederates were employing these slaves as laborers on various military projects, and that the loss would weaken the Southern labor force* They also realized that an influx of Negro labor would release many Union troops for front line duty* However, the

11 contraband11 policy was held to a minimum as many Federal

Commander^ refused to allow fugitives to enter their lines, although such a policy was often contrary to their personal convictions* General Grant wrote to a subordinate: nX do not want to see the Army used as Negro catchers, but less do X want to see it used as a cloak to cover their escape.

No matter what our private views may be on this subject there are in this department positive orders on the subject 13 and these orders must be obeyed * 11

The army1s displeasure with government policy of returning escaped slaves increased, and, still not com­ mitting itself definitely, the government, through General

Halleck, on February 22, 1862, ordered that no fugitives

12 Part on, General Butler in New Orleans, p. 131®

Grant to Colonel Jo Cook, December 2$, l86l, in Official Records * Armies, Series XI, Vol. X, p * 794® 15 should be admitted to Union lines® All cases were to be handled by local courts ® This policy failed because fugitives continued to come in large numbers, greatly 14 hampering military operations® The Republicans mustered sufficient support to overcome the objections of border state Democrats and enabled Congress to pass the first

Confiscation Act, which said, n® ® ® if persons held to service shall be employed in hostility to the United

States, the rights of their services shall be forfeited and 15 such persons shall be discharged therefrom®11

Leaders of military forces in the rebellious states now had legal sanction for keeping fugitive slaves if their masters were considered disloyal® Legions of fugitives streaming into the Union lines created problems everywhere®

The situation became particularly touchy and potentially explosive in the border states; technically, all slave holders in these states were loyal, and they were angry because their slaves were escaping to the shelter of the

Union lines®

Pushed by the abolitionists and the free Negroes to emancipate the slaves, but haunted by the fear that the

^General Henry W® Halleck, General Order No® 46, February 22, 1862, ibid®, Series I, Vol« VTTT, p. 564®

"^Annual Cyclopaedia, l86l, p® 642; Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War7 pi 61T; Act of Congress, August U , l86l, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series XI, Vol. I, p ® 762 ® 16 loss of the border states might spell doom for the Union,

Lincoln allowed the Army commanders to decide for them­ selves what the status of the fugitives in their areas would be o On several occasions, however, he used his executive power, more or less openly as the case required, to handle particular situations«

Surrounded by Virginia counties that had remained loyal to the Union, the city of Washington had become the mecca for large numbers of fugitive slaves o Lincoln, through a letter written by an under-secretary of the War

Department, asked General McDowell if he did not agree that it might be a good idea for the army as a constitutional obligation to permit the loyal slave owners to claim their fugitive slaves who had crossed the Potomac with Union troopso The General was cautioned, however, not to use the

President's name with regard to this sensitive matter,

In the Department of the West, Major-General

Fremont, strong antislavery man and ambitious Republican politician, faced a small war in Missouri between the pro­ slavery and antislavery people of that state. He attempted to strengthen the Union position by establishing martial law, and by declaring at the same time that the property of

Schuyler Hamilton to Brigadier-General McDowell, July l6, l86l, in Official Records , * , Armies, Series II, Vol. I 9 p« 760, 17 those who had taken up arms against the United States would be confiscated and their slaves set free«17

Lincoln suggested that Fremont modify his proclama­ tion to conform with the spirit of the Confiscation Act passed by Congress® Fremont refused to make any modifica­ tion himself, and replied that if any change were made, the

President would have to make it * Lincoln's letter of response was succint and to the point® He wrote, "Your answer just received expressed the preference on your part

I should make an order for modification, which I cheerfully do.**18

Though Fremont's Proclamation had riled the border state of Kentucky to the point of secession, Lincoln's modification of it drew down upon his head the wrath of antislavery people® To his friend 0® H® Browning, who had questioned his action, Lincoln spoke of Fremont's act as one of dictatorship, not required by the military circum­ stances involved, which might drive Kentucky to taking up arms against the Union, perhaps drawing Missouri and

Maryland after it® Lincoln was pessimistic concerning the chances for Union success without the support of these

"^Proclamation, August 30, l86l, in ibid®, p . 221®

"^Abraham Lincoln to John C® Fremont, September 11, l86l, Roy P® Easier (ed ®) , The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols®, New Brunswick, 1953), IV, pp. 151-52® 18 stateso 19 The President was not at this point quite ready to admit that the freedom of the slaves was the most vital 20 issue of the War* (

Army officers, preparing green troops for offensive warfare, now faced the task of confiscating slaves of dis­ loyal masters and returning fugitive slaves to those who had remained loyal * Government orders and practical military operations were two different matters® In the border states the easiest solution to the problem was to assume that all people were loyal and had a constitutional right to their property, to return the slaves, and to refuse to allow fugitives access to the Union lines thus avoiding difficulties in the future *

Brigadier-General William T® Sherman, in the autumn of l86l, directed officers in Kentucky and the

Department of the Cumberland to surrender fugitives to their masters, stating that the laws of Kentucky were 21 binding upon the Army. George B. McClellan, newly appointed General-in-Chief of the Union Armies, wrote to

General Buell in Kentucky, M'I know that I express the

"^Abraham Lincoln to Orville H. Browning, September 22, l86l, in ibid., pp. 531-32.

^Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and The Negro (New York, 1962), p. 71• 21 Wo To Sherman to Colonel Terrachin, October 15, l86l, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I T , Vol® I, p * 774; Wo T® Sherman to Brigadier-General McCook, November 8, 1861, in ibid., p. 777o feelings of the President when I say that we are fighting only to preserve the integrity of the Union and the 2 2 Constitutional authority of the General Government,11 and directed him to respect the constitutional rights of the people of Kentucky ® In Maryland, Major-General John A <> Dix warned his officers not to interfere with the slave-master 2 Q relations and to exclude Negroes from the lines 9 At the onset of winter, the business of drilling and providing for a new army, plus the burden of caring for homeless fugitives, taxed some of the armies in the western areas beyond their resources. Putting aside humanitarian instincts, General

Halleck ordered all fugitives not already employed out of 24 his camps; on Christmas Day, l86l, General Grant ordered 2 5 all fugitives expelled from Fort Holt.

In Virginia, a state where less consideration had to be given to the loyalty of the citizens, hordes of fugitives had gathered, encouraged by General Butlerfs

22 George B. McClellan to Brigadier-General D . C . Buell, November 6 , l86l, in ibid., pp. 776-77 °

^John A. Dix to Colonel H . E. Paine, November 4, l86l, in ibid., p. 774. On August 8 , l86l, Dix stated in a letter to Secretary of War Cameron that he was "neither a negro-stealer nor a negro-catcher.H See ibid. , p. 763 <• 04 General Henry W. Halleck, General Order No. 3 1 November 20, l86l, in ibid., p. 778; Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861-1863 (New Haven, 1938), p. 182.

^General Ulysses S. Grant, General Order No. 2 2 , December 25, l86l, in Official Records . . . Armies, Series II, Vol. I, p. 795• ^contraband11 confiscation. To get them out of the way of an army training and skirmishing, as well as for humane reasons, contraband camps were set up within the area of military protection but removed from active military camps,

The town of Hampton, abandoned by Virginians fleeing to the

South, was turned into a shelter for the fugitives« Butler appointed Edward L , Pierce as Commissioner of Negro Affairs to supervise, feed, and teach the blacks in the area around

Fortress Monroe, Pierce, a ninety-day volunteer and a

Harvard graduate, registered them, provided tools, put the able-bodied men to work building embankments, and obtained 26 rations for them and their dependents*

The doughty General Butler had a flair for receiv­ ing publicity throughout his military career, and his ncontraband11 phrase had become a catchword in the North*

Louis Tappan, benevolent millionaire, antislavery leader, and treasurer of the American Missionary Society, offered 27 the help of that organization to care for the Negroes *

During the summer, the Association sent Reverend L * C »

Lockwood as a missionary to these camps, and the first

26 Of the nine hundred fugitives, there were 330 able-bodied men, 175 women, 225 under ten years of age, 170 between ten and eighteen years, and 30 past the age of hard labor* Parton, General Butler in New Orleans, p p * 129, 170.

2^Ibid*, p* 173; Wiley, Southern Negroes, l86l- 1865, p* 260, 21

Sunday school and day school were established at rr , 28 Hampton»

A change in the official military attitude toward the contrabands at Fortress Monroe was expressed in an order issued in October, Working contrabands were now given the status of hired laborers receiving wages.

Although this order provided that all male laborers were to receive eight dollars and subsistence per month, and women were to earn four dollars and subsistence, no cash was paid out; clothing allowances were deducted, and the balance was put in a fund, administered by the Quarter­ master Corp, to provide support for fugitives in camp who 29 were unable to work. The salary scale was raised in a short time to ten dollars a month and one ration for able- bodied men and a new classification was added: boys from twelve to, eighteen years of age were to receive five dollars and one ration plus two dollars as a bonus for good behavior and industry. Infirm men received the same pay and rations, but received only one dollar as a reward for

good behavior and hard work. For extra work, laborers were to receive amounts from fifty cents to a dollar, also in

28 W® E, Burghardt DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in Amer i c a ( New York, 19 3 5 ) , 642 • 29 General John Wool, General Order No® 72, October 14, l86l, in Official Records . . * Armies, Series IX, Vol. I, p® 7 7 ^ 22 cash o All children under twelve years of age received one ration and remained with their parents» These provisions, however, applied only to freedmen in public service, as servants were to be privately paid, but the army used hundreds of the Negroes as teamsters, cooks, laborers, and 30 servants before they were enlisted as soldiers«.

Life for the Negroes in contraband camps was not easy* Dishonest and prejudiced officers took advantage of the ignorant laborers, cheated them of their few posses­ sions, misappropriated funds set aside for dependents, and treated the contrabands as cruelly as they had been treated in slavery* 31 In some camps the Negroes were required to register and carry identification * All able-bodied men were expected to work * Their morale was low; nevertheless, enough support was found within the military establishment to provide protection, subsistence for those unable to work, and the opportunity to earn self-respect by support­ ing themselves by their labor *

Lincoln took official recognition of the fugitive

slaves' plight in his message to Congress in December, l86l, by pointing out that the Confiscation. Act had freed these people, but that they were dependent upon the

30 House Executive Documents, 37 Cong *, 2 Sess®, Vol. VII, Doc. 8 5 , pp. 1-14.

"The Negro Race in America,11 Edinburgh Review, CXIX (1864), pp. 226-27. Federal government and must be cared for. He proposed that

steps be taken for the colonization of these freedmen and

any others that might be emancipated by the loyal border 3 2 states, in an area of suitable climate«, The report of

Secretary of War Cameron to Congress, proposing to emanci­

pate and to arm the slaves, was recalled by the President

and revised after it had been delivered to postmasters for

distributiona The revised version stated only that the

slave was a source of military power and should not be

returned to his disloyal master» 33 This controversy had

further demoralizing effects upon the Negroes, who had no

intention of leaving the country and did want to serve in

the military forces•

The Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina, had been captured by the navy late in l86l® There the

Union Army of occupation found thousands of abandoned

slaves and a valuable, unharvested crop of sea island

cottono General Thomas Wo Sherman reported to the War

Department that these slaves would not work without being whipped, as if the new state of freedom relieved them from 34 any labor smacking of slavery. He recommended to the

Annual Message to Congress, December 3 ? l86l, Easier, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, p. 48. 33John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, 19&3)? P° l6. 34 Report of Thomas W. Sherman to Secretary of War Cameron, December l4, l86l, in Official Records . .■. Armies, Series IT, Vol. I, p. 783. 24

Adjutant General that a system be established so that these freed slaves could provide for themselves * Their great need was to learn personal and moral responsibility.

Teachers should be sent to instruct them, Qualified superintendents were required to direct the work of the plantations and to instruct these former slaves in inde­ pendent, paid labor@ This plan not only would solve the immediate problem but also would pave the way for the future usefulness of the freedmen*35

An open appeal to the benevolent people of the

North for help was made by the Army at Hilton Head in

February, 1862, Placing the responsibility of the people of the United States to help the freed slaves next in importance in the War to the preservation of the Union,

General Sherman asked for teachers and labor superintend­ ents to provide Christian, social training in citizenship for the freedmenQ

Sherman's appeal was the first public expression of the humanitarian problems involved in the transition of the slaves to the status of free men and responsible citizenso Congress and the army were freeing them and providing them with the basic necessities of food, shelter

3 5Thomas W 0 Sherman to Adjutant-General, January 15, 1862, in ibid,, p p , 802-03 °

"^General Thomas W® Sherman, General Order No® 9, February 6, 1862 , , in ibid.® , pp • 805-0 6 ® 25 and clothing, as well as using them as laborers, but the freedmen would remain hopelessly handicapped in their struggle to live in a free society if they remained ignoranto Thus, the Sea Islands became the site of an experiment to determine whether former slaves could be educated to provide for their own needs and to develop their individual aptitudes and abilities* 37

Conditions for an experiment in basic learning were o Q less than ideal in the Sea Islands * There was much prejudice among Union troops occupying the area; the

Negroes involved in the experiment were generally lacking in initiative, due to their isolated position, a lack of communication and means of inter-marriage with other groups« But the fact that some progress was made with a seemingly unpromising segment of the Negro population served as a challenge and incentive to others to attempt similar experiments in all areas occupied by the military forces * Furthermore, the record made by the first Negro

^7upreedmen at Port Royal,lt Atlantic Monthly, XXX (September X863), p « 291; Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton to Edwin M * Stanton, December 30, 1864, in Official Records * * @ Armies, Series XIX, Vol® IV", p® 1023® 38 First Annual Report of the Educational Commission for Freedmen, May, 1863 (Boston, 1863), pi ET; Second Annual Report of the New England FreedmenT s Aid Society (Educa-^ tional Commission) April 21, 186~? (Boston, l864), pT 21; Freedmen at Port Royal, 11 Atlantic Monthly, XIII (September 1863), P® 301. 26 regiment recruited on these islands helped to convince the

3 9 Union that the freedmen would fight for freedom•

The year 1862 was marked by strong Congressional

action with regard to slavery, Lincoln's urgent appeal requesting compensation for any state that would adopt a policy of gradual abolition of slavery was not acted upon because of the strong objections of Democrats and border 40 state Congressmen. Free Negroes and antislavery people rejoiced over the Emancipation Act of April 11, 1862, which freed the slaves in the District of Columbia and provided a million dollars for compensation to the owners and for removal and colonization for those freed Negroes 4l who might wish to leave this country. After signing the bill, Lincoln wrote to Congress, "I have ever desired to see the National Capital freed from the Institution in some satisfactory way. . . . I am gratified that the two principles of compensation, and colonization, are both 42 recognized and practically applied in the act." The illicit African slave trade which had persisted for half a

39Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York, 1962), pp. 243-44.

^Message to Congress, March 6, 1862, Easier, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, pp. 144-46 »

^Quarles, Lincoln and the Negroes, p. 104; Annual Cyclopaedia, 1862, pp. 333-^4° 42 Message to Congress, April 1 6 , 1862, Easier, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, p. 192. 27 century was effectively dealt with through a treaty with

England» Finally, slavery was abolished, June 19) in all Zj. o the territories, without compensation to owners» ^ The War

Department now took an unequivocal stand in regard to the

Fugitive Slave Law when it forbade any officer or soldier to capture or return slaves to disloyal masters, on pain of k k dismissal from service*

Northern sentiment for emancipation was strengthened by Confederate newspaper editorials which made it clear that slave labor was a source of strength and power to the 45 Confederacy® Frederick Douglass and other Negro leaders urged the government to strike the greatest blow against 46 the Confederacy by emancipating all the slaves« Anti- slavery people rejoiced over the passage of the Second

Confiscation Act of July, 1862, which declared all slaves coming within the Union lines forever free, and all lands abandoned in states in rebellion to be Federal property,

43 Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p p . 96-97®

^Article of War, March 3, 1862, in Official Records . . . Armies, Series II, Vol® I , p @ 8l0 * 45 MThe institution is a tower of strength to the South, particularly at the present crisis, and our enemies will be likely to find that the Tmoral cancerf about which their orators are so fond of prating, is really one of the most effective weapons employed against the Union by the Southeu Montgomery Advertiser, November 6, l86l, as quoted by James M. McPherson, The Negro*s Civil War: How Negroes Felt and Acted During the Civil War (New York, 1965)9 P® 39®

^ Xbid* , pp * 39-^2 * 28 for this confiscated land would provide property for the freedmen•^

Free Negroes were disheartened when General Hunterfs proclamation freeing all slaves in the Department of the

South was declared void by the President, on the ground 48 that it was unauthorized by the Government» His meeting with a group of Negro leaders in the late summer of 1862 stirred up great resentment among these people o . Lincoln’s sensitivity to the free Negro’s status as a second-class citizen may have prompted him to declare openly that be­ cause of white prejudice against the black race and because of basic racial differences, it would be best for both races to be separated® He appealed to these men to urge government financed colonization upon their people, and spoke of an area in Central America which might be satisfactory, if as few as twenty-five families were 49 willing to begin the experiment® The proposal was unrealistic, undemocratic, and wholly unacceptable®

The majority of free Negroes agreed with the following sentiment, expressed at a rally in New York,

’’This is our country by birth® ® ® • We love this land,

/^United States Statutes at Large, XII, pp ® 590-92 ® 48 Proclamation Revoking General Hunter’s Order of Military Emancipation of May 9 , 1862, Easier, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, pp® 222-23 ® 49 Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes, August l4, 1862, ibid.© , pp © 370-75® and have contributed our share to its prosperity and wealth* * • , When our country is struggling for life, and one million freemen are believed to be scarcely sufficient to meet the foe, we are called upon by the President of the

United States to leave this land* * * * But at this crisis, we feel disposed to refuse the offers of the

President since the call of our suffering country is too 50 loud and imperative to be unheeded *n

50National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 13, 1862, as quoted in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, p * 94 * CHAPTER III

THE NEGRO AND FEDERAL GUARDIANSHIP

Before meeting with Negro leaders in August, l862 ,

Lincoln had drafted an emancipation policy and had pre­

sented it to his Cabinet for their consideration» The

summer had been a grim one for the Union Armyo McClellan had not succeeded in capturing Richmond and Union forces 1 had been defeated a second time at Manassas® The morale

of the people of the North was at a low point® The

President, sensitive to public opinion, may have felt that

a moral, humanitarian purpose was needed in the war 2 efforts® The Abolitionists, Radical Republicans, free

Negroes and foreign diplomats all were urging Lincoln to

change his policy regarding slavery ® ^ English journalists were sharp in their criticism of the Government 1s apathetic

attitude toward the condition of Negroes in contraband 4 camps ®

1 Joseph B® Mitchell, Decisive Battles of the Civil War (New York, 1955)? pp ® 78-86 ®

2John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, 1963), pp® 152 ® o Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and The Negro (New York, 1962), p. 8 8 . 4 nThe Negro Race in America,u Edinburgh Review, CXIX (January 1864), p. 221®

30 31 Personally«) Lincoln hated slavery and considered the effects of slavery as evil upon white people as well as black5 but officially he considered the preservation of the 5 Union to be his first duty as Chief Executive® Greeley of the New York Tribune, in an editorial entitled uPrayer of

Twenty Millions,n castigated the President for not en­ forcing the emancipation clause of the Second Confiscation

Act® Lincoln defended his consistent policy in a letter to the editor ®

X would save the Union® ® « ® What I do about the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because X do not believe it would help to save the Union® I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause ® 6

The time was right, as Lincoln saw it, to proclaim emancipation, not as a humanitarian act but as a war measure, and it was as a war measure providing for the enlistment of able-bodied Negroes into the armed services that the Proclamation had its greatest effect upon the 7 Negroes® The slaves in areas taken by the Union Army were

5 Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes, August l4, 1862, Roy P o Easier (ed ®), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, 1953)t V , pp• 371-72; Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, ibid®, pp ® 388-89 ® r Xbid o , p ® 3 88®

^Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863 ? in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Ser® XXI, Vol® 3? pp * 2-3® 32 already free, and the Proclamation that became effective on

January 1, 1863, did not apply to slaves of loyal masters in the border states. Negroes were encouraged that the proclamation made no reference to colonization; and John

Hope Franklin, Negro historian, has declared in his book,

The Emancipation Proclamation, that nthe President indi­ cated . . . Negroes would enjoy a status that went beyond mere freedom.® They were to be free persons, fighting for their own country, a country in which they were to be g permitted to remain *11

In the Sea Islands, where Negroes had been free since l86l, Emancipation Proclamation Day was celebrated by a formal program, with speeches and the reading of the official Proclamation. A free Negro teacher, Charlotte

Forten, called it lfthe most glorious day the nation has yet ;9 seen.n When the freed Negroes, unbidden, began to sing uMy

Country Tis of Thee,11 an Army officer described the sound as "the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.

^Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation, p. 139•

^Ray Alien Billington (ed.), The Journal of Charlotte Forten (New York, 1953)? P • 153 »

^Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York, 1962), p. 6 0 . 33 Negroes began to fight for the freedom of their black brothers still in slavery early in 1863 However, the War Department had authorized the enlisting of freedmen as soldiers by Brigadier-General Saxton on the Sea Islands X 2 of South Carolina In August, 1862, after the cavalry had been withdrawn from the area to the Peninsular campaign, leaving the area without adequate protection* 13 Five thousand volunteer enlistments were authorized, and these soldiers were to receive pay and allowances of white volunteers® All slaves who enlisted at this early date were to be forever free, as were their mothers, wives, and l4 children® These regiments were watched with great interest by the proslavery and antislavery groups alike, and their every act was reported in Northern newspapers in

Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation, p« 130; Luis F® Emilio, History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts, Volunteer Infantry, I863-I865 (Boston, 1891), ppl 51-6 1 « ' 12 Flag officer L® S® Goldsborough had been author­ ized to enlist contrabands for Naval duty as early as September, l86l, under the same terms and regulations as other enlistments® See Quarles, Lincoln and The Negro, P o 92 ®

13Higgins on, Army Life in a Black Regiment, p® 15® 14 Ibid®, p ® 266® Company A of the First South Carolina Regiment counted its enlistment date as May 7, being a part of the early and unsuccessful experiment in recruitment of slaves for the Army under General Hunter® Ibid o, ppo 260-6 1 ; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work of the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley (in coTlaborationwith Ethel Osgood Mason) (New York, 1907)9 pp * 51-52 ° 6 34 order that people could see how former slaves reacted to military discipline and the dangers of war *15

The enlistment of slaves as soldiers following the

Proclamation met with opposition in Congress, where Bill

675 ? a proposal by Representatives Lovejoy and Dunn to enroll one hundred fifty thousand Negroes for a five year term, was defeated. Leaders of the opposition deplored the change of purpose in the War from that of restoration of l6 the Union to the abolition of slavery. Others called the bill an attempt to make white men accept the blacks as their social equals; 17 one member predicted that the action l8 would cause border states to rebel. A volunteer bounty of three hundred dollars was paid by the Federal Government to slave owners in the border states who allowed their slaves to enlist, an action that helped to increase emancipation in this area. 19 Governor Augustus Ward of

15 Colonel Higginson stated, tlT sometimes felt as if we were a plant trying to take root, but constantly pulled up to see if we were growing. n Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, p. 30. 18 Speech of Hon. H. B. Wright of Pennsylvania, January 30, 1863, Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 3 Sess », II, Appendix, p. 75• 17 Speech of Hon. J . J. Crittenden ofKentucky, January 29, 1863, ibid., p. 73; Speech of Hon. James S. Rollins of Missouri, February 2, 1863, ibid., p. 104.

■^Speech of Hon. J. J. Crittenden of Kentucky, January 295 1863, ibid., p. 74. 19 "The Negro Race in America,11 Edinburgh Review, CXIX, p. 241. 35 Maryland protested vigorously, accusing Colonel William

Birney, son of abolitionist James G. Birney, of indiscrim­

inately enlisting free Negroes and slaves of loyal owners 20 in his state. Lincoln, having noted in a memorandum that

only the recruitment of slaved in an offensive manner or

the enlistment of slaves unsuitable for soldiers was com- 21 pletely objectionable to him, continued to encourage the

enlistment of Negroes into the Armyo

Many officers and soldiers of the army objected

strongly to the enlistment of Negroes as soldiers, and by 22 mistreating the ffeedmen, drove them back into slavery»

General Grant, in Tennessee, was urged by his chief,

Halleck, to use his official and personal influence to

overcome the prejudices of his men against the Negroes and

to carry out to the fullest extent the new policy of the 23 government to withdraw slave power from the Confederacy®

Grant reported that some of his commanders were putting

20 Charles L® Wagandt, tT;The Army Versus Maryland Slavery, 1862-1864,^ Civil War History, X (1964), p ® 145® 21 Easier, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, p® 338; Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, p. 856® 22 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, p® 53® 2 3 Henry Halleck to Brigadier-General U® S® Grant, March 31 ? 1863? in Official Records ‘® ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol. XXIV, pt o 3 ? pp"° 156-57 * Contrast this with General Orders, No® 3, November 21, l86l, as cited on p® 19® 36 aside their personal feelings and were upholding the new 24 policy of the Government by vigorously arming Negroes®

Grant^ during the winter of 1862, had been over­ whelmed by the droves of slaves that had descended upon his army, a new army being prepared to make an attack; he ap­ pointed Chaplain John Eaton to the care of these refugees, to provide food and shelter for them, and to put them to work in the cotton fields and the wood lots ® This was a military necessity as well as a humanitarian requirement, for the weather was severe, and many of the blacks were ill 25 and inadequately dressed. Eaton found good assistants hard to obtain, for many soldiers were flatly opposed to helping the Negroes and were upheld in their attitudes by 26 their officers »

The War Department sent Brigadier-General Lorenzo

Thomas to this department to inspect the armies and military posts and to procure officers who would be willing to command colored troops. He was asked also to investigate the needs of the freedmen, to make recommendations on ways

o L. U . So Grant to General H. W . Halleck, April 19» I8635 in Official Records . . » Armies, Series I, Vol. Ill, p t . 1 , p . 31»

2 5Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, pp. 2-13 ° Eaton, formerly a teacher, had enlisted as Chaplain with a brigade of Ohio and Missouri troops commanded by Col. J. W. Fuller of the 2?^ Ohio Infantry, in the fall of 1862. Ibid o, p o 1 o 26 Ibid., pp. 19-22. 37 in which they might become self-supporting and might be 27 provided more humane care o

Recognizing that the problems regarding the freedmen would become greater as the Union armies pushed further

into the heart of the slave states«, Secretary of War

Stanton appointed a three man commission to make a detailed 28 study of the freedmen * These men were commissioned to

travel to all camps, to report fully on conditions as they

found them, to recommend measures by which the freedmen might develop their skills in order to support and defend

themselves, and to determine how they could best be used for

the Union cause during the War o In the appointment,

Stanton outlined the War Department!s dilemna»

Constantly increasing colored population thrown upon the care of the War Department in the progress of the war, with absence of legislative

27 1 Edwin M e Stanton to Brigadier-General L« Thomas, March 2$, 1863, in Official Records * ® ® Armies, Series XII, VOI. Ill, PP. 100-01e 28 Commissioners appointed were Robert Dale Owen, Col* James McKaye, and Samuel Go Howe o Owen was the son of a famous English social reform leader who founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana® He was a member of the Indiana Legislature and credited with establishment of the public school system; while a member of Congress, he helped to establish the Smithsonian Institution® His pamphlet The Policy of Emancipation was said to have strongly influenced Lincoln1s fhinking ® Samuel Howe was the first teacher in the Massachusetts School for the Blind and helped to establish the Perkins Institute. He taught the deaf-blind child, Laura Bridgman, to speak and understand® He ardently supported Horace Mann in his fight for better public schools® Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (eds ®), Dictionary of American Biography (22 vols ®, New York, 1928- 4fc4’, including a general index and a supplementary volume) , Vols. XIV, IX® 38

provision for their disposal or protection, makes it necessary to have authentic and accurate information as to their present condition and as to the experiences of other communities in like crises, and a report of practical measures for placing them in position of self-support and self-defense, with least disturbance to the industrial interest of the country o ^9

The documented reports of this commission were presented by the War Department to Congress, and from the recommenda­ tions made the Freedmen!s Bureau was created by act of o o Congress in 1865®

The enlistment of Negroes was hindered by the

Confederacy*s policy of placing captured colored soldiers in the hands of the officials of the state in which they were captured to be dealt with according to the laws of 31 that state o This often meant re-enslavement or the death penalty® Lincoln promised Federal protection for all soldiers, black or white, and declared that a policy of retaliation would be made upon enemy prisoners if Negro 3 2 soldiers were sold into slavery® The policy of using

29 American Freemen Inquiry Commission, March l6 , 18635 in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series III, Vol® III, pp® 73-7 4 .

^^Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, pp® 64- 70.

31White officers commanding Negroes would be judged guilty of inciting servile insurrection, and if captured, would be put to death® Official Records ® ® . Armies, Series II, Vol® V, pp ® 940-41®

■^General Orders, No® 252 , July 319 1863? in ibid®, Vol. VI, p. 1 6 3 . 39 only white officers for Negro regiments, and an unequal pay base for Negro volunteers created dissatisfaction among many Negro regiments, especially those recruited in the

North» ^

Emancipation changed the War ® The Negro slave was no longer property, nor even a source of power to be taken away from the South® Recognition of his status as a man had been made by Congress, by the President, and by the

Army. He became a vital part of the war effort® Lincoln no longer spoke only of the preservation of the Union® He chided a Union-only friend in a letter, saying,

Negroes, like other people, act upon motives® Why should they do anything for u s , if we do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest of motives--even the promise of freedom® And the promise, being made, must be kept.34

He encouraged the people of Louisiana to recognize emancipa­ tion in their Constitution, to adopt measures to erase the old slave-master relation between blacks and whites, and to prepare for the future by educating the young Negroes ®3 5

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln appealed to the people

^Emilio, History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-^^3 ? PP• 47-4$; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, p p . 267-68 * 34 Abraham Lincoln to James C . Conkling, August 26, 1863, Easier, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, VI, p. 409.

3 5Abraham Lincoln to Nathaniel P® Banks, August 15, 1863? ibid®, p o 365 ® 4o to recognize their responsibility to guarantee the future freedom of the Negroes« Benjamin Quarles has written that the President, in asking for a dedication of the people to a new birth of freedom, was stating that the Union was to be reconstructed 11 on a broadened base of human liberty*

The abolitionists and antislavery people of the

North had been strengthened by a large group of people who saw emancipation as a military necessity, and by many more who considered the freedom of people in bondage as a necessary civil reform * 37 But it was the army that spelled freedom to the slaves. Lincoln, his Cabinet, and Congress had assigned the army the task of waging a war which in its progress freed a society of black men through force of 38 arms® The armyfed, sheltered, taught, and doctored the freedmen® In addition to this care, it provided the means through which the benevolence of Northern people could be channeled®

One hundred eighty-six thousand Negroes served in the Union army and received the training and care of soldiers ® The number of freedmen who received employment, protection, medical care, and education was never fully recorded. Because of the ignorance imposed upon him by

36 Quarles, Lincoln and The Negro, p® 131®

^^John C . Gray and John C . Roper, War Letters 1862- 1863 (Cambridge, 192?)5 p » 72® 38 J Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, p. 125 ® 4i slavery and the unstable conditions produced by an adminis­ trator waging war, the education of the freedman was necessarily elementary and remained so during the period of the waro Despite the fact that employment and protec­ tion of the Negro always came first, the army1s establish­ ment of a pattern of education in the freedmanfs life was its most enduring contribution to this race of peopleo 39

39Ibid., p. 192. CHAPTER IV

EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE DEPARTMENT OF VIRGINIA AND NORTH CAROLINA

The education o f the slaves under the protection of the Union Army began among the refugees in General Butler1s contraband camps® Within three days' time 11 sixty thousand dollars worth of property11 had fled to the Union lines, and though Butler had provided work for the able-bodied men and shelter and food for all, it was apparent that the greatest need for the future of a people who had been kept in a state of ignorance by law was to be educated for life as 1 free citizens®

In the late summer of l86l the American Missionary

Society sent Lewis C . Lockwood to the Fortress Monroe area as a missionary to provide for the moral, physical and 2 religious needs of the contrabands® General Wool, who had replaced Butler in command, authorized the establishment of schools, and on September 15, Lockwood opened a Sunday

1 Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol® II, pp® 52-53; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953)t P° 60 ®

2This society, organized in 1846 and non-sectarian in membership, sought to eliminate the evils of caste, polygamy and slavery® Ibid®, p® 121®

42 43

school for contrabands in the home of ex-President Tyler„^

Three days later the first day school for the contrabands

was opened in Hampton by a free mulatto, Mary So Peake,

using the building of an abandoned female seminary for 4 class room® Miss Peake was the acknowledged daughter of

an Englishman and had been tutored in her own home® When

a group of contrabands had pleaded with her to teach them,

she willingly taught children and adults in night school,

accepting no pay® Believing strongly that education should

be character building, she maintained a strong moral tone

in her teaching, thus strengthening the goals of Lockwood

5 and the American Missionary Society® The success of this

first school was an inspiration to Lockwood who organized

similar ones in the contraband camps of Norfolk, Portsmouth, 6 and Fortress Monroe during the next eighteen months®

A commission appointed to investigate the general

conditions and treatment of the contrabands in the Fortress

Monroe area reported that though the able-bodied men (l)

had been put to work, (2) provided with food and shelter,

(3 ) given a small sum of cash and (4) assurance of the care

of dependents by a fund set aside for that purpose, there

^Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes, l86l-l865 (New Haven, 1938), P* 260. 4 Ibid®, p« 259o

^%uarles, The Negro and the Civil W a r , p® 122®

^Ibid®, p® 172; Wiley, Southern Negroes, I86I-I863, P ® 260 e 44 were many instances of fraud and harsh? cruel treatment of these people by the army« 7 A sergeant in the Quarter­ master' Corps had defrauded the contrabands of their rations and had sold the food to sutlers; others had not received the clothing to which they were entitledo Many laborers never received the two dollar cash allowance per month they had earned since they had begun to work * ^ In some in­ stances ^ the Quartermaster Corps had requisitioned their meager possessions such as mules, wagons\ and iron cooking utensils, and had not reimbursed them® At Suffok, some

Union pickets had been found guilty of selling back into slavery refugees who came into the lines® 9 The daily distribution of army rations had decreased, and there were many contrabands among the fifteen hundred gathered there who had found work in household service, fishing, or in some type of trade, especially in the areas of Newport News and Camp Hamilton®"*"^

7 Commissioners appointed were Colonel T® J® Cram, Major L® B® Cannon, and Major William P® Jones® House Executive Documents, 37 Cong®, 2 Sess® (l86l-6 2 ), Vol® 7 9 D o c ® 8 5 , P~® 3~= 8 Ibid®, pp ® 3-12 ®

9 Preliminary Report of the American Freedmen1s Inquiry Commission, June 30, l863 ? in Of ficial Records ® ® ® Armies, Series III, Vol® H I , p ® 44o ® 10 House Executive Documents, 37 Cong®, 2 Sess® (1861-6 2 ), Vol® 7, Doc o 83, pp® 3-12o At Camp Hamilton, clergymen and chaplains were teaching reading, writing, and the fundamentals of arith­ metic to contraband children and adults in day classes, assisted by qualified Negroes and soldiers who acted as monitors ® Because a suitable building was not available x near the Fort, the commission recommended that the large building which the army had erected for contraband housing be used for day schools, evening classes, and religious services during the hours of eight to eleven in the morn­ ing, two to five in the afternoon, and seven to nine at 11 night, when there would be no interference with meals*

Further recommendations of the commission included the appointment of a supervisor, subject to and protected by the military authority, who would look after the moral, physical, and religious welfare of the contrabands, and the donation of a site for a school house and a chapel which would be removed if military needs demanded it* The army, on the recommendation of the commission, revoked earlier orders and declared that all wages earned by government laborers should be paid to them in cash and that one ration per day and quarters should be allowed, thus 12 raising the morale of the workers *

i:LIb±d. 1 o Ibid. 46

As the ^grapevine telegraph11 spread the word among the slaves that freedom could be found within the Union lines, the numbers of contrabands increased so greatly that some Union commanders felt they could not cope with the 13 burden® In September, 1862, General John Dix, surrounded by two thousand refugees at Old Point Comfort, many of them ill and dying in large numbers, asked Secretary of War

Stanton for permission to write to the Governor of

Massachusetts and other Northern governors to seek asylum for them® When abolitionist Governor Andrews refused, Dix moved many of the Negroes from the Point to Newport News ®

Irish troops from New York who were stationed there mis­ treated the contrabands and they had to be shifted to the 14 isolation of Craney1 s Island® Safe though it was, Edward

Pierce, leader of Freedmen activities in South Carolina, visited Craney1s Island on a trip to the North, and though he commended the work of two educated women of the Society of Friends who were ably teaching the contraband children there, he called it a ^cheerless spot with every incon- 15 venienc e ®

13 John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen® Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special References to The Work of the Contraband and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley (New York, .1907), p. 1 7 3 . 14 Official Records . . . Armies, Series I, Vol. XVIII, pp. 391-9 5 .

"Freedmen at Port Royal," Atlantic Monthly, XII (September, 1863), p « 31^° 4?

Overworked chaplains were assisted by societies

organized in Northern cities that sent clothing, books,

school supplies, and teachers»^ Upon visiting the camps

and seeing the great need for education among the contra­ bands, a Dr o Brainerd in charge of a depot hospital in the

area organized classes for them, using convalescent

soldiers as yet unfit for field duty as teachers® 17

The Department of Virginia and North Carolina was under the command of General Butler again in 1863 ° Pro­ nouncing himself an unconditional antislavery man since his

experiences in New Orleans in the Department of the Gulf,

Butler made great efforts to improve the condition of the

contrabands«, Declaring that a Negro's greatest service

to the Union was as a soldier, Butler ordered all able- bodied men to enlist in the army, promising to all three- year enlistees a ten dollar bounty and subsistence for

their families® All benevolent persons who wished to help

educate or train the freedmen were offered army

r Wiley, Southern Negroes, I86I-I865, p . 261®

17National Freedman, Monthly Journal of the National Freedman's Relief Association (1863), I, pt» J , p o 94® 18 James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans* History of the Administration of the Department of the Gul f in th e Ye ar 186 2 (Boston, 186 3 ) , p „ 619 „ ~~

> 48

transportation and the respect fill treatment and aid of all 19 officers and soldiers®

Colonel J o Burnham Kinsman was appointed General

Superintendent of Negro Affairs with an assistant for each of four districts in the department® The first district was composed of territory held by the army north of the

James River ^ with Captain Charles Wilder in charge; Captain

Orland Brown supervised the second district which lay south

of the James River; the third district consisted of all of the state of North Carolina held by the Union Army, with

Captain Horace James, a chaplain and early teacher of the 20 contrabands, in charge of freedmen education® The fourth

district, including St® Maryf s County in Maryland, and

Northhampton and Accomoc Counties in Virginia, was formed 21 much later, under the supervision of Dr® C ® S® Henry®

A large school for six to eight hundred students was built at Hampton, under the orders of General Butler, with teachers who planned to teach on the Lancaster!an plan

"^Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series 111, Vol® I III, p® ll¥57~

^Wiley, Southern Negroes, l86l-l86$, pp® 26l-62 ® 21 Second Annual Report of the New England Freedmenys Aid Society (Educational Commission), April 21, 1864 (Boston, IF64), p o 23 o 49 2 2 provided by the New England Society of Friends» The city

of Norfolk was divided into districts with teachers ap- 2 3 pointed as in the New England free school system„ The benevolent societies 9 with the active aid of the army under

Butler ^ succeeded in establishing good schools and camps«

Chaplain John Eaton, on his way to confer with General

Grant at City Point in July, 1864, stopped at Fortress

Monroe to visit the camps and schools* Later, he wrote,

nI was glad of the opportunity of seeing the Government *s

settlements for freedmen at this place, where such careful plans had been matured for their welfare * The freedmen were in excellent state and the conditions far more easily 24 dealt with than in the Mississippi Valley*u

In Yorktown, the Friends Colored Relief Association

of Philadelphia took charge of providing teachers for the

freedmen, and built a good schoolhouse which included

living accommodations for teachers * The pupils in the

Hampton schools were praised by Superintendent Wilder for

their good order, application to their work, and the

22 This plan of education, originated by Joseph Lancaster of England, was a quick and cheap method of providing the rudiments of education to the poor through the use of monitors* These monitors were fellow students who had acquired skills more quickly and aided the slower students, under the guidance of a master teacher * Dictionary of National Biography (63 volumes, including three supplements, New York and London, 1885-1911)? Vol * 32 * ^Wiley, Southern Negroes, I86I-I865 ^ p . 263 ° 2 4 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, p. 188. 50 25 progress they had made. Friend Sarah Smiley established

a mothers' meeting for the purpose of teaching the Negro 26 women to sew. A member of the American Bible Society wrote to his association from Fort Monroe in March, 1864,

It has been our practice from the beginning to impress upon the colored people the idea if they would be free they must be worthy of it and fitted for it by reformation and education, giving a! book to everyone who will promise to learn to read so that now it is believed a much larger portion of the colored population in Eastern Va. can read than the white. Over ten thousand small elementary books have been given out in this way during the last two years. . . . One sticking result is we are now obliged to keep a sub-Post Office for reception and distribution of large numbers of letters sent here and away by those in the Government Service or the Army and their families and friends.27

It was estimated by February, l864, that one out of every 28 fifteen freedmen in District One could readQ

The district south of the James River included

schools at Norfolk, Portsmouth, and those established on

25 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men ' s Aid Society (Education Commission) April 21, 1864% P o 31 o 26 Report to the Executive Committee of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends Upon the Conditions and Wants of the Freed People of Color in Washington and Virginia (New Bedford, 1864), pY 7 ® 27 Dorothy U® Campagno, ^National Crisis: Distribu­ tion to the Armed Forces to Freedmen and in the Confederate States During the Civil War, l86l -186 511 (New York: American Bible Society Historical Essay No. 14, Part VI, Section A, 1964), p. 44. 28 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men's Aid Society^ pi 261 " • 51 outlying farms„ Thirty-six white teachers and five Negroes taught 2,355 pupils, and one in nine learned to read*

Curriculum in these schools included spelling, reading, geography, mental and written arithmetic, and teachers 29 reported that the students were attentive and obedient0

Work often took first place in the students 1 lives, especially the boys'; consequently, attendance was eleven 30 per cent higher for girls than for boys.

A flourishing system of night schools existed in

Norfolk by 1865 with pupils from ages twelve to fifty in attendance. 31 Carrying primers and slates, family groups came for class as late as nine o'clock at night. One hundred ninety-six of the five hundred twenty-eight students in regular attendance learned to write, and all except one pupil had advanced beyond learning the alphabet.

These night-class students had contributed $95 ° 7^ from their small wages toward the expenses of running the 32 school, chiefly for lights.

Teachers had many reasons for being discouraged.

The best pupils were often removed from the elementary schools and placed in the newly formed high schools. The

29Ibid. p. 3 1 .

3°Ibid., p. 7 2 o

31Ibid., p. 3 2 .

32National Freedmen (1865)5 I, p t . 6 , p. 191• formation of high schools when students had achieved at

best three years of elementary schooling was in itself a

pretensiono Some students were hampered in their progress

by moves from one district to another, often to areas where

there were no schools, while others dropped out of school

to work o Schools were seldom large enough, were inade­

quately furnished, and poorly ventilated* Though teachers noted an improvement in the students f application to their

studies, in their personal cleanliness and sense of order,

the freedmenTs keen sense of the ridiculous was frequently used in deceit, and their art of mimicry used to mock both 3 3 the good and the poor teachers *

There was a continual need for teachers who would 3 4b be sympathetic and compassionate^ yet firm in manner *

Many young Negroes evidently chafed under the order and

discipline required in class * Mary Foster Collins,

teaching in Norfolk, reported to her home society that it was a relief to teach fourteen grown men in a Sabbath

school even though they could not read, for she had no 35 problem with their discipline *

33rbid., pp. 192-93. 34 1'bird Report of a Committee of Representatives of New York Yearly Meeting of Friends Upon the Conditions and Wants of the Colored Refugees * 1864, p . 12 *

33Ibid., p. 17- 53 To be able to read the Bible was the greatest

incentive for adults to learn to read« An appeal from

teachers at Yorktown for books enumerated two hundred

spelling books, one hundred cheap Testaments, and two Bible

dictionarieso Pupils, both young and old, were encouraged

to buy their own books, even Bibles and Testaments, because

teachers felt they studied better from books which they had

in their possession at all times o ^

After the combined forces of the Union Navy and

Army had captured Confederate strongholds on Roanoake

Island and New Bern, North Carolina, in February and March, 3 7 1862, General Burnsiders lines were overrun with refugees.

The strong and able men were used to build earth fortifica­

tions around the town while the rest of the refugees were

put in the care of Vincent Colyer, Superintendent of the 38 Poor o Colyer set up several schools in the colored

churches of New Bern and enlisted the chaplains and college

trained soldiers of the Massachusetts 25- Regiment to teach

the contrabands. Classes were held at night in order that

the soldiers might teach when off duty. Six hundred pupils

^ Ibid. , pp. 9-1 0 .

^Joseph Bo Mitchell, Decisive Battles of the Civil War (Greenwich, 1962), pp. 45-46 ® 38 Official Records . . . Armies, Series II, Vol. I, p. 812; Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, p. 125; Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962), p. 7 6 . 54

attended tlie first night session at Plymouthe Supplies were nonexistentand Colyer used a sheet and black ink in

lieu of a blackboard on which he printed, for the first

lesson, uLove your enemy11 and ltBless them that curse you, 11

pointing out the letters first, then the syllables, and

finally the complete sentences* 39

Other schools established at Beaufort, Washington,

and Morehead by Chaplains Stone, Halle, and Woodworth were

immediately closed by the newly appointed military governor

of North Carolina, Edward Stanly, when he was ordered to 40 restore the old order * Upon the request of Congress for his reasons for doing so, Stanly stated that the laws of

North Carolina forbade the education of slaves, and when

the old inhabitants returned to the state, educated slaves 41 would be held suspect® Hurrying to Washington, Colyer was assured by Stanton and Lincoln that the Governor was 42 wrong in his thinking®

The movement of troops occasioned the break-up of many of these first schools; however, schools were being

established by July, 1863 9 under the guidance of Chaplain

Horace James, later appointed Superintendent of Negro

^Quarles, The Negro in the Civil W a r , p® 125®

V^Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861-1865, p® 26l®

^Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I , Vol® IX < PP. 395, 400-02 42 Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p® 77« 55 Affairs, and Reverend William Briggs, Superintendent of

Education® Superintendent Briggs set up a school visita­

tion program and teachers were required to make monthly reports to him, which were then sent on to the benevolent 43 societies supporting the teachers in this area®

Beginning with fifteen hundred pupils in the New

Bern area in January, 1864, sixty-six teachers sent by the benevolent societies were instructing twice that number in

six months 1 time o Their duties, in addition to teaching in

day and evening classes, included the distribution of food

and clothing sent by their societies for the relief of the poor o A major discouragement to the teachers was the out­ break of epidemics of smallpox and yellow fever, which

struck the freedmen and teachers, forcing the closing of

schools in July and keeping them closed until December® 44 Much that had been accomplished had to be done over ®

Freedmen in New Bern supported one school for

eighty pupils and hired a Negro teacher® An advanced

school, composed of sixty good students taken from various

schools, was initiated in March, 1865» Progress was out­

standing, according to Helen Ireson, the teacher® Several

teachers remarked that the Negroes of pure African blood

5 —Wiley, Southern Negroes, p. 262„

^ Ibid; National Freedman (1865), I , no. 7, pp. 215-1 6 . 56 learned as well as the mulattos, which suggested that mis- 45 cegenation did not necessarily improve the race o

With the knowledge that their cause was being lost in war and that the freedmen schools were increasing in numbers and efficiency, the opposition of the Southern people to educated Negroes began to manifest itself; often it took violent forms e Teachers from the North were scorned and ostracized by Southern whites @ Often these teachers had to live with the Negroes in order to have any kind of housing @ A hew school that provided quarters for teachers was burned by raiders at Clumfor Creek and the

Northern teachers were warned to stop teaching the it"niggers • * it^^6 ; . > Shermanfs march from Savannah further disrupted the schoolso Classes were discontinued and school build­ ings were prepared for use as hospitals* Other classes were dismissed when troop movements removed teacher- soldiers from the area * The 15- Connecticut Regiment had 47 ten of these teachers when it was moved from New Bern®

Confederate invasions and raids added to the confusion and 48 fears of the freedmen®

45 Ibid ®, p* 217® 46 Ibid., p. 212®

, p. 320 o

^Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men1 s Aid Society, April 21, 1864, p ® 32® 57 When the progress of ShermanT s Army was hindered by- hordes of freedmen following it, he sent five thousand of them to New Bern and ten thousand to the recently occupied port city of Wilmington, with a guard of a hundred cavalry 49 to protect them from marauding Confederate troops*

Superintendent James's problems had been compounded earlier by the appropriation of all confiscated or abandoned

Confederate property by the Treasury Department * Although most of the land was leased to freedmen, none was given to the Department of Negro Affairs for the support of depend- 50 ent Negroes * Teachers filled with missionary zeal were sent to this area by the American Missionary Society• They visited the newly organized freedmen camps, sought out students, and soon were operating eight schools * Despite the bitter opposition of the citizens of Raleigh, three schools for Negroes were opened after that city was occupied by the Union Army in April, l86 5 ° ^

Roanoke Island was used as a camp forthe wives and children of Negro soldiers, as well as for the aged and infirm; eventually it became the home for three thousand freedmen* James personally visited benevolent societies in

the North, raised nine thousand dollars in cash, engaged

49 John G * Barrett, Sherman's March Through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill, 19 5^71 307 *

^ W i l e y , Southern Negroes , pp * 208-1 0 *

^National Freedman (1865 ) ? I , ho * 7 ? p ° 320 * 58 teachers, and set up Industrial schools and day schools for the Negroes o Women were taught spinning rand weaving, and an appeal was made for sewing machines in order that they might clothe their families and help themselves« Skilled crafts such as making shoes, shingles and barrels, as well as the techniques of commercial fishing were taught to the men and boys e

Washington, the home of Abraham Lincoln and thus the symbol of freedom to many fugitives, became the goal of many seeking asylum«, 53 Old Capitol Prison was used as a shelter, and under the protection of the provost marshall as many fugitives as possible were hired out as servants 54 or government laborers 0 When the contrabands outgrew these quarters, they were transferred to Duff Greenf s Row where they lived in squalid poverty« By April, 1863, there were thirteen thousand freedmen in Washington and

Alexandria ®55

Help for the fugitive slave came from many sources o

The free Negro women of Washington organized the Contraband

Relief Association; Elizabeth Keckly, who was Mrs *

^Wiley, Southern Negroes, p <, 206 ; National Freed­ man (1865)9 1 9 no o 39 P o 93®

^Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington: I86O-I865 (New York, 19^1 ), p. 248.

5ZW d . , pp. 141-42, 238.

55r b i d . , pp. 246, 251o 59

Lincoln’s good friend as well as her seamstress, served as its first presidento Sunday schools were staffed by Negro 56 ministers of the city, including a Methodist Bishop o The

Scotch Covenanters built a new schoole Classroom space and living quarters for teachers were provided in a large frame building, forty feet by sixty feet, erected by the

Philadelphia Friends ®

When an epidemic of smallpox broke out among the refugees of Duff Green’s Row, the healthy Negroes were moved to the old army camp of McClellan’s Dragoons, housed in buildings that were little more than shanties on swampy ground and were without adequate provision for water. One camp of a thousand people had to depend on supplies of water brought by wagon from Washington, as its only well 58 was out of order most of the time. Government rations of bread, meat, and beans were distributed and an attempt was made to supply families with money for milk; but a lack of support on the part of politicians plus strong feelings of white superiority often combined to defeat the good

^Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, pp. 203-06.

^^Wiley, Southern Negroes, p. 26l .

"^Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (ed.), South after _Gettysburg: Letters of . Cornelia Hancock (New York, 1956)9 6o intentions of the military* ^59 Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker working in a contraband hospital in 1863, deplored the plight of the contrabands who arrived daily and were housed in barracks infested with rats, many of them ill from exhaustion and without adequate clothing„ With concern that bordered on bitterness she wrote to her family, 1 Where are all those good abolitionists in the North that do so much talking and so little acting?

In May, 1863, Freedman!s Village was established at Arlington by the Federal government« It contained a school, shops, a hospital, and a church * In addition, there were facilities for training blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors, wheelwrights, and shoemakers® After a brief 6l period of time the colony was self-supportingo The

American Tract Society provided teachers for the hundred fifty children ranging from four to fourteen years of age 6 2 who were enrolled in the school„ Most of the refugees, however, preferred to stay in Washington, crowded into the 6 3 inadequate lodgings of their friends®

^Arthur J® Larsen (ed®), Crusader and Feminist, Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm, I858-I865 (St® Paul, 1934), pp. 251-5 2 ®

^Jaquette, South After Gettysburg, pp ® 33.-34, 3 6 ®

^ L e e c h , Reveille in Washington, p® 252® 6 2 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men's Aid Society, April 21, 1864, pi 361

^^Jaquette, South After Gettysburg, p ® 37 <> 6l

Freedmen erected a school themselves in Alexandria on property left by George Washington for educational purposes® Harriett Jacobs and her daughter, Louisa«, taught there, a portion of their salary being paid by the 64 students at a dollar a month® Louisa made the following comment to her sponsoring agency after having taught for a year in the Alexandria school, nWhile the children are eager to learn and make astonishing progress, the duty of maintaining proper discipline is by no means easy® ® ® «

They find no lesson so difficult as the necessity of 65 keeping quiet® n

Another school was established in Alexandria in

1864 by the National Freedm-an * s Association and Henry Fisk was appointed teacher® Although the parents of the one hundred sixty three children could not manage the support of the school themselves, they did establish a Baptist church and called John Rogers to be their pastor® This determined freedman had been unable to read when he first sought his freedom, but he had headed North, learned to

64 Second Report of a Committee of the Representa­ tives of New York Yearly Meeting of Friends Upon the Condition and Wants of the Colored Refugees, l8F3! p® 12 ® 65 Third Report of a Committee of Representatives of New York Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Conditions and Wants of the Colored Refugees, 1864^ pi 7! 62 read and write and had prepared himself for the ministry of his peopleo

Many white people of Washington manifested their hostility toward Negroes in acts of violence after the

Emancipation Proclamation„ Negro soldiers were often the victims o On one occasion a group of convalescing soldiers beat the Negro troops sent to their camp; at another time

Negroes in uniform were stoned by troops passing through

Washington ^

Although the Emancipation Act for the District of

Columbia contained provisions for establishing schools for the freedmen? no public schools had been established by l864o The large group of free Negroes of the city decided that they must make an all out effort to help the freedmen„

Through the Freeman's Aid Society which they organized, school classes were organized in church basements, teachers taught without pay, and pupils attending night classes furnished their own books and defrayed the expenses for lights e The gate receipts from a Fourth of July picnic

National Freedman, I, no * 7, P° 222 o 6? Leech, Reveille in Washington, p » 251; Jaquette, South After Gettysburg, pi 241 held on the White House lawn were used to help build a freedman's schoolo ^

Although there were five hundred thousand freedmen in Maryland and Virginia in the vicinity of Washington, little progress was made in the area of education until the

end of the war when the Freedmen1s Bureau and the army 69 joined efforts* The Freedmenf s Bureau reported one hundred forty-five schools had been opened by October,

1866, with approximately eighteen thousand students en­ rolled * White hostility was very strong though, and few citizens would have any association with the Northern teachers© Four schools provided by the Bureau and one 70 built by the Friends Association were burned © Despite these depredations upon the schools, General Steedman maintained that he saw no hostility to the education of the freedmen among the people of Virginia, and as long as the

Bureau could not maintain its work without the army, he felt the Bureau was superfluous© 71 The lack of sympathy

thousand free people of color of Washington, D © C . sup­ ported their own poor without almshouses, and had few destitute people© Preliminary Report of the Freedmen1s Inquiry Commission, June 30, l863 in Official Records © © © Armies, Series III, Vol© III, p p © 430-51® 6 9 Senate Executive Documents, 39 Cong ©, 2 Sess » (1866-6 7 ), Vol. 1, Doc. 6 , p o 158. 70 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong©, 1 Sess© (1865-6 6 ), Vol. 1 2 , Doc. 120, pp. 48, 1 3 0 o

^^Ibido , pp © 65-66© 64 for freedmen on the part of military officers, together with their support of the propaganda that the South was beginning to look with favor upon Negro education and could carry it on themselves, hindered the education of the

Negroeso

As Negroes returned to work on the plantations following the war, schools became desertedo Plantation owners were sometimes unable to get good workers unless they provided schools® Northern teachers were willing to go to these rural schools, but the planters preferred teachers from the South and would seldom hire those from 72 the North® Pupils enrolled in town schools were often forbidden by their parents* employers to attend® In one community the people raised money to buy the only building suitable for a freedmen * s school, so that they could destroy it to prevent the Negroes from receiving educa- tion, . o 73

The withdrawal of Union troops was the occasion for an increase in violent actions® In Petersburg, three churches that had been used for schools were burned®

Although a substantial reward was offered for information about the criminals, it went unclaimed® In North Carolina, the white people harassed a Northern teacher by paying a

^ National Freedman (1866), II, no® 4, p® 118 »

73Ib±d., pp. 1 1 8 , 1 2 0 . 65 drunken Negro to follow her constantly, to abuse her with foul language, and to attempt to break into her living quarters repeatedly =,

The ever increasing use of violence by the white people of the South, together with the lukewarm support of some of the army officers, increased competition among the benevolent groups , and a weariness in serving the cause of freedmenT s education for so long a time under difficult circumstances interfered with the continued progress of

Negro education in the Department of Virginia and North

Carolina after the War» When .the support of the Army was withdrawn from the area the initiative had to be assumed by the Negroes themselves, with only limited approval from the white people of the area*

74 r Ibid, , p. 123* CHAPTER V

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT AT PORT ROYAL IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THE SOUTH

The Department of the South Included the states of

South Carolina, Georgia, and Floridao With the exception of the Sea Islands in South Carolina, these states were not occupied by Union forces in strength until the last four months of the War and nothing was done to educate the freedmen until that time» However, the education of the

Negroes in the Sea Islands, begun in March, l862 , by the army and teachers from the North created great interest.

A number of articles written by workers among these people appeared in national magazines during the War years. While discouraging aspects of the work were presented, the writers tended to view education as the best hope for the freedmen1s future.

General Thomas W. Shermanf s appeal for help with the abandoned slaves in the Sea Islands met with instanta­ neous response from the abolitionist and antislavery people of the North. Edward Pierce, a representative sent by

Secretary of the Treasury Chase to determine the condition of the slaves and of the cotton, had recommended (1 ) that plantation superintendents possessing humanitarian interests as well as business skills be hired to supervise

66 i 6? the work, (2 ) that the plantation profits be turned over to the government, and (3 ) teachers be provided to instruct the thousands of slaves who had been left to fend for 1 themselveso

The first benevolent group, the Educational Commis­ sion for Freedmen, the name later being changed to the New .t* England Freedmen1 s Aid Society, was organized in Boston on

February 7 , 1862» The stated objectives of this Commission were: (l) to promote the social, intellectual, moral, and religious improvement of persons released from slavery in the course of the War, and (2 ) to employ persons loyal to the government who would not interfere with military regulations and discipline, but would welcome and expect government aid * Three standing committees to facilitate the work were formed * A teachers committee assumed the duties of selecting qualified teachers and providing equipment for them; a clothing committee gathered new and used articles of clothing for distribution among the freed­ men o The business of the organization was carried on by 2 the education committee*

1 Edward L * Pierce, The Negroes at Port Royal, pp * 24-25, as quoted in George R* Bentley, A History of the Freedmen1s Bureau (Boston, 1955)? p p « 7-8 ; First Annual Report of the Educational Commission for Freedmen, May, 1863 (Boston, 1863), p • T°

^Tbid* , p p * 3-6 * 68

Pierce met with the teachers committee and promised

Treasury Department support for free transportation«, subsistence, and living quarters for each teacher*

Qualified candidates were numerous but the committee ultimately selected thirty-one, four of them women *3

Twenty-one volunteers from the New York Freedmen!s Aid

Society, organized February 21, and the Port Royal Relief

Committee of Philadelphia joined those from Boston, and left New York for Port Royal only a month after the first 4 aid group had been formed * Pierce declared them New

England1s choicest products, graduates of Harvard, Yale and Brown * 5 A fellow traveler, however, was able to see only the superficial characteristics of the group and called them nodd-looking men, and odder-looking women * ^

Four of these uodd-lookingu teachers were volun­ teers who wanted no salary; the others were to receive from twenty-five to fifty dollars a month * Acting as their supervisor, Pierce encouraged them to treat the Negroes with kindness and consideration, to gain their confidence and respect, and to teach them that they might be able to

^Ibid*, pp * 6 , 10 *

^ltFreedmen at Port Royal, 11 Atlantic Monthly (1863)9 xii, p. 298.

5Ibid. , p. 299-. 6 Sara F „ Hughes (ed®), Letters.and Recollections of John.Murray Forbes as quoted in Bentley, History of the Freedmen *s Bureau, p® 9® 69 appreciate civilized life and assume the duties and respon- 7 sibilities of free meno

Although there was one good sized town on the

Islands, Beaufort, the workers found that most the slaves were still living on plantations where they had been deserted by their owners and were frightened and bewildered„

Their masters had told them that the Yankees would use them as horses to pull carts«^ The first occupation forces on the islands had acted harshly toward them, further confusing o theme Efforts to put them to work had caused them to balk, for they wanted no part of labor that smacked of 10 their old status under slavery» Because the ripe cotton crop had first priority, most of the men in the first group of teachers sent from the North were employed as super intendents or assistants on the plantations o The women were distributed among the islands to begin their teaching 11 duties, housed in the abandoned homes of the plantations®

7First Annual Report of the Educational Commission for Free dm en, May, 1863^ pp ® 10-11® ~~ 8 . Susan King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, pp o 6-8 as cited in James M® McPherson, The Negro's CiVil War (New York, 1965), p® 57°

^nFreedmen at Port Royal,n Atlantic Monthly, XII, P ° 2 9 8 » ' 4

"^General Sherman to Stanton, December l4, l86l, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series ,11, Vol® I, p® 785 ®

1 11 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men 1 s Aid Society, Apri 1, 1864b , pp ® 15\ 58 ° " "" 70

Pierce and his volunteers conflicted in many ways with the Treasury agents who were sent to the islands to see that the government reaped the profitable cotton harvest. Volunteer William Gannett, assigned to a position as assistant to Superintendent Philbrick on the Coffin l; plantation, had two hundred sixty former slaves to direct.

His agricultural duties were combined with teaching, and when the field hands objected to the absence of the young

Negroes from labor in the best working hours of the day,

Gannett established classes from noon to three o'clock each afternoon. 13 Within two months, he needed an assist­ ant to teach the younger children during the morning 14 hours.

Pierce carried on an active campaign to cause the

Treasury agents to pay the Negro laborers a small wage so that they might feel a degree of self respect from being able to support themselves, but the agents did not agree and Pierce was attacked by an agent and knocked to the

12 When the plantation lands were sold by the government for unpaid taxes, Philbrick arranged for the purchase of nine plantations, which he and friends operated for profit, paying the Negroes more than the standard wages, and offering premiums for extra work. Ibid»

^William H. Pease, uWilliam C . Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment, lt Journal of Negro History (1957) ? XLIT, p. 1 0 0 .

1kbid. , p. 116 « 71 ground o 15 The Secretary of the Treasury was able to report to Congress that a half-million dollars worth of cotton had been saved by the ex-slaves on the Sea Islands during 1862, and that their care and education had cost the government nothing® Pierce was replaced by General Saxton, who was assigned by the War Department to care for the Negro people on the islands and supervise the work on the plantations® 17

Although he was not an abolitionist, Saxton believed that

Negroes had to be educated to be able to assume their responsibilities in a free life, and he faithfully admin­ istered his work with the Negroes in the islands until the

Freedmen fs Bureau was organized in March, 1865 »

The ^social experiment11 which the teachers and

Saxton wished to conduct was hampered to some extent by

General David Hunter’s enthusiastic enlistment of the island Negroes as soldiers, using the ambiguous orders of his predecessor as his authority®When the Negroes did

Bentley, History of the Fr eedmen1 s Bureau, p® 10®

^^House Executive Documents, 37 Cong®, 3 Sess® (1862-1863), Vol. 7 , Doc. 7 2 , pp. 1 -6 .

17Special Order of the Secretary of War in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series XXI, VoX® 2 , pp® 152-53 °

^ R a y A® Billington (ed®), The Journal of Charlotte Forten (New York, 1953)? P® 24®

"^Stanton to General T ® W® Sherman, October l4, l86l, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol® VI, p® 1 7 6 ; ibid®, Series III, Vol® II, p ® 31® 72 not enlist readily, Hunter took stronger measures * They were hunted out and impressed, one who resisted even being 20 ordered shot» An opportune time for recruiting was during church services, causing the Negroes to leave 21 abruptly through the windows. Hunter1s program was modified and finally dropped.

The earnest purpose of a steadily growing number of teachers who came to Port Royal overcame any ill effects of the attempts to exploit the Negroes either as laborers or soldiers. Eighty teachers had been sent by the New England

Freedmen1s Aid Society by June, 1863; although reliable records were not kept, it had been estimated that more than 22 five thousand students attended classes. Accurate numbers of pupils, schools, and teachers are difficult to record, for the various benevolent agencies' reports over­ lapped. For example, George Newcomb, Superintendent of

Negroes of the Sea Islands and Florida, reported fifty- 2 3 three teachers and 2,468 pupils in this area in 186$.

The Commissioner of Education for the Freedmen's Bureau

20 ^Freedmen at Port Royal,n North American Review (1865), ci, p. 27. 21 Pearson, Letters from Port Royal as cited in Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes (New Haven, 1938), P • ^5•

22 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men 1 s Aid Society^ April 21, 18154 , pp . 11-12.

^ National Freedman, 1 8 6 3 , I, no. 6 , pp. 3 3 -3^ i "Freedmen at Port Royal," Atlantic Monthly, XII, p. 3 0 3 » 73 reported thriving schools at St. Helena's Island and

Beaufort in the winter of 1864-65, with a total of ll4

schools, 1?4 teachers and 9:500 pupils in the area of South 2 Zj. Carolina and Georgia by September 9 1865*

The goal of General Saxton, uto test the industrial,

intellectual, and moral capacities and aptitudes of the

Negroes by furnishing them with the opportunity and means

of developing whatever attributes of human nature they 2 nr possess11 was carried out by the Northern teachers. The majority of them were intelligent, educated women of

genteel background, who, motivated by humanitarian princi­ ples, were willing to serve under miserable conditions*

They lived under tight military discipline in abandoned rundown quarters and lacked any opportunity for personal 26 comfort or sociability* Illness among the teachers due to the hot, humid climate made it necessary to close 27 schools through the hottest months *

24 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong* , 1 Sess * (1865-1866), Vol. 7, Doc. 1 1 , p. 26". 2 cq General Saxton to Stanton, December 30, 1864, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol. IV, p. 1023 ® 26 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men1 s Aid S o c iety, April 21, 1864, p . 22; General Saxton to Stanton, December 30 9 1864 in Official Records . . . Armia s , Series III, Vol. IV, p. 1027« 27 Four of the men of the group sent to the Sea Islands in March, 1862 died, one of tuberculosis, one of malaria, and another of overwork. nFreedmen at Port Royal,n Atlantic Monthly, XII, pp. 299-300. 74

Twenty-two year old abolitionist Laura Towne was one of the first women teachers, establishing a plantation 28 school on St* Helena's Island» Her assistants were

Charlotte F or ten«, a mulatto of Philadelphia, and Ellen

Murray of Massachusetts <> Other schools were conducted by her sister, Rosa Towne, Annie and Jessie Heacock of

Pennsylvania and Martha Kellogg of Connecticut. Mrs. A.

Me French, an expression teacher, encouraged the Negroes' aptitude for mimicry in two schools with one hundred pupils. Harriet Tubman, heroic figure to the slaves for her work with the Underground Railroad, taught for a time at Port Royal.^ <

Classes were held anywhere it was possible to gather students, in abandoned chapels and churches, in an abandoned women's seminary, and out-of-doors in nice weather. Because there were never enough teachers, classes were very large according to modern standards. Charlotte

Forten taught fifty-eight small children the alphabet while

28 Miss Towne's school was the only one that con­ tinued into the period after the w a r . William and Jane H. Pease, Black Utopia (Madison, 1963), p. 138. 29 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1954), p. 7 6 ; Billington, Journal of Charlotte Forten, p. l4y » 75 30 two other classes were in session in the same room. The curriculum of reading, writing and spelling was of the most elementary material, but some pupils advanced to arithmetic, geography, grammar and gymnastics * 31 Industrial classes were started in Beaufort, where one hundred thirteen girls from six to twenty years of age learned to sew and patch clothingo With the aid of one teacher and some volunteer assistants, they were soon able to produce simple aprons, 3 2 pillow cases and handkerchiefs «

The task of educating the Negro for a new status in society was taken seriously by the teachers who willingly taught adults in night classes, tutored laborers in their homes, held Bible classes on Sunday, and were constantly aware that their example to these people was of great

30 Ibid* , p * 1 5 8 * Miss F or ten returned to Philadelphia in 1 8 6 4 , and devoted the rest of her life to the struggle for racial equality* In 1 8 7 8 , she married Francis J * Grimke, the mulatto half-brother of Sarah and Angelina Grimke * Angelina Grimke, wife of antislavery leader Theodore Weld, openly acknowledged her family relationship to Grimke * Harvey Wish (ed« ), Slavery in the South* First-Hand Accounts of the Ante-Bellum American Southland from Northern and Southern Whites, Negroes, and Foreign Observers (New York, 1964), pT 8 7 ; Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor , 1939) ? P° 9~® ~ ' 31 Pease, Black Utopia, p * 133; National Freedman, 1865 5 I , no* 6 , p * I 8 5 •

3^nFreedmen at Port Royal,u Atlantic Monthly, XII, p * 306 * 76 3 3 importance in their education® Marriage rites were performed with solemn dignity in the churches with freed- men, superintendents, and teachers in attendance to witness 34 this acknowledgment of family responsibility«

Crowded, inadequate classrooms made it most dif­ ficult to control children who were noisy and inattentive in a situation that was completely foreign to them *

Attendance at school was irregular * Severe temperatures or rain often made it necessary to dismiss school and parents usually wanted to take their children to the fields with 35 them to work during the busy seasons. Further confusion resulted from the practice the newly freed children made of trying out new names. Suddenly having an identity thrust upon them, they enjoyed the freedom of choosing the sound of this identity. White teachers, puzzled at trying to pick distinguishing features from a sea of brown faces, 36 could not depend upon names to identify them, either.

The Negroes of the islands were considered to be inferior in intelligence and unattractive in

3 3 Billington, The Journal of Charlotte Forten, pp. 133-3 4 , 1 3 7 , 2 5 .

-^rbid. , pp . 244-45.

35Ib±d., pp. 131-32; nFreedmen at Port Royal," Atlantic Monthly, XII, p . 307® 36 Elizabeth Botume, First Days Among the Contra­ bands , pp. 46-49 as cited in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, p- 119. 77 appearanceo 37 Slavery on the islands had totally dis­ regarded both family and maternal relationships. Families had no means of eating meals together; even pregnancy was 38 no reason for being excused from labor or punishment«,

The presence of the army provided an introduction to the vices of a free society, thereby nullifying much of the moral training which the Negroes received. 39 Slavery was considered to have reached its lowest level of nmoral 4o degredation and inhumanityn in South Carolina* Life in slavery had fostered inclinations to lie and steal among the Negroes, and these inclinations were encouraged by the army's foraging policy * More than a thousand Negroes in the Sea Islands were used by the Quartermaster Corp for this purpose beginning in the summer of 1862*^^“

37Charlotte Forten remarked, on seeing the contra­ bands for the first time, nThe most dismal specimen's I ever saw*n Billington, The Journal of Charlotte Forten, p * 1 2 6 ; General Saxton to Stanton December 30, .1864, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol. IV, p * 1027; ltThe Freedmeh at Port Royal, n North American Review, Cl, p. 2. 38 Preliminary Report of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, June 30, 1863, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, p * 433» ~ ^

"^American Freedman (l868), III, pp * 431-32 as cited in Bentley, History of the Freedmen's Bureau, pp* 176- 77. 40 Preliminary Report of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, June 30, 1863, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, p * 434* ~ 41 - Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, p * 96 * 78

School supplies necessary for good teaching were inadequate despite the distribution of thirty-five thousand 42 books and pamphlets» The slight degree of difference between the most advanced students and the slowest, the attempts of soldiers to frighten the teachers with rumors of rebel attacks or yellow fever, and their open display of disrespect for the teachers all added up to profound dis- 43 c our a g em ent for many of the volunteers •

While the goal of all the teachers remained the same, the education of the Negro for self-responsibility and citizenship, the methods of attaining it differed from teacher to teacher* Idealist Laura Towne felt that the

Negroes had been the victims of slavery and should be treated as persons, whereas teachers who held more pragmatic views felt the Negro should pull himself by his own efforts in order to live in a competitive, harsh world * 44 They did not want freedom to be made too simple*

The experimental nature of the work and the

accessibility of the islands provided many people with an opportunity to visit the schools, those curious or

42 Ibid *, pp * 124-25; Billington, The Journal of Charlotte Forten, p® 131®

^ R a y A* Billington, UA Social Experiment: The Port Royal Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 1862-1863,u Journal of Negro History (July, 1950), XXXV, pp * 224-27®

^Pease, Black Utopia, p » 138; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, p . 287 as cited in Wiley, Southern Negroes, p * 248 * 79 skeptical as well as those genuinely interested* Pupils spent much time parading their newly acquired learning.

Having no conception of the depth of ignorance among the freedmen, Northerners often made the error of supposing that the Negroes had advanced farther than they had*

Visitors often asked how soon the black pupils would be 45 able to become teachers *

Too often the abolitionist teachers saw only the best in their pupils or viewed any progress with unmerited enthusiasm, and consequently gave misleading reports of the freedmen1s education* William Gannett, after three years of labor, admitted that he found few Negro pupils who could read without great hesitation and none who could 46 read perfectly. Gannett himself preferred his assignment as a full-time Superintendent on a plantation, for he felt that this work made more use of his training than did the task of teaching on the very elementary level of these 4? Negroes.

45 The soldiers from the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment visited the schools on St * Helenafs Island in February, 1863 * Billington, Journal of Charlotte Forten, p . 171; National Freedman, I, no. 7 9 p « 215 ® 46 uFreedmen at Port Royal,^ North American Review, Cl, p. 3* Gannett wrote that the poverty of opportunity, and the lack of humanizing experiences had made the igno­ rance of the children so complete that even the words and the sounds of the primers were unknown to them. Ibid., p. 4* 47 Pease, nThree Years Among the Freedmen: William C . Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment,11 Journal of Negro History, XLII, p * 100 * 80

Most Negro parents wanted education for their 48 children and mourned the lack of it for themselves®

Feeling that the secret of the white man1 s power lay in his ability to read and write, they realized they must 49 have this ability to live in the free world® Ned, a

Negro who had secretly learned to read during his enslave­ ment, had maintained one hundred fifty pupils in two schools with the help of a seventy year old man from the time of the armyT s occupation until the arrival of teachers from 50 ti­ the North® The slave of a Northern plantation owner, who had taught her to read and write, instructed a group of small children in the alphabet and one syllable words® 51

The adults f interest in education resulted in good attendance at night schools® One beginner in an evening class was the one hundred five year old personal servant of 52 General Nathaniel Greene of the Revolutionary War o

Though the discouragements were numerous, the

teachers found xthat the Negroes had some qualities that made teaching a pleasure and a rewarding experience® Most

^ O n e freedman expressed his desire for education to Gannett, nWe pant for it, sir ® u Ibid ® 49 uFreedmen at Port Royal,u North American Review, Cl, p o 4 ®

^ ltFreedmen at Port Royal, u Atlantic Monthly, XII , p® 3 0 5 .

51rbid. , p. 298.

"^Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, p« 292„ of the pupils were docile and receptive, and though they were slow to reason, they quickly learned the alphabet*

Many of them walked two or three miles to school in good weather, looking forward to classes with the same anticipa­ tion as white children awaited a holiday* Two native qualities, a susceptibility to religious training and the ability to sing beautifully, were often combined * 53 Much of their singing was in a melancholy vein employing a

Biblical theme. Singing sometimes took the form of a nshout,n with the singers executing a shuffling movement and clapping their hands to the rhythm as they sang and

5k moved in a circle * Hearing these songs for the first time, Northern people were struck with their original quality and feared that the words and melodies might dis- appear in a free society. 5 5 Experienced teachers felt that the progress made by the children of the freedmen was as rapid as that of any group of children of a comparable

^General Saxton to Stanton, December 30, 1864, in Official Records * . * Armies, Series III, Vol, TV., p, 1031 Billing!on, Journal of Charlotte Forten, pp* 129, 132, 154, 242; uFreedmen at Port Royal, 11 North American Review, p , 4, 54 Charlotte F or ten, $tLif e on the Sea Islands , n Atlantic Monthly, XIII, p p * 587-676 as cited in McPherson, The Negro!s Civil W ar, p p , 117-18* 5 5 Charles Nordhoff, Freedmen of South Carolina, Some Account of their Appearance, Character, Condition, and Peculiar Customs (New York, 1863) , p! 1 0 « 82 56 age o As they gained a knowledge of the outside world and learned to care for their own needs, the freedmen gave promise of being able to assume their own instruction if necessary, and support at least in part their own schools and churches»57

By May 1, l863 ? two thousand acres of plantation land had been bought by freedmen with savings from their 58 first year of labor as free men* When President Yeatman of the Western Sanitary Commission reported the great suffering of freedmen in the St* Louis area, Negroes of the

Sea Islands sent clothing and materials for their relief* 59

Ever mindful that the military forces determined the broad policies on the islands, benevolent societies improvised and shifted their teachers as conditions changed * ^ The New England Freedmenf s Aid Society, in fourteen months, spent nearly nine thousand dollars for teachers salaries, slightly less than three hundred dollars

56 Annual Report of Educational Commission for Freedmen, May ,1863 9 pi 13 ° ~ ~ ~

57ttFreedmen at Port Royal,n Atlantic Monthly, XII , pp*307-08; Preliminary Report of American Commission for Freedmen, June 30, 1863, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, pp. 448-50. " ” 58 First Annual Report of Educational Commission for Freedmen, May, 1863, p. 8 .

59ttFr eedmen at Port Royal,u Atlantic Monthly, XII, p. 309•

60Ibid., p. 297. 83 for books9 and sent two hundred fifty-eight barrels and cases of supplies and clothing9 ^

After fifteen months of working with the former slaves on the islands, leaders were certain that the evidence of their labor proved that the freedman could be educated and taught to accept the responsibility of caring for himself and his family. One of his great needs, how­ ever, was the assurance of his emancipation, through the actions of white men who would treat him as a free 62 person. The people of England had watched the experiment at Port Royal with great interest; Edward Pierce felt that the success of the experiment had had a restraining influence upon the English government, helping to prevent 63 its interference in American affairs®

As the character of the War changed after 1863, the unique conditions on the Sea Islands changed. In December,

1864, General Sherman sent to Hilton Head five thousand of the freed slaves that had been following his army northward

^ First Annual Report of Educational Commission for Freedmen, M ay, 1863, p. 16 ® ~ ~~ — ~ 6 2 Preliminary Report of the American Commission for Freedmen, June 30, 1863 ? in Official Records . . . Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, pp. 448-50. Colonel Higginson found that the Negro soldiers felt secure with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in their possession, even though few of them could read it. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Ann Arbor, i960), p . 55•

^3ttFreedmen at Port Royal,tl Atlantic Monthly , XII,. p. 292. \

84 through Georgiao This action had a disturbing effect upon 64 the schoolso Changing labor needs produced a migration of Negro families from one plantation to another or from 65 town to plantation. There was a marked turn-over in teaching personnel also, due to a combination of circum­ stances, such as climate, salaries that were inadequate to cover expenses, and the difficulty of the work. The high moral purpose of the early teachers and leaders was some­ times lacking in the later volunteers. The attitude of a

Methodist minister among the freedmen of the area was described by an officer of Sherman’s Army as being more sanctimonious than sanctified, and he criticized the clergyman’s policy of charging a fee for marrying Negro couples after exhorting them to sanctify their union in the eyes of God,^ Another minister, Negro James Lynch, was assigned a farm of one hundred sixty-five acres near

Beaufort, provided he erected and maintained a school upon

Paul M, Angle (ed,), Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: The Letters and Diary of Major James A, Connelly (Bloomington, 1959), PP- 367-68; National Freed­ man , X, no o 6, po 184,

^ National Freedman, I, no, 7? PP ® 2l4-l$, 66 M, A , DeWolfe Howe (ed,), Marching with Sherman, Passages from Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 4, 1864-May, l86g (New Haven, 1927)9 p, 227. 85

it o 67 When 0 « Q , Howard assumed his duties as head of the

Freedmen1s Bureau in March of 1865 ? schools in the Sea

Islands were being molested by South Carolina state agencies and Confederate terrorist bands, and he had to order heavier military protection for some areas «^

By the close of the War, the benevolent societies that had sent volunteers to this region had attempted to

eliminate duplication of effort and competition, and were publishing the National Freedman monthly magazine to keep isolated volunteers informed of the work and its progress»

In June, 1866, teachers of the American Freedmen and Union

Commission held a convention in New York to report on their

teaching and discuss common problems ® Minimum salaries of

twenty dollars a month with board, and thirty-five dollars

a month without board were established, with one month!s pay for the summer vacation period„ They recommended that

the Commission provide homes for the teachers in the many

areas in the South where it was not possible for them to

obtain housing. After much discussion, this group decided

that the greatest good for the freedmen would result from

the establishment of as many schools as possible rather

than a small number of superior schools. During the year,

67 Christian Recorder, February 27? 1864 as cited in McPherson, The Negro's Civil W a r , p . 135® 68 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong,, I Sess, (1866-67), V o l . 8 , Doc. 70, p, 90o 86

the Commission reported total receipts of $339,680, all & 9 spent for education and supplies for the freedmen *

Upon relinquishing his duties to the Freedmen1s

Bureau, General Saxton urged his co-workers to establish

and maintain more schools• Only through education could

the Negro race receive a blessing from its freedom* To

the freedmen he stated that their success as a people

depended upon the education of their children, and that

they had the responsibility of seeing that the young people

took every opportunity presented to them of receiving 70 instruction * After his experiences as both a teacher

and superintendent, William Gannett wrote in a national magazine, nTf we see aright, it is our treatment of the

Negro on which depends all that the historian of the next 71 century will sum up as the permanent result of the war ®ft

Union troops captured Savannah, Georgia, in

December, l864« The first schools in that city were

organized by the American Tract Society. The freedmen

there raised one thousand dollars to help pay for teachers 1

support and supplied ten educated Negroes to help teach the

^ National Freedman, II, no. 6 , pp. 171-72. 70 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong., 1 Sess. (1865-6 6 ), Vol. 8 , Doc. 70, p. 93* 71 uThe Freedmen at Port Royal, W . C . Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment,n Journal of Negro History (1957), XLII, p. 20. 8? 72 five hundred pupils in the old Bryant slave market» Six

weeks later, James Redpath, newly appointed Superintendent

of Schools for the Freedmen, organized schools for them in

the abandoned school buildings of the city. The New

England Freedmenf s Aid Society sent twelve teachers,

paying their expenses and salaries, while transportation,

rations, and protection were provided by the army„ The

city had been set afire by the fleeing citizens of

Savannah, and officers and teachers foraged through the

gutted homes seeking adequate quarters and furnishings ® 7 3

Thousands of refugees from inland plantations had followed

Sherman1s Army to the city, all of them destitute and

ignorant; a large number of the freedmen of the city were

able to read, however, and had been working in factories 74 and shops on the contract system for their masters.

72 Report of Honorable T * D . Eliot, Chairman of Committee on Freedmen!s Affairs to House of Representatives, March 1 0 , 1868 (Washington, 1868), p. 23® Undoubtedly^ the Savannah Republic of July 12, l86$, referred to this school when it praised the orderly conduct of the pupils, and their proficiency in high school studies such as grammar, ancient and modern history, and declamation, National Freedman (1865), X, no, 7 > p , 197 ®

^Elizabeth G , Rice, n'A Yankee Teacher in the South, An Experience in the Early Days of Reconstruction,u Century Magazine (l90l), LXXI, p , 151» 74 Angle, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland, p p . 367-68 o The ex-slaves from the rice plantations of Georgia were in the sorriest state of all freedmen, -Neglected by absentee owners, treated as brutally as animals by overseers, and terribly undernourished, these people bundled their few possessions together, and blindly followed the Army, scarcely knowing the meaning of freedom. Ibid,, p, 359. The auditorium of the State Normal School, capable of accommodating four hundred pupils, served as a class room for the completely illiterate refugees. Military police were stationed at the doors to keep out the wanderers who drifted about the city, Some came only for a day or two and then moved on, having no concept of discipline, mentally or physically. Pupils talked aloud, fell asleep, or wandered about during the three hours of school, One

Northern teacher had eight literate Negro girls as assist­ ants ; each one was assigned fifty students, to teach them the alphabet and numerals from a blackboard, all contained within the large auditorium, It is in the nature of a miracle that any at all learned the fundamentals and were thus transferred to another school. Long recesses were given the restless pupils, but a rod was frequently neces- sary for punishment,75

When the army offered teachers transportation North at half-price for the summer months, most of them left; those that returned to Savannah in the fall found that the disturbed conditions of the city had subsided. More orderly schools were established that continued through the period of military occupation,^

^Rice , ltA Yankee Teacher in the South, Century Magazine, LXXI, pp, 152-53®

7 6 rbid., p. 154. 89 The Georgia constitution drawn up in September,

1865 9 stated that Negro children could be bound out as apprentices after the age of two years with the masters responsible for teaching them useful trades, or sending them to school six weeks out of the year, if a school were conveniently located and the teacher were properly licensed by the district judge„ This was virtually re-enslavement for the freedmeno 77 A large group of Negroes appealed to the white people of the state of South Carolina to establish public education for Negro children that would be equal in every respect to that afforded white children* 7

Southern white people used every opportunity to

express their opposition toward Negro education * Once the military forces had been withdrawn or had been reduced in strength, freedmen were stoned as they walked to school, schools were burned, and Northern teachers insulted and driven out of some communities® The more ignorant the white community, the greater the opposition® 79 Wanton murder of freedmen by white people was common occurrence®

77 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong® 1 Sess® (1866-6 7 ), Vol. 12, Doc. Il8 , p. l4. 78 Herbert Aptheker (ed®) , Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York, 1951 pi 34 6 ® ~ ~ 79Senate Executive Documents, 39 Cong®, 2 Sess ® (1866-67)9 Volo 1, Doc ® 6 , p. 38! ^According to the i860 census, 44,237 white persons in Georgia were illiterate* U* S® Census Office, 8^ Census, i860, Statistics of the Stated StaiTesT^p ® 30# as cited in T® Conn Bryan, Confed­ erate Georgia (Athens, 1953) 9 P ® 222 ® Seventeen cases of murder or felonous shooting of Negroes had,been reported to the Army Commander near Macon,

Georgia, and though twenty-five men were sent out to hunt down these criminals, no arrests were made for no one would 80 identify the assassins. Negro refugees following

Sherman1s Army had been beaten and killed. A group of

Confederate soldiers, disguised as Union men, went through the area coaxing the slaves to leave for freedom, and when^ they did so, the soldiers had beaten them brutally. An aged Negro woman who had aided an escaped Union prisoner was tortured.

Outside of the Sea Islands only a few areas in the state of South Carolina had schools for the freedmen.

Schools were established in February, 1865 ? in Charleston.

Forty-two teachers were hired, all of them citizens of

Charleston, and most of them free Negroes. They were hired on a trial basis for a month at a time, so that any that might not be satisfactory could be eliminated from the schools. Salaries were established at ten dollars a month plus rations. Superintendent George Newcomb appealed to the benevolent organizations to send experienced male

80Edgar L. McCormick, Edward G. McGehee, and Mary Strahl (eds.), Sherman in Georgia. Selected Source Materials for College Research Papers (Boston, 1961), pi 94. ~ 8l Howe, Marching with Sherman, ppe. 84, 106 . In l86l, a Northern teacher had been tarred and feathered, then sent North for being suspected of having abolitionist sentiments . Ibid., p . 269 * teachers to this area« 1 When the citizens of Charleston were given control of their city again, General Saxton

insisted that a fair proportion of the schools be reserved

for the freedmen® Three were used for Negroes, one large 83 enough to accommodate eight hundred students® A former

summer resort for wealthy people of Charleston became a

settlement for freedmen, with a school for one hundred

fifty children and a night school of forty adults who were 84 taught by Union soldiers® In the up-country area of

Greenville, South Carolina, a Negro minister started a

school for the children of the freedmen in an abandoned hotel, and with two assistants taught until the New York

Freedmenfs Union sent two white teachers® A New York

publishing company furnished the latest editions of text­

books o When the building was restored to its former

owners, the freedmen bought an old storehouse, tore it

down and rebuilt it on property given them by the Freed- 85 men1s Bureau. Though the efforts made were commendable,

they were woefully inadequate to meet the needs of the

thousands of freedmen in the area.

82 National Freedman, X, no® 3 p ° 89 » o o Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (ed®), South after Gettysburg; Letters from Cornelia Hancock (New York, 1956), PP° 194-95« ~

8^rbid., pp. 225, 228.

John William De Forest, A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (New Haven, 1948) , pp ® 118-21® 92

In Key West, Florida, several day schools and night classes for adults had been established in 1864 by the New

England Freedmen1s Aid Society. The army in this area provided rations for any teacher who taught twenty pupils.^

Schools for the Negroes were opened in St. Augustine in

March, 186$, but they had few books to use for teaching, and the children were so poor that they did not have 8? adequate clothing to attend. Negro preachers opened five schools in Tallahassee in 1865 and acted as teachers for the children. The Homestead law of 1862 made land available to freedmen in northern Florida along the upper St. John's, the Suwannee, and the Manatee Rivers, and many freedmen homesteaded in these areas and thus avoided the debilitating dependence of the share-cropping system.

Chaplain Ho H. Moore of the 3^— Colored Infantry was made Superintendent of Instruction for Florida in the 88 early fall of .1865» Other schools were opened at

Jacksonville, Lake City, and Gainesville, but the teachers were treated with scorn and derision everywhere and were able to continue teaching in these isolated spots only as

^ Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men 's Aid Society, p . 22. 87 National Freedmen, I, no ® 3 9 p » 85 ® 88 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong., 1 Sess. (1865-6 6 ), Vol. 8 , Doc. 70, p. 8 5 . 93

long as the Union armies remained in the Department of the 89 South o

^National Freedman (186 6 ) IX, no® 4, p® 114® CHAPTER VI

EATON AND EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY

The Department of the Mississippi was the very heart of the new lower South, including Tennessee,

Mississippi, Missouri, parts of Louisiana and Kentucky®

The i860 census stated that the area contained seven 1 hundred thousand slaves and free Negroes«, From the battles for Forts Henry and Donelson in February, 1862, to the battle of Nashville in December, 1864, much of the area was a battleground0 Many plantation owners abandoned their lands and took themselves and their slaves westward, while

abandoned slaves and runaways pushed toward the advancing

Union forces like ^oncoming cities«

General Grant followed the program which Congress permitted to all military commanders of providing the

contrabands with rations and protection and using them as 3 laborers in whatever way the army needed® Grant

^John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, Remi­ niscences of the Civil War, with Special Reference to the Work of the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 1907) , p! 214 * “

^Ibid *, p » 2 o

^Special Field Order, N o . 4 in Official Records o o o Armies, Series I, Vol* LIT, p t . 1 , p p « 301-0 2 «

94 personally requested Chaplain John Eaton of the 27- Ohio

Infantry to look after the welfare of these Negroes® The task seemed impossible to Eaton® With winter coming on 9 the army in hostile territory, and the hordes of refugees steadily increasing, Grant persuaded him that the responsi­ bility had to be undertaken in order to make it possible for the Army to function properly and to help suffering 4 people for humanitarian reasons® Eaton acquiesced to the

General? s request and established the first contraband camp in the southeastern part of the state at Grand Junction,

Tennessee® Abandoned houses and buildings were used as shelters® The ill were separated from the group and put in the care of a regimental surgeon® Commissary officers were ordered to provide army rations, substituting rye for coffee for the weary, shivering people, and the Quarter­ master was directed to provide clothing for them® One regiment was assigned guard duty to prevent molestation by

Confederate raiders® All able-bodied persons were put to work picking cotton or cutting cord wood for the Quarter-- 5 master Corps®

Plantation owners who were loyal to the Union or did not wish to leave found that if they wanted laborers for their fields they had to bargain with the Army for the

4 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p® 12® 96

services of their former slaves® This provided a greater

labor market but increased the problems for Eaton® Grant made Eaton General Superintendent of the Contrabands for

the entire department with the power to appoint assistants

to help with the problems of providing for the Negroes and keeping accurate records of earnings and expenditures for

them® The attitudes of the ordinary soldiers in the ranks were often unsympathetic to the contrabands, and Eaton

found that the best assistants were usually the chaplains, whose Christianity combined with humanitarianism made them

effective® The assistants had to protect the interests of

the contraband from the soldiers and the claims of the planters without interfering with the ordinary functions of

the A rmy. Furthermore, it was the responsibility of these men to see that the Negro learned to work independently for himself and to establish firm family relationships by providing for them® ^

Other contraband camps were established at Corinth

and Memphis under the care of General Grenville Dodge and

Chaplain A® S® Fiske® Defeat of the Union forces at Holly

Springs made it necessary to move the contrabands to

Memphis where a strong anti-Union feeling existed® The

transfer was a wild melee made by means of a railroad, with

the contrabands swarming all over the outside of the cars,

Ibid., pp. 32-43. 97 refusing to leave their precarious positions for fear they would be left behind to the fury of the Confederate 7 soldiers ® Many refugees were sent to Cairo, Illinois, to be employed in the North□ Some of these Negroes were

thrown into jail where they became ill and died or were bailed out of their imprisonment for undetermined indenture 8 as farm laborers <» The more fortunate ones were removed

from Cairo to Island Number 10 in the Mississippi River q where they were assigned plantation land for cultivation»

General Grant used four thousand freedmen to dig a canal from one bayou to another on the Mississippi before the

siege of Vicksburg«

General Lorenzo Thomas, inspecting contraband camps

and encouraging the enlistment of freedmen in the army

during the early part of 1863, was concerned with the large numbers of freedmen who were idle, and recommended that

those who were employable, but not employed by the army or

the government, be hired out to planters at a minimum wage

of seven dollars a month for men and five dollars for women» Necessary clothing could be deducted from these 1

^Ibid o , p. 3 0 .

^Ibide , p o 37; **The Negro Race in A m e r i c a , " Edinburgh Review (1863)5 CXIX, p® 2230 9 First Annual Report for the Educational Commission for Freedmen, May 1863 (Boston, 1863), pT 51

"^Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p . 44 ® 98 wages, as well as any time taken off for illness ® Sickness and poverty were so common among these freedmen that they often ended the month and even the year in debt to their employers, making freedom seem no more attractive to them than slaveryo

James Yeatman, President of the Western Sanitary

Commission, an efficient benevolent organization which gave much aid to the soldiers and freedmen in western areas, inspected the freedmen camps of the area for his society and was extremely critical of the Thomas system of leasing land and employment of Negroes * in Memphis, he wrote,

I saw a number of colored men pressed into service to labor at the rate of $10 per month, one of whom petitioned to be released as he had a good situation at $30 per month. The firemen on the steamboat on which I was a passenger , , * were all receiving $4$ per month, These men were afraid to go ashore at Memphis, for fear of being picked up and forced into Government employment • • • thousands have been employed for weeks or months who have never received anything but promises to pay,12

Yeatman was asked to assist Special Agent Mellen of the Treasury Department to draw up new labor and lease arrangements, To discourage the speculative leasing of

11Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men !s Aid S^ociety (Education Commission) April 21, Id64 (Boston, 1&64), p , 37; Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes (New York, 1938), pp. 237-39- 12 James E, Yeatman, A Report on the Conditions of the Freedmen of the Mississippi, pp. 4-5 as cited in James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965)9 p. 123. 99 land by men who had no interest in anything except to make

a fortune on cotton«, the new regulations put into effect by

the Treasury Department for confiscated and abandoned . property stated that only one plantation could be rented by

an individual5 with labor rates for Negro men set at

twenty-five and twenty dollars a month, eighteen and

fourteen dollars for women, and fifteen dollars a month for boys or men who were between the ages of twelve and

fourteen years, or over fifty years of ageo Each family hired was given one acre of ground to cultivate for its own use, while clothing and food were to be sold to the laborers at cost, plus fifteen per cento Planters were required to establish schools for the children of the Negro laborers

In many respects, this system was better than those

of the army or General Thomas but it encouraged the leasing

of greater areas of land to more people beyond the lines of military control and protection and increased the harass­ ment of the freedmen by Confederate guerrillas* The new

lessees seemed to be no more patriotic or humanitarian than

those under the military system* After investigating

freedmen1s conditions on plantations in the Mississippi

Valley, Reverend Fiske reported that he could find no

effort being made on the plantations to educate the ______■^Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, pp. 147- 491. 100 freedmen, nor to encourage them to live in family groups»

In one fifty mile stretch of land near Vicksburg all the houses and buildings had been leased and the laborers 1 l4 dependents had no quarters available for them»

Despite the conflict in supervision of the freed- men«, Eaton was able to give an encouraging report to Levi

Coffin, who requested information to give his English audiences regarding the condition of the newly freed slaves in the care of the Union Army in the West o During the year of 18631 the army had cared for 113 9 650 freedmen; 41,150 had been employed as laborers or soldiers by the army;

72,500 had been employed in cities and on plantations;

62,300 of them were self-supporting; 10,200 had received government subsistence 9 Three thousand of this latter group, however, were members of families in which the fathers had leased plantation land and would pay for their 15 subsistence when they harvested their first crops o

The divided authority between the army and the

Treasury Department caused friction and difficulties o

14 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p. l60 0 In 1865, Brigadier-General Clinton B „ Fiske, Assistant Commissioner for this Department reported that many planta­ tion owners were establishing plantation schools in order to obtain laborers, for the freedmen were hesitant to leave the cities and towns where their children had the advantage of attending good schools. House Executive Documents, 39 Cong., 1 Sesso, Vol. 8 , Doc. 70, p. 31® 15 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, pp. 133~ 34. Officers in charge of leasing plantations asked Eaton if

the Superintendent would not take charge of matters again.

Confusion and insecurity had caused the Northern benevolent

societies to delay the sending of supplies and teachers,

In July, 1864, Eaton went to Washington to discuss the

problems of his department with Lincoln and in a few weeks received word from the Secretary of the Treasury that that

department 1s regulations concerning freedmen would be

suspended,^ ^ 17

The freedmen1s relief societies of the eastern

states and new ones organized in the upper Mississippi

Valley sent clothing and supplies, teachers and doctors to

aid Eaton and his ^assistants. While Grant 1s Army laid

siege to Vicksburg, thirty thousand Negroes were camped

along the river in desperate need of help, many ill and

dying•

Three freedmen schools were started by a free Negro woman in Natchez and soon had six hundred pupils, Several

benevolent societies sent teachers to help, The North­

western Freedmen1s Aid Society sent twelve teachers to

Vicksburg after the Union Army captured the city. In the

l6rbid. , p. 1 6 3 .

17Ibid., p. 170. 18 Martha Mitchell Bigelow, '‘Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley, 1862-1865," Civil War History (1962), VIII, p. 4 5 . 102

Memphis area, Camp Shiloh had two women teachers who were

supported by the Cincinnati Freedmen f s Association„ The

United Presbyterian Church sent a male teacher and four women teachers to President 1s Island; in addition, they provided a superintendent, an assistant, four women teachers

and a missionary to the freedmen at Goodrich!s Landing®

Fifteen teachers were sent by the New York Freedmen? s 19 Association to work in other schools in the area. Schools

for people of color had always been prohibited by municipal

law in Memphis, and the feeling of the citizens against

education for the freedmen was so strong that only private

classes in military camps were attempted for fear the 20 freedmen would be beaten or worse*

The Indiana Freedmen1s Aid Commission was organized

in September, 1863, to supply the needs of the freedmen and

to help elevate them to the duties and responsibilities of

Christian men* The immediate task of that winter was to help provide food and clothing for them; the Western Freed­ men * s Aid Commission of Cincinnati acted as a treasury as well as a collection and distribution center for the goods

and money collected * In the spring of 1864, eleven

teachers and three doctors were sent to Tennessee® One

"^Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men * s Aid Society , April 21, 1864, pi 37• 20 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p. 192® 103

of the doctors was brutally murdered by the Confederate 21 raiders ®

All of the people sent as workers among the refugees were religious people® A request from Lieutenant

Moore for a man and his wife to teach uhouse-wifery and rigid economy11 was promptly filled by the Indiana Commis­ sion® Ella Graves, a young teacher at an army camp, requested that no vacation time be scheduled because it would interfere with her pupilf s progress, particularly the progress of the wives of Negro soldiers who had enrolled in 22 classes and were her best students® After rations for teachers were cut off by General Sherman, Hannah Davis had stayed on at her school in Murfreesboro for four months, paying her own expenses because she did not want to inter­ fere with the progress of her students, among whom was a fifty-six year old Negro minister who was learning to write®■4. 23

The Freedmen!s Relief Society of St® Louis, which had been organized after the Emancipation Proclamation,

contributed five hundred dollars for a school building on

Island Number 10, established two schools for freedmen, and

21 Report of the Board of Managers of the Indiana Freedmen1s Aid Commission, September 7^ 1864 (Indianapolis, 1864), pp. 7-9. : 2 2 Ibid., p. 20.

23Ibid., pp. 24-25. 104

solicited aid through the newspapers, though the entire

active membership of the Society numbered only ten people

In contrast with this organization, the Northwestern Freed-

m en? s Aid Commission of Chicago, which had one hundred

eighty-seven auxiliaries in Iowa, Michigan, and Illinois

furnished money and materials to freedmen in every state of

the Mississippi River Valley and operated schools for them

from Cairo to New Orleans, and from Chattanooga to Fort

Leavenworth, Kansas * By the end of the War, it had com­

missioned one hundred eighteen teachers and had spent more

than twenty-eight thousand dollars for teachers f salariesi

As head of the Freedmen?s Department, Eaton worked

closely with the people sent by the benevolent societies,

but lacked authority to supervise the placement of teachers,

the conduct of the schools, or the selection of uniform

textbookso Teachers seldom had adequate housing; class­

rooms lacked proper desks and seats. In the freedmenf s

camps, conditions were worse than in the towns and in some

areas it was impossible to hold classes regularly. Teachers who were selfless in their personal lives were sometimes

petty and fault-finding in their jealous attachment to the

particular organizations for which they worked, thereby

24 Annual Report of the Freedmenys Relief Society of St, Louis for (St • Louis, l864) , pp. 4-6. 2 5 Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of Northwestern Freedmen1s Aid Commission (Chicago, 1865), pp, 5-1 2 , 105 fostering a lack of cooperation and harmony among the 26 workers, all of whom were desperately neededo

In September, 1864, Secretary of War Stanton ordered Superintendent of Freedmen Eaton to appoint super­ intendents of Colored Schools, through whom Eaton was to arrange for locating the schools, appointing the teachers, and handling all details of education« The area was divided into seven districts: Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez,

Arkansas, Helena, and Columbus, Kentucky. It is significant that four of the superintendents appointed were chaplains,

L a Ho Cobb, Joel Grant, and two chaplains of colored regiments, James A <> Hawley and John Buckley» Towns and cities were divided into wards and each child was required to go to the school in the ward where he lived* School organization, discipline, hours, and textbooks were the responsibility of the school superintendents ® Teacher placement was a joint action of the society agent and the 27 superintendent *

Because of the unsettled state of the area, general taxation for support of the schools was not possible*

Baton established a fee system with fees ranging from one dollar twenty-five cents a month to twenty-five cents for each student depending upon his ability to pay* Each pupil

26 Baton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p * 195 ®

27I b i d . , pp. 196-97. io6 received a ticket of attendance which served to identify him and also as a receipt of payment® These fees did not cover the entire expense of the schools, but the payment of them gave the freedmen a sense of responsibility and self respect®^ 28 ,

Women were taught the practical art of remodeling new and old clothing in sewing schools® Night classes for those who worked during the day were started in many of the 29 city schools, especially in Vicksburg® This city had a total of 3,721 children enrolled in day schools in 186 5 ®

Fifty-five teachers taught in thirty-five schools® One school was classed as a high school, divided into upper and lower divisions and sixty pupils were enrolled® The curriculum, however, was not that of a high school, according to modern standards® All the students were engaged in reading, writing, spelling, penmanship, and geography, but only forty studied written composition and 30 fifteen were learning grammar®

Although education for the children of the freedmen on plantations was generally ignored by the owners or lessees, some Negroes fortunate enough to have learned to read and write conducted classes for children® At

28 Ibid®, pp. 198-9 9 . |

^ National Freedman, X, no ® 3 9 F « 7^«

^National Freedman, I, no® 6, p® 178® 10?

Groshon1s Plantation, Rose Ann taught forty to fifty children; one-armed Win McCutcheon on Currie plantation taught sixty-three pupils® No circumstances stood as obstacles for those people of color who wished to share their learning® For example, though aged and bed-ridden,

Uncle Tom on the Savage plantation taught thirty pupils from his bed® 31

The Department of the Mississippi had a great number of orphaned Negro children due to the high death rate in the contraband camps, desertion of children by parents, and the high death rate of Negro soldiers ® No single benevolent society was willing to undertake the task of building and organizing a large asylum for orphans but a number of small institutions were supported by different

V- groups® The Society of Friends provided for one at Helena under the supervision of Elkanah Bear and his wife® An asylum established by the Friends in Vicksburg was attacked by Confederates® Forty Negro children were captured and taken away, while two white men, a doctor and the lessee of a plantation, were shot after having had their ears

^Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (New York, 1962), p® 130® 32 Three-fifths of all the Negro volunteers or draftees were from the Department of the Mississippi® General Foster to Stanton, October 20, 1865 in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series 111, Vol ® V, pp ® 137-40 108 3 3 amputated by the raiders * ^ Martha . Canfield was moved to work for the relief of the freedmen after her husband had been killed at Shiloh. After putting her two sons in a boarding school, she returned to Memphis and managed an asylum for orphans and helped in the teaching program.

Larger institutions for orphans usually had their own teachers while the smaller ones used local freedmen schools 34 for the children.

In the school year of 1863) thirteen thousand children had been enrolled in schools in Eatonf s depart­ ment o Four thousand had learned to read and two hundred had become proficient in writing. In the area from Natchez to Memphis and west to Little Rock there were fifty-one schools by 1865 with a total of 7 ? 360 pupils in this area alone. 35 In their final report with regard to help for the

Department of the Mississippi, the twelve benevolent societies of the National Freedmen!s Relief Association of

New York listed a total of two hundred fifteen workers who had been sent to this area.

33 Third Report of a Committee of Representatives of New York Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Conditions and Wants of the Colored Refugees, 1864, pi 1*8*1 34 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, pp. 201- 02.

35Ibid., p. 204. 36 National Freedman, I, no. 7 ? P ° 232. 109 Many of the most valuable and most intelligent slaves had been moved from the war areas to Arkansas, a region that had always been short of an adequate supply of slaves, a fact which operated to keep their value high*

Though it was feared that Arkansas would become a refuge for the aged and dependent Negroes from Texas, two thousand freedmen were at work on plantations in March, 1865, with wages of twenty-five dollars a month and quarters, rations, and medical care provided • 37 In spite of a state law which forbade Negroes to acquire money, these ex-slaves organized a FreedmenTs School Society in Little Rock and supported 3 8 schools and teachers for the last nine months of 1865 °

Hostility toward Negro education was especially bitter among the poor white people of Arkansas * The

American Union Aid Commission forwarded food and clothing amounting to over forty thousand dollars to the state in

1865v but it was given almost exclusively to the poor whites for they were in greater need than the freedmen»

Local governments refused to take any responsibility for the protection of the freedmen. Twenty-nine murders were reported in two months with as many more unreported. nNigger insolence™ was sufficient reason for an insulted

37second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men 1 s Aid So ciety, ppl 78-79 ; Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and ""the Freedmen, p. 220® 38 ^ Ibid., p. 200. 110 white to administer any punishment he wished upon the guilty freedman° 39 General Sprague appealed to all intelligent people of the state to aid and abet every effort made by benevolent persons to educate the young

Negro o 11 If the colored portion of your population is elevated by educating the children of the present, you will have the best laboring class known to the civilized 4o world ou Not even the clergy responded to Sprague!s appeal, which caused the General to remark that once Union troops were withdrawn, the white people's persecution of 4l the freedmen would be severe* Although there were approximately two hundred thousand freedmen in the area of

Arkansas, Missouri, and the Indian territory by 1866, only - 42 a small portion of them were introduced to learning *

Workers who had observed or helped the freedmen of the Sea Islands noted the great difference between them and the Negroes of the area of central Tennessee, who, when freed by the Union Army, sought out work, became self- 43 supporting, and organized schools for their children*

39 Senate Executive Documents, 39 Cong *, 2 S ess „ (1866-6 7 ), Vo 1 * 1, Doc * 6 , pi 241 40 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong*, 1 S ess * (1865-6 6 ), Vol. 8 , Doc o 70, p. 78.

^ Senate Executive Documents, 39 Cong., 2 Sess. (1866-6 7), Vol. 1, Doc. 6 , p. 32. 42 Ibid., p. 24. 4 3 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed­ men 's Aid Commission,pi45« Ill

Jo Go McKee, an agent for the Western Freedmen Aid Commis­ sion, estimated that there were at least four thousand freedmen in Nashville in 1863® The Negro community organized a ltGood Samaritan Society11 and provided clothing and medicine for freedmen in hospitals *^ By 1864, eight hundred children in the city were receiving instruction 45 from teachers paid by their parents*

Major G * L * Stearns was sent to the area of

Nashville and the Cumberland Valley to recruit freedmen as soldiers, but he felt that the families of the soldiers had to be provided for * Through personal solicitation, Stearns raised money to establish a permanent school for Negro 46 girls in Nashville* Stearns had great confidence in the

Pennsylvania Freedmenf s Aid Commission, for it was managed by wealthy people of practical business minds; he asked the group to establish schools and procure Northern teachers for them* Though strong opposition to Negro education was expressed by loyal citizens of Tennessee, enough support and assistance had been given by a small group of the good

^Colored Citizen, November 7, 1863, as cited in McPherson, The Negro's Civil W ar, p * l4l 45 SeSecond c ond AnnuAnnual Report of New England FreedmenTs Aid Commission, pT 5*5

Wiley, Southern Negroes, p * 270; Major Stearns to Stanton, October 10, 1864, in Official Records * * * Armies, Series III, Vol* TV, p. 771. 112 people of the state to encourage Stearns^ to think that public opinion could be changed to a favorable one»47

Because the border states had few Union troops of occupation«, and the general attitude of the citizens was opposed to education for the freedmen, schools were not numerous in Missouri and Kentucky«, Dr® A® P «, Peabody of

Boston spent five weeks in St® Louis and found less hostility to Negroes there than he had found in other border state cities® Teaching the Negroes was an offense according to Missouri state laws; nevertheless, freedmen had organized schools at their own expense in St® Louis and had received aid from benevolent groups for the support of teachers® These schools were organized under municipal government, causing the freedmen to work to have them incorporated into the public school system of the city®

Sunday classes for Negroes were taught by learned and ' intelligent white people as well as by Negroes® In a Negro barber shop, Dr« Peabody noted that the journeymen appren­ tices who were not busy were reading the Bible or studying 48 their spellers or primers® Eight districts for the establishment of freedmen schools were set up in Missouri and Kansas in July, 1865® Army chaplains were appointed as

^7Ibid. 48 Second Annual Report of New England FreedmenT s Aid Commission, pp ® 77-78 ® 113 superintendents of six of them, and one minister who was 49 appointed refused to accept any pay for his work*

In Kentucky, pioneer educator John Fee, whose college at Berea had been closed during the War, asked permission to organize aid for the thousands of refugees gathered about Camp Nelsone His friend Salmon P. Chase used his influence in the War Department to obtain permis­ sion to use army barracks for day classes. Fee enlisted chaplains as teachers, and the American Missionary Society sent money for a hospital, separate cottages for the women 50 and children, and desks and seats for the school.

National Freedman reported that six schools with an enroll­ ment of seven hundred and thirty-nine pupils were operated by its affiliate organizations in Kentucky in 1865* The

American Missionary Society opened schools in Covington and

Lexington, using buildings donated by the army,

Bands of lawless, whites who called themselves

. ) ^regulators11 roamed the country, terrorizing the freedmen, breaking up schools , and driving teachers away from the 51 schools in areas removed from military protection.

Further discouragement to the freedmen was provided by the

4g House Executive Documents, 39 Cong,, 1 Sess, (1865-6 6 ), Vol. b, Doc. 7 0 , pp. 72-74.

^Edwin R. Embree, Brown Americans, The Story of a Tenth of the Nation (New York, 19^3), p p • 66-6 8 • , - House Executive Documents, 39 Cong,, 2 Sess, (1866-6 7 ) , VolV 1, Doc, (rj pp . 63“66 o llA

Kentucky legislature when it levied a two dollar tax on all

Negroes for schools, but left the decision as to whether they should be built up to white school trustees» None had been built by 1867, and the freedmen protested to the legislature that the tax was unjust under those circum- , 52 stances*

Chattanooga was a village of only twenty-five hundred people in i860* During the last year of the War it served as the Union supply depot for the Southwest, with many Union troops stationed there. Refugees from the western part of the state, together with those from the area of ShermanTs invasion, sought refuge in the town and it was soon surrounded by tents and homemade shelters.

Citizens and freedmen starved along with the Union Army during the Confederate sie-ge preceding the Battles of

Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Guerrilla raiders led by Forrest and Wheeler intimidated and killed the freedmen, even as Union sympathizers executed revenge upon their Rebel neighbors.53

A census taken in November, 1864, counted 3,893 freedmen in Chattanooga, but undoubtedly these figures were not accurate, because two weeks after the report had been

^Herbert Apthecker, A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States (New York, 1951) ? P*° 5^1 ®

5 3Gilbert E. Govan and James W. Livingood, ^Chattanooga under Military Occupation,^1863-1865,^ Journal of Southern History (1931), XVII, pp. 23-24, 28. 115 made the government was distributing rations to four

thousand freedmen daily= The Pennsylvania Relief Associa­

tion for East Tennessee was organized to help local

organizations care for the poor whites and the freedmen«, but the commissioners sent to the area were instructed to

see that aid went only to those people who had been

sympathetic to the Union o Six hundred Negro children

attended schools established by the Methodist church, paying one dollar a month tuition» In 1865 the military post was garrisoned by Negro troops whose children attended

the freedmenfs schools while the poor white children 54 attended a school maintained at the Port,

The army, John Eaton, the chaplains, and large numbers of people sent by benevolent societies sheltered, protected, and began the education of more than two hundred

thousand freedmen in the Mississippi Valley. The struggle

that took place between the army and the Treasury Depart­ ment benefited the freedmen because it pointed out (1 ) the

inadequacy of the wages established by the army, and (2 )

the need for more authority and positive action in the care

of freedmen than was possible under the Treasury Agents« 55

Though the education provided was elementary, and in many

^ X b i d o , pp. 36 , 45°

5 5Bigelow, nFreedmen of the Mississippi Valley, 1862-1865,n Civil War History, VIII, p. 4?» ll6 cases completely inadequate, nevertheless, it went far toward leading the freedman out of his old state of 56 slaveryo

^^Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, p «, 204 0 CHAPTER VII

EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF

Although the Department of the Gulf included the

states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, only

New Orleans and the parishes surrounding it were occupied by Union forces long enough to establish schools for the

Freedmen during the War» Education for Creole girls had been started by Ursuline nuns in 1727 ° Public schools for white children had been opened in the city early in the nineteenth century» Education of slaves was forbidden by law here as it was throughout the South and the large free

Negro population had to depend upon private tutoring for 1 the education of their children® An attempt had been made by Mrs® Mary Brice in 1858 to open a school for Negroes, but she was forced to close it on numerous occasions because of persecution from the white citizens® When a

sign was placed on the school door threatening ltDeath to

Nigger teachers,n she resorted to visiting her pupils in 2 secret to teach them®

^Elizabeth Jean Doyle, ltNurseries of Treason: Schools in Occupied New Orleans, n Journal of Southern History ( i 9 6 0 ), XXVI, pp® 1 6 1 -6 3 ® 2 Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department of the Gulf, 1864 (New Orleans, 1865), p! 3 ®

117 118

When New- Orleans was captured in April, 1862, the army of occupation marching toward the city seemed like uthe thrust of a walking-stick into an ant hill, lt for thousands of slaves left the plantations and marched along with the soldiers, feeling that the army had come to free 3 themo The large loyal white population of New Orleans and the ten thousand free Negroes living there presented problems quite distinct from those encountered in other departments in the South* Many of the free Negroes were themselves the offsprings of wealthy white fathers and were well-educated, cultured people of means, though severely repressed in their rights by the white population * Their condition was, in some ways, little better than that of the slaves * Though they were taxed to support the city schools, 4 their children were not permitted to attend * General

Benjamin Butler, in command of the city, ordered all public employees to take an oath of allegiance, all schools to teach from northern textbooks and in English only, and appointed a board of visitors who inspected the schools and investigated all teacher application, but he did not go so far as to open the schools to persons of color e Nevertheless

3 James G * Parton, General Butler in New Orleans* History of the Department of the Gulf in the Year 1862 (Boston, 18 6 3 ) , pi 4 8 9 o

4Ibid., p. 490. 119 these were part of the orders that caused the South to call him ltbeast*u^

The contraband theory the General had used for the good of the fugitives at Fortress Monroe would not work in

New Orleans because the plantation production of the area was at a standstill while fifty thousand refugees were idle and hungry in the city* An order of the War Department in

March^ 1862 9 forbade the return of slaves to disloyal masters; Lincoln had declared General Hunter’s emancipation of the slaves in the Department of the South void * Before

Butler had embarked for his duties in New Orleans, the 1

President had advised him to get along with the fugitive slave problem as best he could, avoiding problems that had no solution, until the government arrived at a definite policy*-i • 6

General Butler attempted to eliminate many of the cruelties and injustices to the slaves while maintaining the status quo ® Whipping posts and the segregated street cars were abolished; slaves were put on a basis of equality before the law and allowed to testify against white people.

Butler even encouraged them to bring their complaints to him personally* Although they were not permitted to come

cz Doyle, ^Nurseries of Treason: Schools in Occupied New Orleans,11 Journal of Southern History, XXVI, p . 165 •

^Parton, General Butler in New Orleans, pp * 491-92 * 120 into the Union lines, any slaves sent by their masters to the army to be fed were freed and employed in government 7 service or by the army * Each officer in the army was allowed to hire one refugee as a servant«, and many of them who had strong antislavery sentiments were moved by the misery and helplessness among these people to hire -i 8 several»

Butler made it very clear to the free Negro people that the Union Army represented their greatest good and encouraged their enlistment in the army• By winter, l862, three regiments of infantry and two batteries of artillery had been formed« Abandoned plantations in the area were manned by ten thousand idle refugees from New Orleans.

Each male laborer received ten dollars a month, with three dollars deductible for clothing» The length of the working day was cut to ten hours, and the working month to twenty- six days, with each laborer receiving food, shelter, and medical care, whether his employer was the government or a planter.9

Fugitives were kept out of the military camps when­ ever possible, but the many who camped near-by were given food and shelter of a sort by the quartermaster and

7Ibid., p. ^ 9 3 .

8Ibid., p. 497.

9Ibid., pp. 517, 522-24. 121 commissary departments » General Phelps , discouraged by the lack of a positive program by Congress for the refugees and the War Department's refusal of his proposal to arm them, resigned his commission and returned to his home,10

After stirring up a hornet's nest of hatred among loyal citizens of New Orleans by his "slur upon Southern womanhood, 11 Butler was replaced by General Nathaniel Banks, a man highly regarded by Lincoln as a tactful person with compassion for the freedmen*^^ Banks was also an extremely practical man, and when he made the discovery that the unemployed freedmen were costing the army sixty thousand dollars a month, he set up a system of labor contracts that virtually returned recently emancipated Negroes to 12 slavery. The highest wage scale was set at ten dollars a month, and though the freedman had his choice of em­ ployers, once he had signed a contract he was forbidden to leave until the contract expired® Vagrants were jailed by provost marshalls and put to work without pay on government projects. Shelter, clothing, rations, medical care, and education for children were provided by the planter, but

1Qrbid., pp. 506-14.

"^George R. Bentley, History of the Freedmen1s Bureau (Philadelphia, 1 9 5 5 )? P P • 4 8 , 9 0 . 12 Liberator, March 1 1 , 1864 as cited in James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality. Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1961), p. 290. 122 half the freednianT s wages was withheld until the expiration of the contracto Freedmen were ordered to give respectful obedience to their employers and could not leave the plantations without passes® 13

Fearing their work might alienate the loyal citizens of Louisiana«, benevolent societies were reluctant to send aid to this area equivalent to that sent to other 14 regions® The New England FreedmenTs Aid Commission opened seven schools for freedmen in 1863, under the direc­ tion of Lieutenant Stickney9 a former Vermont teacher, who patterned the schools on the New England system® Twenty- two departments were set up and teachers with strong antislavery sentiments were hired from the New Orleans area® Feeling that these teachers lacked the drive shown by graduates of Northern normal schools, Stickney estab­ lished apt in-training program® Twelve hundred pupils were enrolled by December of that year in schools notably equipped with desks and chairs* Salaries for teachers 15 ranged from fifty to eighty dollars a month®

13 General Orders no® 1 2 , in Official Records ® * * Armies, Series I , Vol® XV, p p . 666-6 7 ; General Orders no® 23, in ibid®, Vol® XXXIV, pt® 2, pp® 227-31.

^^Bell Irvin Wiley, The Southern Negro (New York, 1938), p. 265. 15 Second Annual Report !©f the New England Freed­ men f s Aid Society (Education Commission) April 21, 1864 (Boston, 1865), po 48® 123

Late in 1863 ? benevolent societies meeting in

Washington drew up a constitution and made an appeal for

Congress to set up legislation for the purpose of promoting greater efficiency in the care of the freedmen* Nine large aid societies, with many auxiliaries, were now at work among the freed Negroes, and two groups from England were sending aid» There was definite need of better coordina- l6 tion e

Earlier in the year, the preliminary report of the

American FreedmanTs Inquiry Commission had been presented to the War Department and Congress » In this report the committee admitted that it did not have the solution for

nthis most serious social situation ever to face the nation, n but stated that in its opinion if Federal guardian­ ship had to be a permanent condition it would be an indica­ tion that the black and white races could not live together on the same continent«, Their study had indicated that the freedman was capable of learning to take care of himself and his family and should be allowed to do so® Labor, medical care, education, and the Christian religion should be provided at first, but at the earliest possible time he was capable, he should provide for these things himself»17

"^Ibido , p p . 7-9 ®

17Preliminary Report of American FreedmanT s Inquiry Commission, June 30, 1863 in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, p. 442® 124

Immediate recommendations made by the committee included (1) the payment of wages to the laborers rather than rations because in the long run it was cheaper for the

government, and because it gave the freedmen a greater sense of responsibility; (2) care for the freedmen, separate from the military administration yet under its protection; (3) the appointment of a general superintendent with the rank of Brigadier General with the power of appointing department superintendents to work with him; and

(4) the assignment of chaplains to fill educational needs of the freedmen that were not being filled by the benevolent societies, until such time as the freedmen could provide

education for themselves @ The Commission called special

attention to the need for men of humanitarian instincts, as well as competency®1^

Banks, as had Eaton, tangled with the Treasury

Department when it took over the abandoned property but for

a different reason® Banks complained that the helpless women and children were being sent from the plantations to

the city, and their care fell upon the army.1^ General

Halleck gave him permission to reclaim all plantations

1^Ibid®, pp® 445, 447-49®

"^Banks to General Halleck, October 15, 1863, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol® XXVI, pt® 1, pp! 764-65 * 125 necessary as a source of revenue to support these helpless 20 people6

In keeping with his desire for order and efficiency in the field of labor 9 General Banks, early in 1864, set up a good school system for the freedmen of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes* The provost marshall was assigned the duty of dividing each parish into police and school districts and was assigned a force of invalid soldiers to maintain law and order * Each district had at least one school for Negro children under twelve years of age, and all schools were administered by a superintendent of public instruction, the first appointment being Lieutenant

Stickney who had worked to start the first schools for the 21 benevolent societies® A three member Board of Education for Freedmen was created® The first Board appointments by

Banks consisted of two army officers and a lay teacher,

Lieutenant E® M = Wheelock, Major Rush Plumly, and Isaac

Hubbs ® The current school year was established from

February 1 , 1864, to February 1 , 1865, and was the only year the Board functioned®

Charged with the establishment of at least one school for each district, the Board was given the power to

^General Halleck to Banks, October 2 6 , 1863, in ibid®, pp® 775-76® 21 General Orders no® 23, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series I, Vol. XXXIV, pt® 2 , pp. 227-31* 126 purchase land and to build schools * In selecting teachers, it was instructed to select people from the area of New

Orleans when possible, because it was felt that Southern women understood the Negro and had a better knowledge of the people of the South, and would thus be able to combat 22 prejudices regarding Negro education* Also included in the Boardf s duties was the responsibility for determining courses of study, disciplinary procedures, hours of instruction, and the procuring of books and supplies ® The cost of this education was to be met by a tax levy on real and personal property including the crops of the pianta- 23 txons *

The seven schools that had been conducted by the benevolent societies were transferred to the jurisdiction of the Board including twenty-three teachers and more than fourteen hundred students® A census taken of the freedmen at this time indicated that there were 13,840 children of

22 Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Depar tment"~of the Gulf, l86 4^ p. 11® uIt was thought that good teachers could not be secured without going North for them® However, the white women of noble heart in New Orleans put themselves swiftly to the task, and have continued courageously in the face of calumnies, mockeries and social proscription® One hundred of the teachers were born and raised in the South, and seventy-five are from Louisiana® Honor to them!u New Orleans Tribune as cited in James G® McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), p. 1 3 1 .

^General Orders no. 3 8 , March 22, 1864, in Official Records . . . Armies, Series 111, Vol. IV, pp. 193- 94; Wiley, Southern Negroes^ p p . 265-266. 12?

color between the ages of five and twelve years in New

Orleans and the parishes surrounding it®

An orderly schedule was set up by the Board®

Classes were held from 8:45 in the morning to 3 : 30 in the afternoon, with classes thirty minutes in length® Singing, the Lord1s Prayer, and readings from the Bible were used during opening exercises® Pupils not participating in reading instruction were kept busy with memory work or exercises on the slate, so as to provide the maximum amount of quiet for good learning® A recess of a half-hour was given each class with pupils leaving and re-entering the buildings in military order® This rather modern sounding schedule must have been appealing to many persons, for a rule was made that plantation laborers over twelve years old were not to be admitted unless they had permission from their employers® Teachers were responsible to the Board

for submitting weekly attendance records and for requesting books and equipment they needed® The value of any equip- 25 ment unaccounted for was deducted from teachers' salaries®

Weekly inspections of classrooms were authorized by the

Board in New Orleans; the outlying parishes were inspected

24 Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department" f the Gulf, 1864, pp ® 31

^Wiley, Southern Negroes, pp® 267-68 ® 128 monthly9 the inspectors 1 salaries being inadequate for more

. 26 ^ frequent visits o

In nine months* time 9 ninety-five schools were in operation, with one hundred sixty-two teachers and 9?571 pupils, in spite of growing demonstrations of prejudice against the freedmen * s education on the part of the white citizens ® About seventy-five per cent of the children had learned to read by the end of the first school year and about thirty per cent could write0 When migrations of freedmen from the Red River area increased toward the end of the school year, the School Board tried to plan for more schools, estimating that the number of school age children 27 among the freedmen would reach twenty thousand in 1865®

The establishment of sqhools in the outlying parishes presented many problems for the School Board»

Provost marshals were hesitant to confiscate suitable buildings for fear of arousing enmity among people who were already unfriendly, and third rate cabins, sheds, and abandoned buildings made unsatisfactory classrooms« Often these make-shift accommodations had neither floors nor windows; rain poured in at times, threatening to swamp the pupils o Not all the provost officers were sympathetic to the education of freedmeno One refused to help a teacher,

^ Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department of the Gulf, 1864, pi ~o

2^Xbido, p o 6 c 129

saying he did not believe in teaching 11 niggersn ; another

set his dogs on students going to night classes «, In the parish of Thibodeaux 9 school houses were broken into repeatedly, equipment smashed, and bricks hurled through 28 the windows during school classes®

The white residents of the parishes refused to house teachers of the freedmen, and in areas where no suitable buildings existed for the purpose, it was often necessary to build some type of living quarters for them®

Only through the efforts of the freedmen themselves were many of the schools maintained, for they guarded the

schools, protected and aided the teachers, and often shared 29 their homes and provisions with them®

Absenteeism was a problem in freedmen schools at

all times, especially so in the winter, because the children

did not have warm, suitable clothing to wear to school®

Fear and superstition made parents wary of smallpox vaccinations and the disease reached epidemic proportions 30 in several parishes® Despite the lofty sound of the

curriculum established by the Board, classes seldom had

the same books for each pupil® The most common text was

the Bible or a Testament® The American Bible Society

p A Ibid., pp. 8-9.

29Ibid., p. 7-

30Ibid., p. 14. 130

records showed a distribution of 18,424 books to the freed-

men in 1864, particularly "Scriptures, for immediate and

prospective use « • ® in Louisianaou31

Despite these reasons for feeling discouraged,

educators among the freedmen found some indications of

progress. The carry-home influences of the schools

increased the cleanliness, thrift and self-respect of whole

families. There was noticeably less defacement of property

and books in the freedmen1s schools than in white schools.

In outlying parishes, some plantation owners of Spanish blood attended night school to learn English. 32 Above all,

there was the continual enthusiasm of the majority of the

students and their parents for the schools. When the

schools were temporarily closed for lack of funds, ten

thousand Negroes signed a petition, most of them marking

their name with an X, asking to have the schools re­

opened

31Dorothy U . Campagno, !tNational Crisis: Distribu­ tion to the Armed Forces, to Freedmen and in the Confederate States During the Civil W a r , l86l-1865n (New York: American Bible Society Historical Essay No. l4, Part VI, Section A, 1964 ) , p a 43 e 32 Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department~~of the Gulf, 1864^ pp • 14-15 • 3 3 We E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America (New York , 1935 ) ? 644. 131 The financial arrangements for the schools looked satisfactory in print % but were never carried out as they should have been amidst the growing hatred shown by the white people and the changes in the situation due to the ending of hostilities ® Having estimated the cost of educating each pupil at Si•50 per month, the Board levied a tax of one and a half mills on property which should have provided one hundred fifty thousand dollars for the school year» The tax, however, had not been collected by the end of the first school year. Expenses had mounted rapidly, for teachers' salaries were high, and much basic equipment had been purchased, With only forty thousand dollars of the tax on hand, the School Board's financial 34 position was critical.

The tax levy was suspended at the end of 186$, and an order was issued requiring all employers to deduct five per cent of the freedmen's wages, to be used only for freedmen's schools. Unable to raise the money immediately and already heavily in debt, the Board suspended the operations of the schools until they could be put on a self-supporting basis, 35

34 House Executive Documents, 39 Cong,, 1 Sess, (1865-6 6 ), Vol. 7, Doc. 11, p. 2 8 .

3 5House Executive Documents, 39 Cong,, 1 Sess, (1865-6 6 ) , Vol.' 8 , Doc, 70, p. 33 o 132

The reputation of the School Board received a blow with the defection of Board member Isaac Hubbs, who was

accused of embezzlement of school funds and misconduct with

teachers® Hubbs resigned and took a portion of the school records with him® ^ By the time the schools were opened

again under the direction of the Freedmenf s Bureau^ the mustering out of officers and soldiers from the army had begun, and the loss of many of these people who had been

sympathetic to the freedmen? s education made the attacks

of the white citizens upon the schools and the freedmen more frequent and vicious• Many Negroes were murdered in

the race riots which occurred in 1866, schools and churches were burned, and Negro children were afraid to return to

school® 37

A number of private schools for the freedmen were

opened by Negro teachers but the tuition rates were high

and most of the teachers were unqualified for the work ®

The most constructive project after the end of the War was

the establishment of a seminary for girls where training

for a teaching career was offered, giving hope for the

future of Negro education® All aid from benevolent

societies gradually decreased over the next few years, due

^ Do y le , ^'Nurseries of Treason: Schools in Occupied New Orleans,11' Journal of. Southern History, XXVI, p« 1?8 ®

37Senate Executive Documents, 39 Cong®, 2 Sess® (1866-67) , Vol. I, Doc. 6 , pp. 6 8 , 75-76® in part to resentment felt by Southerners over the nintru­ sion*1' of Northern people in their local government, but also because the interest and philanthropic spirit toward the Negroes had decreased. Northern teachers who had taught among the freedmen in Louisiana where there was a high percentage of mulattos seemed relieved to be able to report to their sponsoring societies that the mulattos had shown no greater ability to learn than the pure-blooded

Negro.AT 3 8

Despite the dmbitious beginnings of a good school ( system for the freedmen set up by General Banks, the schools were able to exist only as long as the army pro­ tected the freedmen, the teachers, and the buildings from the hatred of the white people of the state» When the army was withdrawn and the Bureau discontinued after the

Reconstruction period, the high moral purpose of education for the freedmen— to train him for citizenship and responsibility in a free society--was paid lip service only in Louisiana, This was true in the states of Alabama,

Mississippi, andtTexas, also, No education for the freed

Negroes was attempted until after the War was over in these areas, because they had not been occupied by Northern armies, The Freedmen1s Bureau, with the help of teachers

38 Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Northwest FreedmenTs Aid Commission, 1865 (Chicago, I 8 6 5 ) , p. 1 4 . sent by the Northern benevolent societies and the protec­ tion of the Union occupation forces9 started schools which were greeted with enthusiasm by the freedmen but which received only token support from the state governments„39

^National Freedman (1865) ? 1 ? no = 6 9 p® 183® CHAPTER VIII

THE EDUCATION OF THE FREEDMEN IN THE UNION ARMY

The American Freedmen1s Inquiry Commission, in

1863, taking the broad view of Negro education to be the duty of elevating the character and building the self- respect of the man of color as a human being and a citizen, proposed to the War Department a full scale enlistment of the Negroes into the army® nThe war, if the

Negro be employed by us as a soldier,11 the report stated, nbecomes a blessing to him, cheaply bought at any price»,l^

The Commissioners felt that with intelligent, kind leader­ ship, prompt pay9 and full protection of their rights,

Negroes would be eager to enlist, so that they could feel 2 that they were fighting for their own emancipationo

In October, 1863, nine months after the Emancipa­ tion Proclamation had given the slaves their official freedom and an opportunity to become soldiers, C® W »

Foster, General of Volunteers, reported to the War Depart­ ment that a total of fifty regiments of infantry, six regiments of artillery, and two regiments of engineers,

1 Preliminary report of the American FreedmenT s Inquiry Commission, June 30, 1 863, in Official Records o o o Armies, Series III, Vol. Ill, pp" 452-54*

2Ibid. 136 composed of freedmen and free Negroes had been formed, an aggregate of 3^,707 men. Louisiana had furnished twenty- one regiments, Mississippi and Tennessee had each provided five, South Carolina had enlisted four, and James H « Lane had organized one regiment in Kansas o In the Department of the Mississippi, General Lorenzo Thomas had organized twenty regiments, Some of these had fought in the battle for Vicksburgo The first Regiment of United States Colored

Troops, Maryland, enlisted and trained by Colonel William

Birney, had been readied for service in just sixty days.

The Third Regiment of Colored Troops of Philadelphia was sent to take part in military operations at Ports Wagner and Sumter in less than six weeks after its organization. 3

Negro soldiers were enlisted under War Department orders of December 1863? which gave to a three-year- enlistee a ten dollar bounty and subsistence for his family for that period of time. In case of his death due to disease or wounds in battle, this family subsistence would continue for six months. As a soldier, he would be issued the same uniforms and rations as the white soldier and receive the same hospital treatment. All able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were enlisted; those unfit for service were provided with work. Any man unwilling to work was refused rations and was liable to

^Foster to Stanton, October 30, 1863, in ibid., pp. 111-13* 137 arrest» Soldiers ! pay was to be ten dollars a month, with three dollars retained for clothing, though white soldiers received thirteen dollars plus a clothing allowance of three dollars and a half« In the orders the War Department expressed the hope that Congress would soon correct this 4 inequity in pay for the Negro soldier» This salary scale was the same as that established by the militia act of July

17 ? 1862, primarily a wage scale for Negro laborers rather than soldiers«, but when Secretary of War Stanton wished to have a ruling on the arming of Negroes as soldiers? this law was the only one that applied»5

Having met little enough of dignity in his new life of freedom so far? the Negro hoped for equality as a soldier? and this injustice was humiliating® The free

Negroes of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment refused their pay for a year? even turning down the special allot­ ment voted by the Massachusetts legislature which would have made up the difference between what they were paid and the amount to which they were entitled? hoping that their protest would influence Congress to correct the wrong®

Colonel Higginson of the First South Carolina Volunteers? an organization that had been specially authorized by the

^General Orders ? no® 46? December 3 ? 1863 9 in ibid® ? pp « ll40-43 ®

^Militia Act? July 17? 1862? in ibid®? p® 252; Bell Irvin Wiley? Southern Negroes (New York? 1938)? pp ® 322-23 * 138

War Department before the Emancipation Proclamation with the promise to n» » » receive « • » the same pay and rations as are allowed, by law, to volunteers in the service,n wrote letters to Congress and the Northern press to get action for his men,^ But when Congress finally passed a law in the summer of 1864 giving all Negro soldiers who had been free on April l8 , l86l, equal salary with white soldiers, retroactive to the time of their enlistment, freedmen only received equal salaries from

January 1 , 1864,

The freedman learned quickly that his position as a soldier did not make him universally popular with the

Northern white soldiers, and although most command officers complied with the government f s policy of enlisting the

Negro, many were sure he would never make a good fighter,

Soldiers of the Civil War were seldom subtle in their preju­ dices and the Negroes often received harsh treatment from 8 them,

^James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, Aboli­ tionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), pi 214; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (East Lansing, i960), pp, 217-19«

^Ibid,, p o 224; U, S , Statutes at Large, XIII, pp , 129-31 as cited in James McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965)9 p . 202® g John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work of the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 1907)9 pi 50; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington (New York, 1941), p , 253« 139 Sherman refused to enlist Negro soldiers in his

Army pushing through the South, although he assured the o freedmen that the government would enlist them elsewhere®

The General was willing to use any able-bodied Negroes as laborers if his officers needed them, but he warned his company commanders to be aware of the matter of supplies, 10 which were to be given to the soldiers first ® Some recruiters sent into the South to enlist the freedmen used stern measures to persuade them® One regimental historian described the method used in his area,

The plan for t!persuadingn recruits while it could hardly be called the shot-gun policy was equally as convincing, and never failed to get the urecruit«,n . ® • The cavalry of the division was continually employed as scouts and skirmishers, and almost daily brought into camp hundreds of animals and negroes as spoils oH

On the Sea Islands recruiters were guilty of seizing under­ age boys and sending them to distant points for service®

One freedman who resisted an officer was killed and his 12 body left in the cotton field where it had fallen®

9 Henry Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock (New Haven, 1927) , p ® 71® TO Memoirs of General William T® Sherman by Himself (2 vols., New York, 1875), II5 p. 116.

"^Robert Cowden, A Brief Sketch of the Organization and Service of the Fifty-ninth Regiment of the United States Colored Infahtry? pp« 38-^0 as cited in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, p . 70®

General Saxton to Stanton, December 30, 1864, in Official Records ® ® ® Armies, Series III, Vol® IV, p . 1 028• Enlistments in the Corp d ? Atrlque in New Orleans were maintained at a high level by arresting all unemployed freedmen and giving them a choice of enlisting or going to jail e Major Steam's policy, in the Cumberland Valley, was noteworthy for its intelligent, humane approach to the problem of freedman enlistment« He stopped the severe methods that had been used, worked with the white citizens of that area of Tennessee to obtain their support, sent out recruiters to meet with groups of colored people to inform them of the government's need of their services, and pro­ vided means for the care and education of the Negro's family during his service* 13 In spite of the mandatory tone of General Lorenzo Thomas' orders for Negro enlistment, any officer of that department who was guilty of cruelty to

Negro soldiers was threatened with dismissal from the

ik service 9

The order of the Confederate government to treat all Negro prisoners of war as insurrectionists with punish­ ment of re-enslavement or death, and the determination of

Confederate soldiers to prevent ex-slaves from enlisting in

^^Mussey to Foster, October 10, 1864 in ibid*, pp* 762-63 e l4 Annual Cyclopaedia, l863 ? p o 26 * lAi the Union Army even if they had to murder them, deterred 1 5 Negro enlistments in many areas.

Officers for the Negro regiments were volunteers, and consequently were usually interested and sympathetic to the men in their care. Although antislavery men such as Thomas Higginson of the First South Carolina Volunteers have been accused of ^benevolent paternalism11 by some historians, through their determination to use the war training experience as an elevating influence upon the freedmen, they did much to make the Negro soldier ready l6 for life in a free society®

Military discipline of camp life made the transi­ tion from slavery to freedom easier for the Negro soldier®

The majority of these men were ^better fed, housed, and 17 clothed than ever in their lives before ®n The primary object of their training was to transform them into soldiers ® These ex-slaves! life-time of subservience to white people caused military discipline to be less objectionable to them than to the independent Northern

soldier, and their skill in the art of imitation served

them well in drill® They rarely mistook their left for

^Elijah P. Marrs, Life and History of the Reverend Elijah P® Marrs, pp® 17-20 as cited in McPherson, The Negro 1s Civil W a r , p. 207 ®

"^McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, p® 202® 17 Higginson, Life in a Black Regiment, p. 8. 142 their right foot in contrast with the farmer-soldier who had to be instructed by tying hay and straw to his feet, thus becoming a uhay foot, straw-footu soldier *^

A law of 1831 had authorized one chaplain for each army post with the task of teaching specifically stated.

Although only a third of the posts had chaplains when the

Civil War began, the number of chaplains increased rapidly but was never equal to the task of teaching the Negro soldiers during the war o The chaplains in the Union

Armies had strong convictions regarding the evil of slavery and those chaplains assigned duty in Negro regiments took 19 seriously the duty of teaching these ignorant people.

Since the total number of Union chaplains was approximately three thousand, serving at least two million men, chaplains sent out appeals for help to benevolent societies such as the Christian Commission, and teachers and materials were hurried to the camps to aid the chaplains in their teaching 20 duties o Officers and educated soldiers in the ranks were enlisted in the work* Not the least effective teaching was

l8Ibid.

"*"^Roy J. Honeywell, Chaplains of the United States Army (Washington, 1958), pp. 78-8 0 , 90. 20 National Freedman (1863)9 1 ? n o , 3 9 P * 74, 143 done by one black soldier passing his meager knowledge on 21 to his companions around the evening camp-fire„

Although the chaplains, teachers, and allotment of time were inadequate to the task, the freedmenf s universal desire for the white manf s ability motivated him in learning. Colonel Higginson wrote of his colored regiment,

The love of the spelling-books is inexhaustible— they stumbling on by themselves, or the blind leading the blind, with the same pathetic patience which they carry into everything. The chaplain is getting up a schoolhouse, where he will soon teach them as regularly as he can. But the alphabet ^ must always be a very incidental business in camp,

The regiments of freedmen had only a very small proportion of their number who could either read or write at the time of enlistment, but at the close of the war it was estimated that twenty thousand or approximately eleven per cent could 23 read intelligently.

Seldom was a soldier able to have more than two hours a week with a teacher, with classes held in the morning, afternoon, or evening whenever the chaplain or the student had free time. Sometimes there was one teacher who taught for one hour a day, sometimes several teachers who

21 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, p . 19; Report of Honorable T, D , Bliot, Chairman of Committee on Freedman Affairs to the House of Representatives, March 1 0 , 186 8 (Wa shington, 1868 ), pT 22 , 22 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, p , 19 *

^^Ibid,, p • 1; Report of Honorable T, D , Eliot, Chairman of the Committee on Freedman Affairs, p, 22 , 144

taught six hours a day, Again there were weeks when it was

impossible to hold any classes at all e Not all Negro regi­ ments were so fortunate as the First South Carolina

Volunteers, whose chaplain built them a school, or the

Negro troops of the Army of the James, whose commander promised the Christian Commission enough material to build

a schoolhouse and every facility needed for the school if 24 the Commission would send teachers« A tent, a guard­ house, the chaplain's tent, barracks rooms with or without

seats, and sometimes the shade of a tree served as class- rooms® 25

Chaplain James Peet reported that the soldiers

carried their books with them, studying when there was an

opportune moment, often aided by more advanced students,

and some who did not recognize one letter of the alphabet

at the beginning of the year could read with ease and could write legibly® Oral geography and arithmetic had been \ undertaken by a few men® Of the six hundred forty-six men

in the regiment, four hundred fifty-five had learned the

alphabet, forty-eight could read well, and four times that number could read easy material® Writing was the more

difficult skill to learn, but thirty-seven could write

24 James 0 ® Henry, "History of the United States Christian Commission (unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, Md®, 1959)? p » 233 ®

^National Freedman, I, no® 3? P® ?4® 145 their names, and seventeen could write wello One hundred ninety-one soldiers were still illiterate but these were chiefly new recruits,^

General William C . Birney appealed for teachers and books to the New England Freedmen?s Aid Society which responded with seven teachers and many school supplies for the Negro troops at Camp Stanton in Maryland. One of the teachers was elected Chaplain of a colored regiment and was sent with these men to Hilton Head, South Carolina, so that he might continue their religious and educational train- xngo 27

Frances Beecher, wife of a commander of Negro troops at Beaufort, South Carolina, and Jacksonville,

Florida, traveled with the troops, spending the mornings holding classes for the men in tents, assisted by the chaplain * When the men of the regiment were mustered out of service, each one was able to sign the pay-roll with his name, instead of an X- As in any group, some had great difficulty just learning to write their names, while others 28 learned quickly« Soldiers of Sherman !s Army praised the

26rbid. 27 Second Annual Report of the New England Freed- men's Aid Society (Educational Commission) April 21, l8b4 (Boston, 1864), p „ $4* 28 Frances P » Beecher, ltTwo Years with a Colored Regiment, a Womanf s Experience,11 New England Magazine (1890), XVII , p o 536 as cited in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, p. 211. 146 practical skills of these soldiers® UT saw them building their huts 9 and they seemed as careful and industrious as whites could be— no white officers were superintending their work«

Textbooks were in short supply, and the men used spellers, primers, the Bible or Testaments, many sharing 30 the same book. The United States Christian Commission purchased five thousand Wendeville1s Second Readers at eight cents a copy and sent them to Negroes in service ®

In December of 1864, the Executive Committee of the Com­ mission voted to spend an additional two thousand dollars for the purchase of such books for the Negro troops.

Personal representatives of the Commission were sent to

Charleston, South Carolina, to distribute books to troops located there in 186$,^^

In answer to an appeal from General Butler, the

Commission advertised in newspapers and magazines for teachers, and were able to send fifty qualified people to 3 2 the Negro troops in the Army of the James. Colored

troops in winter quarters near Memphis, in 1863 , had a

29 Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, p. 232. 30 Beecher, uTwo Years with a Colored Regiment,11' New England Magazine, XVII,,p , 536 as cited in McPherson, The NegroT s Civil W a r , p , 211®

"^Henry, "History Q f the United States Christian Commission," p® 235® A

32Ibid. 14? large, comfortable school house where they were taught by

the chaplain and his wife during the soldiers f off-duty hours o During the day, the women and children were

instructed in the building» Contests in reading and

spelling were held frequently, and the prizes were greatly

coveted by the older pupils as well as the childreno Two hundred and fifty men learned to read and write 6 3 3 In

Chattanooga and Nashville, three Negro regiments organized by General Thomas had schools for each company® Efforts were made to teach the men not only to read and write, but

also to teach them qualities of self-respect and manliness®

Colonel Thomas J® Morgan stated, uOur success in this 34 respect was ample compensation for our labor®11

The total number of Negro troops commissioned and

enlisted was 186,097? with a total of 68,178 losses® The

Negro had proved himself a good soldier and had been

exposed to learning that he could not have received in any

other way®

33Robert Cowden, A Brief Sketch of the Organization and Services of the Fifty-ninth Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry^ pp• 60-6l as cited in McPherson, The Negro*s Civil War, pp® 211-12® 34 Thomas J® Morgan, ^Reminiscences of Service with Colored Troops in the Army of the Cumberland , 1863~65n in Personal Narratives of Events in the War of the Rebellion, being papers read before the Rhode Island Soldiers' and Sailors' Historical Society (No ® 13? 3rd series, Providence, 1885)? pp. 11-48 as cited in ibid®, p ® 230« 148

Without any forethought or planning, the army had accepted the problems arising from the emancipation of three and a half million slaves® With the aid and inspira­ tion of teachers sent by benevolent societies of the North, it had attempted to prepare these people for the social upheaval which had taken place in their lives and in the society of the United States® Neither the army nor the benevolent societies could have been effective in their

efforts without the other ® When the army was removed from the South, the Northern teachers had to leave, Reconstruc­ tion governments were overthrown, and the Freedmenrs Bureau was rendered ineffective® White men in the Army were guilty of gross injustices to the freedmen, but enough good men

served in the Union Army to provide the first step toward true freedom for the emancipated Negroes® SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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