This richly researched and impressively argued work is a history of public schooling in Alabama in the half century following the Civil War. It engages with depth and sophistication Alabama’s social and cultural life in the period that can be characterized by the three “R”s: Reconstruction, redemption, and racism. Alabama was a mostly rural, relatively poor, and culturally conservative state, and its schools reflected the assumptions of that society.
This richly researched and impressively argued work is a history of public schooling in Alabama in the half century following the Civil War. It engages with depth and sophistication Alabama’s social and cultural life in the period that can be characterized by the three “R”s: Reconstruction, redemption, and racism. Alabama was a mostly rural, relatively poor, and culturally conservative state, and its schools reflected the assumptions of that society.
Schools in the Landscape: Localism, Cultural Tradition, and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915
217
Schools in the Landscape: Localism, Cultural Tradition, and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915
217eBook
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Overview
This richly researched and impressively argued work is a history of public schooling in Alabama in the half century following the Civil War. It engages with depth and sophistication Alabama’s social and cultural life in the period that can be characterized by the three “R”s: Reconstruction, redemption, and racism. Alabama was a mostly rural, relatively poor, and culturally conservative state, and its schools reflected the assumptions of that society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817383596 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 217 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Schools in the Landscape
Localism, Cultural Tradition, and the Development of Alabama's Public Education System, 1865-1915By Edith M. Ziegler
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1709-6
Chapter One
Reconstruction and Its Reach, 1865-1901
In the immediate wake of the Civil War-the period of so-called Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867)-Alabama's General Assembly was primarily concerned with returning the state to a recognizable normality. This meant conservative white rule and the continued repression of its black population, which now included 439,000 former slaves or "freedmen." A new constitution adopted in September 1865 reflected this goal of normalization and included a number of conditions required for Alabama to rejoin the Union. The assembly was granted authority to "enact necessary and proper laws for the encouragement of schools and the means of education" but otherwise was short on detail. Implicitly the schooling to be encouraged was to be for the benefit of the white population, which was significantly illiterate and experiencing a baby boom.
In this same period the freedmen were starting to seek the schooling that they had been denied by law in slavery and with which they associated power and influence. Their requirements were often met by Northern schoolteachers operating under the auspices of agencies such as the American Missionary Association (AMA), and in conjunction with the Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands-the "Freedmen's Bureau."
In October 1866, against a background of ugly race riots in Tennessee and Louisiana and an emerging pattern of harsh black repression all over the South, Radical Republicans swept the congressional elections. Determined not to see the achievements of the Civil War invalidated, they used their legislative dominance to pass the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867. This placed Alabama, along with Georgia and Florida, under the military rule of General John Pope, thus initiating "Congressional" or "Radical" Reconstruction in these states. The act also required the Southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution-designed to ensure freedmen obtained all the rights and privileges of citizenship-and to prepare new state constitutions. To further safeguard black civil rights, Congress passed the second Reconstruction Act, which concerned voter registration arrangements and electoral supervision. The imposition of martial law and an externally prescribed political order upended all the normal interactions and customs that had long been part of Alabama's cultural fabric. Many whites furiously resented the new status of former slaves and the congressional intervention on their behalf.
It was within this sociopolitical context that the Northern teachers embarked upon their mission to assist Alabama's freedmen. Some of the teachers had been schooled in the equalitarian ideas of abolitionism and, for a number of reasons, they ignored the fact that many whites regarded them as purveyors of alien notions that breached age- old conventions and taboos. The perceived threat posed by the Northern teachers was sometimes met with nothing less than terrorism. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for intimidation, arson, and even murder. When a Canadian missionary, William Luke, taught his Calhoun County pupils that black and white women were equal in God's eyes, and that workers of both races should receive the same wages, he was promptly hanged by local vigilantes. Luke's fate was a stark warning to those who might encourage talk of civil rights.
Although white attitudes toward black schooling did not follow a simple trajectory from resistance to acceptance, overt hostility subsided somewhat after about 1868 when some white opinion leaders grudgingly acknowledged such schooling might be necessary. In some places "colored" schools seem to have been tentatively encouraged by whites-as long as they were in the reliable hands of Confederate veterans or local teachers.
In November 1867 a constitutional convention elected on the extended franchise met in Montgomery to draft a state constitution. The convention's "Committee on Education and the School Fund" comprised four Carpetbaggers (allegedly opportunistic Northerners who had moved South), two Scalawags (local Republicans), and one black representative, Peyton Finley. The chairman, Gustavus Horton, had assisted in organizing Mobile's public schools in 1852 and three members of the committee-John Silsby, Benjamin Yordy, and Charles Buckley-were agents of the Freedmen's Bureau.
The committee proposed an entirely new model for the public schooling system based on an Iowan precedent. Its principal feature was a "Board of Education of the State of Alabama." This board was to have legislative powers in relation to education and, in this respect, would rival the assembly. The system's principal funding source was to be an appropriation equal to one-fifth of the state's total revenue.
A novel feature of the proposed system was that schooling would be free for all students between five and twenty-one years. In the antebellum period, except in cases of parental hardship, tuition fees had been payable. Thus, instead of the new provision being seen as a way of guaranteeing universal access to schooling, critics saw it as a needless expense with the potential for stigmatizing all students as paupers.
Newspapers covering the convention made their opinions clear. The Montgomery Daily Mail's description of the education article was a rant of racial suspicion: "One legislative body, not able to do all the harm to the white race, desired by the majority of the convention; an additional one, nicknamed the Board of Education, is created, and armed with the power to force all white children to go into all the free public schools upon terms of social equality with all sorts of negro children or else surrender the schools as a monopoly to the negroes."
This intemperate outburst was prompted because, while Section 7 of the proposed article did not specifically rule in integrated schools, neither did it rule them out. Proposed amendments to make separate schools compulsory were defeated, allowing opponents of the new constitution to whip up fears about social equality, miscegenation, and "Negro supremacy." The education committee had not really believed in the likelihood of racially mixed schools, but knew that specifying separate schools would mean inferior schools for blacks.
After a vigorous campaign by conservatives and newspapers such as the Montgomery Advertiser to denigrate the provisions of the new constitution and create fear about its racial implications, it was not ratified by the people. It came into effect anyway in June 1868 as a result of the fourth Reconstruction Act.
* * *
The white response throughout much of the state to the new education regime was often averse and even truculent. Conservatives, whose criticisms were politically based, regarded the board of education as an incubus to be borne until Reconstruction's end. While all Southern states were developing public education systems in the postbellum era, the hostility of many Alabamians to what was seen as a costly external imposition made the state's experience sui generis. In his first annual report to the governor in 1869, Dr. Noah B. Cloud, the state superintendent of public instruction, reported on the unpopularity of the schools with those whom they were intended to benefit. He felt this reflected antigovernment feeling and a flow-on hostility toward its agents who were organizing the schools. Cloud's report also blamed "idle politicians and certain unscrupulous disappointed newspaper editors." But whoever or whatever was to blame, white communities appeared not so much interested in accessing schooling for their own children as in demonstrating their mistrust of the new system and of funds being expended on schools for black children. The experience of Coffee County's superintendent was typical: "At the time I commenced appointing trustees, the prejudice of the people was general and strong against the free public school system-so great that there was difficulty in getting people to act." He explained this prejudice as being "mostly on account of the proposed enumeration of the colored children and their prospect of the benefit of the system." The opposition he encountered initially prevented him from organizing black schools. The superintendents for Dallas, Marengo, Macon, and Sanford (later Lamar) counties all reported similar antagonism. They were finding it hard to obtain teachers and/or to get men to act as trustees. They said the intense opposition to "colored" schools meant organizing them could prove dangerous.
If they could not resolve matters of schooling policy for themselves, teachers and trustees generally looked for direction to the county superintendent. This official was now a political appointee of the state superintendent and, in the fractious and factional political climate of Reconstruction, could only ever be as popular as his patron. Aspersions smacking of disgruntled local gossip were cast on some of the appointees: one was illiterate, another corrupt, and yet another, Dr. Ezra F. Bouchelle of Pickens County, suffered a double whammy of calumny. He was accused of being both incompetent and corrupt. In Clarke County, a dispute over the commission payable for disbursing teachers' wages erupted into a bitter contest between the county superintendent, Miel S. Ezell, and the local Democratic "courthouse clique." Ezell owed his appointment to a Republican state superintendent who was thus tagged as a Radical. Ezell's supporters described him as being "from an intelligent and respectable family," and as "a man noted for his piety and devotion." His enemies claimed Ezell was a person of "repulsive temperament and manners" and a "Radical of an independent faction." As soon as the Democrats recovered the state superintendency, Ezell's enemies alleged he had been corruptly installed and-this was key-that his political positions "were against the interests of the Democratic and Conservative Party in Clarke County." Ezell was soon dumped.
The difficulties of supervising the county schools were either genuinely onerous and the additional duties required by the role were overwhelming or the county superintendents had inflated ideas about their own importance. They certainly had rather ambitious expectations with regard to their annual remuneration. In 1869, the Committee of Clerks and Trustees for Bullock County's schools proposed to the state superintendent that a salary of $1,200 be paid to Columbus Cunningham, the county superintendent. The committee, probably in cahoots with Cunningham, who believed he deserved far more, said it was "reflecting the general desire that such salary should be given as will secure the services of entirely competent and reliable men in the office." Perry County's committee recommended a salary of $2,000 for Louis W. Temple, because of the "large number of children and amount of labor devolving on the superintendent." When the state superintendent reduced this to $1,500, the committee's chairman, Theophilus G. Fowler, darkly alluded to "political and civil issues in the county which made the superintendent's labor arduous." He remained huffily convinced the reduced amount would be "insufficient compensation for the amount of labor needed to be done for the cause of education, particularly among the colored people, where the field is a vast one and their desires and necessities urgent."
Across the rest of the state the level of recommended annual salary ranged from the not unreasonable $375 in Covington County to $2,000 in Dallas. However, it was becoming evident that the state was not in a position to fully fund the costs of the new school system as intended by the constitution. Dr. Cloud might flatter the framers of that document and assert that its education article "was the first decisive blow ever before struck in the planting states, and especially in Alabama, to clear out among all classes every vestige of ignorance with its long and attendant train of evils." The reality was that money earmarked for schools was not being made fully available. This early and critical breach of "the chartered pledge of the state to furnish the means and facilities adequate to the education of all the children of the state" would be long remembered.
* * *
In the years between the establishment of the board of education and the election of 1874, which returned conservative interests to power, the official annual reports to the governor by successive state superintendents contained both self-justifications for their own actions and broadsides against their predecessors. The stance of each report was influenced by whether the superintendent and the governor were of the same or different political stripes. Similarly, the turf wars between the board of education, where the Republicans held a majority, and the assembly where, after the 1870 election, the Democratic and Conservative Party held a majority in the lower house, meant that what was actually going on in the schools up and down the state was a matter of contested opinion. Yet the county reports appended to the state superintendent's annual report give some idea of how schools were being conducted in different parts of the state and the extent to which communities regarded schooling as part of their cultural and socioeconomic life.
In 1871 many superintendents reported their townships were often without their own schoolhouses and that pupils had to be taught in churches or Masonic lodges. The shortcomings of the buildings that did exist, and the paucity of their furnishings and equipment, were widely reported-and would continue to be for the next thirty-five years and longer. Yet parents overlooked exhortations to provide something better, citing "the hard times, the bad crops, &c." Schooling was not compulsory and money could not be wasted on what was still something children might opt to squeeze into "every spare day" when they could be excused from farm duties.
The reports of 1871 show the difficulty some of the superintendents were having with the concept of universal free public schooling, still regarding assistance from the state as a last resort for children who were unable to get an education in any other way. Many thought patrons should pay tuition fees to supplement the public fund as they had done before the war. Blount County's superintendent said he had implemented a fee-charging regime and "made the public fund auxiliary only." He had had to do this he said because parents were only sending their children to school while it was free. As soon as the funds ran out, children were withdrawn. This overwhelmed the teacher in the first instance and subsequently cheated children "out of the benefits of schooling and the teacher out of employment." The subscription school supplemented by state resources had the compelling appeal of the tried and true. Moreover, it allowed teachers to believe they would be paid.
In June 1870 General Oliver Otis Howard, who headed the Freedmen's Bureau, ordered its work in Alabama to be finished by July 15-a month later. After that date, the schools operated for black children by missionary societies in conjunction with the bureau, became part of the state system-though not an integrated part. The county superintendents' reports for 1871 describe black communities struggling with familiar problems-nonattendance owing to seasonal labor needs, inadequate schoolhouses, unreliable trustees, and/or insufficient private funds to buy books or supplement public allocations.
The reports just described were made to Joseph Hodgson, a member of the Democratic and Conservative Party, who had been elected as state superintendent in November 1870 and would serve until 1872. During his term of office, Hodgson could never secure the appropriation promised by the constitution for school funding. The state's failure to comply with its constitutional obligations meant teachers were going unpaid. In some desperation and often fruitlessly, superintendents issued warrants for payment from local tax collectors. Others provided teachers with vouchers with which they could redeem goods from a local merchant. According to Hugh W. Caffey of Lowndes County, some teachers bore "their deprivation of pay with commendable fortitude." He blamed the "financial embarrassments" on Republican Scalawags.
In his annual report for the 1872 scholastic year-his last before leaving office-Joseph Hodgson wrote about education's purpose and benefits. He condemned Alabama's alarming illiteracy rate and opined that even laborers were deserving of a "pastime and a power"-such as that derived from being able to read newspapers. In Hodgson's comments there is a glimpse of the Jeffersonian ideal-access to education for the common man whose world need not be limited by occupation or location.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Schools in the Landscape by Edith M. Ziegler Copyright © 2010 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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