VII FREEDMEN’S EDUCATION, 1861-1865

IN an optimistic mood, Wendell Phillips told an assemblage of abolitionists on the Fourth of July 1861, that “these days of anti-slavery gatherings for the purpose of emancipation, I believe, will be soon over.” Emancipation was sure to come as a result of the war, and the duty of abolitionists would then be “to watch for the welfare of this victim race, guard it during its pupilage, shelter it by patronage, by protection, by privilege, by recognizing its claim to an equal manhood.” A year later William Goodell asserted that “as soon as slavery shall be abolished, there will be an opportunity for Christian philanthropists to commence the arduous work of educating, enlightening, and guiding the emancipated colored people.” In 1863 Whittier thanked God for the virtual abolition of slavery by the war, but warned his fellow abolitionists that “we must not for a moment forget that, from this hour, new and mighty responsibilities devolve upon us to aid, direct and educate these millions, left free, indeed, but bewildered, ignorant, naked and foodless in the wild chaos of civil war. We have to undo the accumulated wrongs of two centuries; to remake the manhood that slavery has well-nigh unmade.”1

During the early war years, northern conservatives conjured up terrifying visions of servile insurrection and barbarism as consequences of emancipation. Abolition would mean social and economic anarchy in the South, with horrible scenes of bloodshed and carnage the result of inevitable race war. “The Negro will not work except under compulsion,” they cried. “The two races cannot live side by side in freedom.” Slavery was an absolute necessity to the South’s social and economic system. “What will you do with the freed slaves?” they asked the abolitionists. Conservatives cited the alleged failure of emancipation in the West Indies as an example of the baneful consequences of letting black men go free. Abolitionists replied with an outpouring of scholarly and popular studies, based on official British and French sources, designed to demonstrate the economic and social success of emancipation in the West Indies.2

Many conservatives, however, remained unconvinced that large numbers of freed slaves could remain in the United States without causing social upheaval. In 1861-1862 there was widespread support among conservative Republicans and Democrats for the colonization abroad of Negroes emancipated by the war. Abolitionists and northern Negroes, of course, were overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of colonization as a solution of the Negro question. James Redpath promoted the emigration of northern Negroes to Haiti in an effort to help build that island republic into a strong nation and make it a showcase of Negro abilities. But Redpath as well as other abolitionists denounced all wartime colonization plans having the general purpose of getting Negroes out of the United States. Most colored men had little desire to leave their homeland. “Sir,” said Robert Purvis to an advocate of Negro colonization, “this is our country as much as it is yours, and we will not leave it.”³

Nevertheless Lincoln lent his support to several unwise colonization schemes during the war. In 1862 the president actually signed a contract with one Bernard Kock, a fly-by-night promoter, for the colonization of more than 450 freed slaves on the Ile A’Vache, a small island off the southern coast of Haiti. This venture proved a tragic failure. Kock confiscated the American dollars of the colonists and failed to provide them with adequate housing. Smallpox and actual starvation decimated the ranks of the emigrants. Lincoln finally admitted failure and sent a ship to bring the surviving Negroes back to the United States in February 1864. Abolitionists hoped that the government had learned something from the failure of its colonization schemes. Edmund Quincy asserted that the collapse of emigration projects showed colonization to be a “wild, delusive and impractical scheme,” while emancipation without expatriation, for which abolitionists had always contended, had been successful. “Thus does the boasted wisdom of ‘Conservatism’ turn out to be folly, while the ‘fanaticism’ of the ‘crazy Radicals’ is proved by experience to be the highest wisdom.”4

The failure of colonization confronted America with the problem of absorbing 4 million freed slaves into the social structure. Abolitionists were ready for this challenge. Opportunities for abolitionists to demonstrate the Negro’s fitness for liberty and to help the freedmen in their difficult transition from slavery to freedom came early in the war. As contrabands began pouring into Union lines at Fortress Monroe near Hampton, Virginia, in the summer of 1861, General Butler assigned Private Edward L. Pierce to the job of ministering to their needs and superintending their labor on Union fortifications. Pierce was picked for this task because of his antislavery background, his administrative ability, and his eagerness to prove the Negro’s capacity for freedom. He had studied law in the office of Salmon P. Chase, was a friend of Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, and had served as a member of Phillips’ bodyguard during the antiabolitionist riots of the secession winter.⁵

Pierce worked with the contrabands only a short time before he was mustered out and returned to private life (he had enlisted for three months). But during that brief period he laid down certain basic principles that governed future contraband policy at Monroe. The contrabands were to work the same number of hours per day as white laborers, and receive the same rations as soldiers. They were to be paid for their labor. Part of their wages was to be deducted for support of sick and aged contrabands. Pierce published an article on “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe” in the Atlantic Monthly. He stated that the Negroes had worked hard in the July heat and had shown little of the indolence of which they were usually accused. Many officers had sneered at Pierce’s idea of getting Negroes to work by kind treatment and wage incentives, but Pierce asserted that the result proved him right: the contrabands worked better when treated well than when they were whipped and driven like cattle. Pierce had held long conversations with several contrabands, and when he mentioned that most whites considered their race lazy and shiftless, they replied scornfully: “Who but the darkies cleared all the land round here?” Pierce concluded that there were lazy Negroes, but that there were a great many lazy white men as well. With good wages, promptly paid, the Negro would prove as industrious as the southern white, perhaps more so.6

Letterhead of the National Freedmen’s Relief Association.

Less than two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, The American Missionary, organ of the American Missionary Association (A.M.A.) proclaimed that the war would create in the South “one of the grandest fields of missionary labor the world ever furnished.” By June 1861, the abolitionist-dominated A.M.A. was making plans to send teachers and books to educate the 700 Negroes within Union lines in Virginia. The Reverend L. C. Lockwood went to Fortress Monroe in early September and opened a Sunday school on September 15. Two days later a day school for freedmen was established near the site where the first shipload of slaves landed in America in 1619. The school was a success, and several more schools and churches were started under A.M.A. auspices in subsequent months. The Association also helped the government provide for the physical needs of the freedmen. The Boston auxiliary alone sent more than one hundred barrels of clothing to the contrabands during the winter of 1861-62.⁷

On the morning of November 7, 1861, a Union fleet steamed into Port Royal Sound with guns ablaze, and by nightfall Port Royal Island and the adjacent South Carolina sea islands 50 miles southwest of Charleston were in Union hands. Most of the islands’ white population escaped to the mainland, leaving behind scores of fertile cotton plantations and more than 8,000 confused slaves. Here indeed was a challenge to abolitionists. Because of their physical and cultural isolation, these slaves were among the most ignorant and backward of the entire South. If they proved themselves capable of a productive and peaceful life in freedom, antiemancipation arguments based on the alleged barbarism and shiftlessness of the Negro race would crumble to pieces. Abolitionists were quick to grasp the significance of this opportunity. Two weeks after the capture of Port Royal, the Anti-Slavery Standard urged the government to grant freedom to the slaves and hire them to harvest the cotton crop. “Here, within the protection of the arms of the United States, might a new experiment of tropical culture by free labor be tried,” declared the Standard. “Succeeding there, as succeed it must and would, how simple the process by which it might be extended wherever the arms of the nation may be predominant!”8

In December the Treasury Department sent special agents to the islands to collect and sell the 1861 cotton crop. The agents were to supervise the labor of contrabands and keep records of their work for future payment of wages. Secretary of the Treasury Chase realized, however, that such an arrangement was not satisfactory on a long-term basis since the cotton agents had no interest in the welfare of the Negroes and would do little or nothing to further the great social experiment of freedom on the islands. On December 20 Chase sent a telegram to Edward L. Pierce asking him to accept a commission to investigate the condition and needs of the freedmen at Port Royal. Pierce accepted, and departed for the sea islands on January 13, 1862.⁹ After two weeks of intensive observation Pierce drew up a report to Chase on February 3. He thought that “when properly organized, and with proper motives set before them,” the contrabands “will as freemen be as industrious as any race of men are likely to be in this climate.” Because of their past dependence the Negroes were not yet self-reliant, but “in spite of their condition, reputed to be worse here than in many other parts of the rebellious region, there are such features in their life and character that the opportunity is now offered to us to make of them, partially in this generation and fully in the next, a happy, industrious, law-abiding, free, and Christian people.” Pierce recommended that the government appoint labor superintendents for each plantation or group of smaller plantations, “selected with reference to peculiar qualifications, and as carefully as one would choose a guardian for his children.” The contrabands, said Pierce, should be treated “with sole reference” to their preparation for the rights and duties of freedom and citizenship.¹⁰

Pierce talked with President Lincoln on February 15. Afterwards Lincoln gave Chase carte blanche to go ahead with the sea island experiment on the basis of Pierce’s recommendations. Chase appointed Pierce a special agent of the Treasury Department with full powers to select superintendents and teachers for the contrabands. The government would supply the superintendents with rations, housing, and transportation, but their salaries would have to be paid by private philanthropic societies.11

Shortly after arriving on the sea islands Pierce had written to Jacob Manning, abolitionist pastor of the Old South Church in Boston, describing the “strange and chaotic condition” of the contrabands. They were confused, destitute, and in danger of demoralization by their contact with Union soldiers. “If this critical moment be not availed of and some means not taken to make them industrious, orderly and sober, they will become hopelessly demoralized,” Pierce informed Manning. “You must see that the heathen to whom we owe a special duty … are nearer to us than the Ganges.”¹²

Manning published this letter in the Boston Transcript, and called a meeting at his home for the formation of a society to send supplies, teachers, and labor superintendents to the contrabands. At a second meeting on February 7 the “Boston Educational Commission” was organized. Its purpose was “the industrial, social, intellectual, moral and religious elevation of persons released from Slavery in the course of the War for the Union.” Governor John Andrew was chosen president of the Commission, whose membership included every shade of antislavery conviction from radical abolitionist to moderate Republican. In New York City the Reverend Mansfield French, an abolitionist and a friend of Chase, took the lead in organizing the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. In Philadelphia, abolitionist J. Miller McKim took steps to form a similar society. At a public meeting on March 5 the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee was organized, with McKim as executive secretary.¹³

The inception of the freedmen’s aid movement touched off a debate within abolitionist ranks over the purpose and strategy of antislavery societies. Early in 1862 McKim submitted his resignation as corresponding secretary of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Slavery was crumbling under the weight of war, argued McKim, and there was no longer any need for agents, lecturers, and other traditional appurtenances of the abolitionist movement. “In my judgment, the old anti-slavery routine is not what the cause now demands,” he wrote. “Iconoclasm has had its day. For the battering-ram we must substitute the hod and trowel…. We have passed through the pulling-down stage of our movement; the building-up—the constructive part—remains to be accomplished.” McKim proposed that abolitionists dissolve their old societies or convert them into freedmen’s aid associations.14

Most abolitionists disagreed with McKim. The officers of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society refused to accept his resignation, and McKim consented to stay on as corresponding secretary until a replacement could be found. Pillsbury, Powell, and other abolitionist lecturers maintained that lectures, meetings, and so on, were more important to the antislavery cause than ever. “If emancipation comes as a mere ‘necessity of war,’ ” declared the Anti-Slavery Standard, “it will come unsanctioned by any considerations of justice or humanity toward the victims of our oppression, and the strenuous exertion of moral influence in their behalf will still be greatly needed.” The end of slavery may be near, wrote Giles Stebbins of Michigan, but there was still grave danger of compromise. “Surely the Abolitionists, with tongue and pen, can help to the right answer. Never were their words so earnestly and widely heard as now…. Why seal our lips when, more than ever, the people hear and ponder our words?”¹⁵

McKim hastened to deny the implication that he favored abandonment of the antislavery crusade. He merely wanted to channel it in a new direction. “This freedmen business is an immensely ‘big job,’” he explained. “It is abolition already begun. It is all important that the first instalment should be well managed. The experiment of freedom should be initiated with as much care as possible.” Abolitionists could not do the whole work, of course, but they should take the lead. “We are to continue to be what we have always been, a wheel within a wheel; an original motive power…. Our presence & influence should be seen and felt in this & all other important movements.”16

Meanwhile the freedmen’s aid societies selected 41 men and 12 women as the first group of plantation superintendents and teachers for the sea island freedmen. This contingent sailed from New York early in March 1862. Among these “Gideonites,” as they soon called themselves, were many abolitionists. Miss Laura Towne, a Philadelphia abolitionist who was destined to become one of the outstanding personalities on the islands, declared when she arrived there in 1862 that “we have come to do antislavery work, and we think it noble work and mean to do it earnestly.” Another antislavery veteran observed in August 1862, that some of the foremost young abolitionists in Philadelphia had left comfortable homes to go to Port Royal and teach the freedmen.¹⁷ Charlotte Forten, a highly cultured young Negro from Salem, Massachusetts, complained on the other hand that some of the plantation superintendents were prejudiced against the Negroes and spoke of them in contemptuous terms. Reuben Tomlinson, another Philadelphia abolitionist who became a prominent figure on the islands, deplored the shortcomings of several of the superintendents. “There is also a lukewarmness among them on the subject of anti-Slavery,” he wrote, “which I think interferes very materially with their usefulness.” The northern societies were forced to dismiss several of the superintendents who had treated the Negroes badly. The great majority of Gideonites were genuinely concerned for the freedmen’s welfare, however, and most of those who were not, were quickly weeded out of the enterprise.¹⁸

The Gideonites encountered many trials and difficulties in their first months on the islands. The sea island Negroes spoke a dialect almost unintelligible to northern ears. Harriet Ware, a Massachusetts abolitionist stationed on St. Helena Island, reported in April 1862, that it required a “great deal of tact and ability” to gain the friendship and confidence of the contrabands. “We are not used to these people—it is even very difficult to understand what they say.” After her first day in Beaufort, Laura Towne wrote that “it certainly takes great nerve to walk here among the soldiers and negroes and not be disgusted or shocked or pained so much as to give it all up.” Charlotte Forten considered the first Negroes she encountered upon her arrival “certainly the most dismal specimens I ever saw.”19 The teachers faced a herculean task in trying to teach Negro children of all ages to read and write in overcrowded schoolrooms. Laura Towne described one of her early classroom experiences: the pupils “had no idea of sitting still, of giving attention or ceasing to talk aloud. They lay down and went to sleep, they scuffled and struck each other. They got up by the dozen, made their curtsies, and walked off to the neighboring field for blackberries, coming back to their seats with a curtsy when they were ready. They evidently did not understand me, and I could not understand them, and after two hours and a half of effort I was thoroughly exhausted.”²⁰

In the face of such discouragements a few Gideonites gave up and returned home. Most of them stuck it out, however, and soon sang a happier tune. Laura Towne forgot her early disheartenment, and in June 1862, she wrote to a friend:

“I wish you were as free from every fret as I am, and as happy. We found the people here naked, … afraid and discontented about being made to work as slaves, and without assurance of freedom or pay, of clothes or food,—and now they are jolly and happy and decently fed and dressed, and so full of affection and gratitude to the people who are relieving them that it is rather too flattering to be enjoyed. It will not last, I dare say, but it is genuine now and they are working like Trojans…. It is such a satisfaction to an abolitionist to see that they are proving conclusively that they can and will and even like to work enough at least to support themselves and give something extra to Government.”21

After they learned to keep order and communicate with the pupils, teachers found to their delight that the children learned to read rapidly. All of the freedmen showed great eagerness to learn to read and write. Most of the teachers agreed that Negro children were fully equal to whites on the lower levels of learning. At the higher levels, such as mathematics, original composition, grammar, and so on, they did not do as well, but most of the teachers attributed this to lack of background, motivation, and opportunity rather than to any innate inferiority. On the whole, most teachers were satisfied with the progress made by their students during the first year. Pierce wrote after observing the contrabands for several weeks that “I was never so impressed as at this hour with the conviction that the lifting of these people from bondage to freedom … is a very easy thing, involving only common humanity, and reasonable patience and faith. If white men only did as well under such adverse circumstances, they would be regarded as prodigies.”²²

The Port Royal experiment received a great deal of national publicity in both the proslavery and antislavery press. Much was at stake on the South Carolina islands. If the contrabands there showed themselves capable of an industrious and productive life in freedom, the main argument against emancipation would dissolve into nothingness. For this reason the Democratic and conservative press in the North tried to discredit the whole enterprise. The attempt by Pierce and his “band of Abolition socialists, free lovers, and disorganizers of society generally” to “put in practice the theory of Abolition at Port Royal, will be the beginning of the downfall of the now rampant and powerful Abolition party in the North,” declared the New York Express. The Express charged that the contrabands had become paupers living on the United States Treasury, revelling in idleness at the expense of the northern taxpayer. “The question now arises, if this is the result of letting loose a few thousand negroes in South Carolina, what will it be when the contrabands shall be counted by hundreds of thousands?” The New York Journal of Commerce intoned that “the nonsensical, wild and fanatical plans of irresponsible men and women which are having their trial at Port Royal are a subject of sorrow and disgust to the intelligent world.” And the Louisville Democrat commented that “the abolitionists propose to elevate the black races. Nothing but hemp could do the same thing properly for them.”23

The abolitionist and antislavery press countered these aspersions with facts, figures, and opinions based on actual observation and study of the situation on the sea islands. On June 2, 1862, Pierce submitted his final report as special agent of the Treasury Department. Under the supervision of Gideonites the Negroes had planted nearly 15,000 acres of cotton, corn, potatoes, and grain. Despite their initial disinclination to plant cotton (they considered it a badge of slavery), and the six weeks’ late start on the growing season, the crops were coming along well. The contrabands worked industriously under the stimulus of wages even though they were frequently not paid on time. Their behavior, said Pierce, gave the lie to the old proslavery assertion that Negroes would work only under compulsion. “It is not pretended that many of these laborers could not have done more than they have done, or that in persistent application they are the equals of races living in colder and more bracing latitudes,” he wrote. But they worked hard enough to make themselves self-supporting, and with the additional incentives of complete freedom they would work even harder. Nearly 2,500 children were taught in the day schools during the first two months of the experiment, and almost the whole adult population attended Sunday schools. “The success of the movement, now upon its third month, has exceeded my most sanguine expectations,” concluded Pierce. “Industrial results have been reached which put at rest the often reiterated assumption that this territory and its products can be cultivated only by slaves. A social problem which has vexed the wisest approaches a solution.”24

In the summer of 1862 J. Miller McKim visited the sea islands as the official representative of the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee. McKim was shocked by what he saw of the lingering effects of slavery. Even in his most radical moments as an abolitionist he had never suspected the depths of the soul-corroding and personality-warping effects of human bondage. Nevertheless, after a two weeks’ tour of the islands McKim expressed optimism about the future of the Negroes as free men. Most of the anti-Negro stories circulating in the North, he said, came from reporters of the New York Herald and New York World stationed on the islands, who moved among “the ribald and unprincipled, picking up their items in bar-rooms, … and thus it is that at least half of what they write is absolutely false.”²⁵

McKim returned to Philadelphia and on July 9 gave a public lecture summarizing his observations on the islands. The lecture was widely published by the antislavery press and printed in pamphlet form for distribution throughout the North. Many people were asking: “Has the negro the spirit—the pluck, to do his part in maintaining the status now, or hereafter to be, assigned him?” McKim tried to answer this all-important question as fairly as he could. “Servitude is not a condition favorable to the growth of courage,” he said. “Slavery in fact as well as law, unmans its victims.” But given the incentives and responsibilities of freedom, the Negroes would develop pluck enough. McKim quoted the testimony of one of the plantation superintendents: The freedmen “have their vices. Deception and petty thieving prevail. They are careless, indolent and improvident. They have a miserable habit of scolding and using authoritative language to one another.” But “all these vices are clearly the result of slave education, and will gradually disappear under improved conditions.” McKim stated his firm conviction that the free-labor experiment at Port Royal had thus far been “entirely successful.”²⁶

Many other abolitionists and Gideonites contributed their testimony to the positive results of the first months of the Port Royal experiment. Charles P. Ware, a plantation superintendent from Massachusetts, observed in October 1862 that the enterprise had operated under many handicaps during the preceding summer. “The sudden reaction consequent upon the change from slavery to what they hardly knew as freedom; the confusion incident upon military occupation … the lateness of the cotton crop, the poorness of the seed … and lastly, the shameful delay in the payments” of wages—with all these hindrances it would not have been surprising if the experiment had failed entirely. But it had not failed. Under such adverse circumstances “it is wonderful how much they have done and in what an excellent state they are.” E. S. Philbrick wrote after a year on the islands: “If our Northern croakers could only be made to realize as we do here the ease with which we have reduced a comparative degree of order out of the chaos we found, and see how ready this degraded and half-civilized race are to become an industrious and useful laboring class, there would not be so much gabble about the danger of immediate emancipation.”27

Evidence of the success of the Port Royal experiment and similar efforts elsewhere did not rest upon the testimony of abolitionists alone. John Murray Forbes, a businessman who visited the sea islands in the spring of 1862, wrote in June of that year: “I used to think emancipation only another name for murder, fire and rape, but mature reflection and considerable personal observation have since convinced me that emancipation may, at any time, be declared without disorder.”²⁸ Many others like Forbes were becoming convinced in 1862 by the pressures of war, the reports of teachers of the freedmen, the statements of impartial observers, and personal observation that immediate emancipation was both safe and practicable.

While the freedmen’s aid societies were winning converts among conservatives, a few abolitionists warned against the dangers of paternalism inherent in the very concept of freedmen’s aid. Lydia Maria Child complained about the practice at Fortress Monroe of withholding a portion of the freedmen’s wages for support of the sick and aged. “I wish white people could get rid of the idea that they must manage for them,” she said. “White laborers would not work with much heart under such circumstances. They ought to pay them wages in proportion to their work, and let them form Relief Societies among themselves, so that they might feel that they did the benevolent work themselves.” Wendell Phillips also believed in a greater degree of laissez-faire for the freedmen. “I ask nothing more for the negro than I ask for the Irishman or the German who comes to our shores,” said Phillips in May 1862. “I thank the benevolent men who are laboring at Port Royal—all right!—but the blacks at the South do not need them. They are not objects of charity. They only ask this nation—‘Take your yoke off our necks.’ ”29

In one sense this criticism was unfair. There was a very real danger of excessive paternalism, to be sure, but the abolitionist teachers and superintendents in the field were no more in favor of paternalism as a permanent policy than Phillips. They were confronted by a set of circumstances, however, which made a certain amount of paternalism necessary at first. The contrabands were just emerging from slavery, an institution that had deeply implanted in their character the habits of dependence and servility. It would take months and years of patient labor, education, and experience before this attitude of dependence on the one side, and the corresponding necessity of a certain amount of paternalism on the other, ceased to exist. The function of the limited paternalism practiced by Gideonites was to help the Negroes take the first steps to freedom, to set them on the path that led to eventual self-reliance, when paternalism would no longer be necessary.³⁰

Most of the Gideonites fully recognized the dangers of falling into an attitude of benevolent condescension toward the contrabands. They were annoyed at first by the servile attitude of the Negroes. “These people show their subserviency in the way they put Marm or Sir into their sentences every other word, … and in always agreeing to everything you say,” wrote Harriet Ware from St. Helena Island in April 1862. “In school it is rather annoying to have them say, ‘Yes Marm,’ ‘zackly Marm,’ before it is possible for an idea to have been reached their brains.”31 In many ways the adult freedmen were like children. They had been treated like children, in a sense, all their lives, and for a time they continued to act toward the northern missionaries as they had acted toward their old masters. “The great mass of these people are to all intents and purposes children,” observed Reuben Tomlinson early in 1863, “except that they are children with fixed habits, the growth of years, & are therefore even more difficult to manage than children.” In view of this childlike behavior, it is not surprising that some of the Gideonites were unconsciously flattered and wheedled into an overindulgent attitude toward their “people.” Tomlinson warned against such overindulgence, declaring that it was the worst way to prepare the Negroes for the responsibilities and duties of freedom.³²

When the Gideonites first came South the contrabands were destitute, in desperate need of food, clothing, and benevolent assistance. The government distributed rations, and the freedmen’s aid societies sent thousands of dollars worth of clothing to the islands. This natural impulse to treat the poverty-stricken freedmen as objects of charity was soon overcome, however. The societies set up stores on the islands where the freedmen could buy clothing and supplies at cost, and in November 1862, the government discontinued the issuance of rations to able-bodied freedmen and their families. Most of the Gideonites made conscious efforts to avoid an excess of paternal benevolence, and as time passed the freedmen themselves began to act more like free men.³³

Port Royal and Fortress Monroe were not the only places where northern teachers and missionaries worked with the freedmen. As the war progressed the A.M.A. established schools and churches in just about every part of the Confederacy penetrated by Union armies. The Boston and Philadelphia Educational and Relief Societies, organized in February and March 1862, later changed their names to the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society and the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association. These two societies plus the National Freedmen’s Relief Association of New York expanded the scope of their activities during 1862-1863, established auxiliary societies, and sent an ever-increasing quota of supplies and teachers to the South.34

Abolitionists were prominent in the organization and leadership of freedmen’s aid societies. A substantial percentage of the officers of the New England, New York, and Pennsylvania societies were old-line abolitionists. The A.M.A. was dominated by abolitionists.³⁵ In March 1862, George E. Baker, an old abolitionist, helped to organize the National Freedmen’s Relief Association in Washington, which distributed supplies, conducted schools, and provided hospital and medical care for freedmen in the District of Columbia and northern Virginia. Joseph Parker, an abolitionist Baptist minister from Boston, became corresponding secretary of the New England Educational Commission for the Freedmen, an organization which directed the freedmen’s aid efforts of New England Baptists during the war. In February 1862, Richard J. Hinton founded the Kansas Emancipation League to provide relief, establish schools, and find jobs for the 4,000 contrabands who escaped into Kansas during the first year of the war.³⁶ In Syracuse Samuel J. May organized an auxiliary freedmen’s relief association and spent much of his time and energy directing the work of the association during the rest of the war. The Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society supported a school in Alexandria, Virginia. As the Union armies in the West advanced southward into Tennessee and Mississippi in 1862, thousands of contrabands crowded into filthy camps set up for them behind Union lines. Levi Coffin, famous Cincinnati abolitionist and legendary “President” of the underground railroad, visited a contraband camp at Cairo, Illinois, late in 1862 and helped start a school there. He returned to Cincinnati and in January 1863, organized the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission. Coffin served as general agent of the Commission, and spent the rest of the war organizing auxiliary societies, raising money, and overseeing the activities of his organization.37

Abolitionists also predominated among the teachers and missionaries who went South to instruct and assist the freedmen in their transition to freedom. Few of the old-line abolitionists actually went into the field to teach: that work was usually left to younger and more adventurous persons of antislavery backgrounds, while the older people remained in the North to serve in administrative capacities. A few of the veteran crusaders, however, went South and served on the firing line of freedom. Frances Dana Gage arrived at Port Royal in 1862. Josephine S. Griffing went to work among the freedmen in Washington in 1863 and stayed there until her death in 1872, devoting herself entirely to the work of caring for sick and aged freedmen and finding jobs for the able-bodied.³⁸ At the outbreak of the war the sixty-year-old Quaker abolitionist, Abigail Hopper Gibbons, offered her services to the government as a nurse. The government accepted, and assigned her to army camps in northern Virginia in the first year of the war. In 1862 she was put in charge of the army hospital at Point Lookout in southern Maryland. A contraband camp was established next to the army hospital. Mrs. Gibbons took charge of the distribution of supplies from freedmen’s aid societies, and found jobs in the North for several of the freedmen. She was disliked by the local white populace, most of whom were Confederate sympathizers. She received several threatening letters from irate Marylanders. The following was a typical example of these missives: “Old Lady you are not needed at this place and you had better leave double quick or else the soldiers [Maryland Unionist soldiers] will give you an introduction to the bay you never came here for any good to soldiers as they have found it out you old nigger lover yea worse an old hypocrit the devil has his house full of better people than ever you were you old Hell hound you must know that you cant rule this whole point now hum yourself away pretty soon.”39

At the end of the war the various secular and religious freedmen’s aid societies had more than 900 teachers in the South. In August 1865, General O. O. Howard, newly appointed head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, said that more than 200,000 freedmen had received instruction during the past four years.⁴⁰ In the early postwar years there was a great expansion of freedmen’s aid activity, especially among the church-connected societies (see Chapter XVII).

Abolitionists made use of every opportunity to proclaim the success of the Port Royal experiment and other free labor enterprises. Edward Pierce and Charlotte Forten published their observations in the Atlantic Monthly. Mansfield French and Frances Gage wrote articles about the sea islands for the New York Tribune. Mrs. Gage went on an extensive lecture tour in the winter of 1863-64, giving more than 75 lectures about the Port Royal freedmen.⁴¹

An ever-increasing number of northern conservatives were becoming convinced by the success of the scattered free labor experiments that immediate emancipation was safe and practicable. But the glowingly optimistic reports written for publication by teachers, labor superintendents, and other freedmen’s aid workers contained only part of the truth. For many years abolitionists had argued that the dehumanizing institution of slavery destroyed nearly every vestige of manhood, morality, and intelligence in its victims. When the Gideonites first came South and saw for themselves the abject, servile character of many contrabands, their theories about slavery were quickly confirmed. But to report the objective truth about the freedmen would only confirm the stereotype of the servile, shiftless, barbarous Negro. Hence in most of their published reports and letters they played down the ignoble qualities of the freedmen and emphasized their rapid progress and remarkable achievements under freedom. The countless trials, heartbreaks, and disillusionments faced by the Gideonites were rarely mentioned in public accounts of their work.

Typical of some of the teachers’ published reports was this statement by Linda Slaughter, an Ohio abolitionist and teacher for the A.M.A.: “Already has the Freedman been quickened intellectually…. What has not freedom done for him? The brutish mind, the servile demeanor, and the clouded soul have given place to noble impulses…. A nation has been born in a day…. Steadily are they rising; steadfastly are they progressing…. The Freedmen are destined shortly to become the ruling race in the South. Labor and education … soon will elevate them above the aristocratic level of their former masters.”42

Such rosy accounts may have been necessary to convince the North of the success of emancipation, but many abolitionists recognized the dangers inherent in these enthusiastic statements. In the first place they did not accurately reflect the facts of the freedmen’s character, the difficulty of the transition to freedom, and the many disappointments experienced by the freedmen’s aid workers. Secondly, if the Negro found the transition to freedom as easy as Linda Slaughter and others represented it, slavery could not have been such a bad institution after all—but most abolitionists who went South agreed privately that slavery was even worse than they had suspected. Thirdly, these optimistic and exaggerated reports of progress could only build up such high expectations that disillusionment would be inevitable when the real facts of the freedmen’s character, abilities, and status became known.

Many teachers of the freedmen warned against rosy distortion of the condition of affairs in the South. A Massachusetts abolitionist teaching in an A.M.A. school at Norfolk wrote in 1863 that on the whole the Negroes were behaving well in freedom. But “some injudicious letter-writers from the South would make them out better than other men and women, almost angelic…. This is as unjust and foolish as to go to the other extreme, like the New York Herald. They are human, and then, from their births, outraged and wronged, their ideas of morals are very vague and few. How could they be otherwise? … Some are honest, some are not. Some are stupid and dull, some brilliant and learn quick. … Well, I think it was just so, up in the Old Bay State … and, I presume, it is so still, and ever will be with ‘white folks’ children.”

Another A.M.A. teacher at Norfolk wrote in July 1863: “I have sometimes feared, when reading letters from friends of the negro, south, who naturally enough want to look upon the bright side of the slave’s character, that false impressions would be made regarding the capabilities of the negroes…. We must stand face to face with stern and revolting facts. The contrabands are low and degraded, but is it their reproach? They are unfit for freedom, but are they any more fit for oppression, or will longer servitude ever better prepare them to receive the glorious heritage of liberty? They are what the accursed system of slavery has made them.”43

An abolitionist friend of Garrison, serving as a Union army chaplain at New Bern, North Carolina, wrote a letter to the Liberator asserting that the condition of some of the freedmen was appalling, their morals low, their minds ignorant. “But when we think of the circumstances under which they have been raised, we cannot wonder at their condition. Herded and worked like cattle, … kept in total ignorance, governed through their fears, bought and sold, beaten and bruised at will,—no wonder that they are unloving, suspicious, treacherous, impure, passionate, degraded.” Abolitionists and all friends of the freedmen should confront these realities with a clear eye. “There must be nothing sentimental or romantic. They, the freedmen, are not angels, they are not even civilized men…. We must begin at the root. We must deal with them as children in intellect, but men in instincts and passions…. It is useless, it is folly to disguise the difficulties, or to throw a false halo of romance about the negro. It is the highest proof of a genuine sympathy and interest, to admit all the disagreeable features of the work, to realize all the difficulties, and still to go on.”44

William Channing Gannett was one of the most thoughtful and objective participants in the Port Royal experiment. Not yet twenty-two years old when he arrived on the sea islands in the spring of 1862, Gannett was the son of one of New England’s foremost Unitarian ministers. While attending Harvard he had become an abolitionist and an admirer of Wendell Phillips. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1860, and joined the first shipload of Gideonites to Port Royal in March 1862. Gannett stayed on the islands until 1865. After the war he became a prominent Unitarian clergyman and a leader in the Social Gospel movement.⁴⁵

Gannett was a penetrating and lucid thinker. During the war he commented frequently on the progress of the Port Royal experiment. Taken together, his observations constitute a remarkably objective and valuable analysis of the experiment by a participant in it. Gannett considered the experiment a success. “I feel no doubt,” he wrote in 1863, “that under conditions of peace, three years would find these people, with but very few exceptions, a self-respecting, self-supporting population.” Their behavior had suggested the capacity and power of development. “Their principal vices—dishonesty, indolence, unchastity, their dislike of responsibility, and unmanly willingness to be dependent on others for what their own effort might bring,—their want of forethought and inability to organize and combine operations for mutual benefit … can be traced naturally and directly to slavery.”⁴⁶

In 1865 Gannett concluded his tour of duty among the freedmen. He published an important article on the freedmen in the North American Review of July 1865; and in the fall of the year he visited England, lecturing frequently to eager British audiences on his experiences at Port Royal. In his article and lectures Gannett constantly reiterated that “the real wrong in slavery did not affect the body, but it was a curse to the soul and mind of the slave. The aim of the master was to keep down every principle of manhood and growth.”47 As a result the slave became childlike and dependent. “In slavery, not only are natural rights denied, but, what is quite as injurious, necessary wants are supplied; everything contributes to the repression of faculty. The slaveholder’s institution is a nursery for perpetuating infancy.”⁴⁸

In mental ability, said Gannett, the Negroes showed surprising quickness in the faculties of perception and intuition, but were slow in constructive reasoning. This was a defect of training, not of innate capacity. “They have capacity, but lack ability,—the term properly applicable to the mind which by discipline has control of its powers. That the faculty exists dormantly and awaits its training is indicated by the fact that in many individuals it is already partially developed.”⁴⁹

Slavery had also dulled the Negro’s sense of conjugal fidelity. Sexual promiscuity was encouraged by the example and regulations of the master race. “On the Sea Islands the plantation is a rare exception on which the white family has not contributed to populate the negro houses.” There were no proper marriages among slaves; husbands or wives could be sold away from each other, or from their children. “Thus all the props which society usually affords to chastity are changed under slavery into stumbling-blocks.”⁵⁰ In reply to the charge of dishonesty and mendacity commonly leveled against the Negro race, Gannett pointed out that the slave had virtually no protection under law, so he lied to protect himself from abuse and punishment. A piece of property himself, he could have little appreciation of the sanctity of the rest of his master’s property. “Laziness, dishonesty, and licentiousness,” wrote Gannett, “are the very habits which it is impossible, even in conception, to dissociate from slavery.”⁵¹

Gannett presented a cautiously optimistic view of the future. “If a people were really unfit for freedom,” he declared, “it seems likely that emancipation would render them not only paupers, but a race of beggars.” Nothing of the kind had occurred at Port Royal. But the road to freedom would not be smooth. “Not only do their old habits cling to the freedmen as they rise, but their ignorance will betray them into new and perilous mistakes. We look for slow progress and much disappointment…. For a time discouragement and failure await the eager restorer.” But Gannett concluded that these disappointments and setbacks should never dissuade America from her goal of equal rights and opportunities, under law, for all men.52

1 Phillips was quoted in Liberator, July 12, 1861; Goodell in Principia, Oct. 23, 1862; and Whittier in Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its Third Decade Anniversary (New York, 1864), 7.

2 The most important wartime writings by abolitionists on emancipation in the West Indies were: Lydia Maria Child, The Right Way the Safe Way (1st ed., New York, 1860; 2nd ed., 1862); Lewis Tappan, Immediate Emancipation: The Only Wise and Safe Mode (New York, 1861); a series of articles by Richard J. Hinton in The Pine and Palm, June 15, 22, 29, July 6, 13, Aug. 10, Sept. 14, 1861; a series of articles by Frank Sanborn in the Springfield Republican, Nov. 13, 16, 23, Dec. 7, 1861, Jan. 18, 25, Feb. 1, 8, 1862; Frank Sanborn, Emancipation in the West Indies, a pamphlet published by the Emancipation League in Boston in March 1862; a series of articles by Sanborn in the Commonwealth, Oct. 25, Nov. 8, 22, Dec. 13, 20, 1862, Jan. 10, 1863; and Mary Louise Booth, translation of Augustin Cochin’s Results of Emancipation and of the same author’s Results of Slavery (both books published in Boston, 1863).

3 Purvis to Samuel C. Pomeroy, Aug. 28, 1862, published in the New York Tribune, Sept. 20, 1862.

4 N.A.S. Standard, Mar. 19, 1864. There are several studies of wartime colonization projects. The best of these are: Warren A. Beck, “Lincoln and Negro Colonization in Central America,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, VI (Sept. 1950), 162-83; Willis D. Boyd, “Negro Colonization in the National Crisis, 1860-1870,” Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1953; Paul J. Scheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” Journal of Negro History, XXXVI (1952), 418-53.

5 Edward L. Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship, Addresses and Papers, ed. by A. W. Stevens (Boston, 1896), 4-5, 19; Edward L. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly, VIII (Nov. 1861), 632-36.

6 Pierce, “Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” op.cit., 635-40.

7 Augustus F. Beard, A Crusade of Brotherhood, A History of the American Missionary Association (Boston, 1909), 117-18; Richard B. Drake, “The American Missionary Association and the Southern Negro, 1861-1888,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1957, 1-31; S. S. Jocelyn to Gerrit Smith, June 17, 1861, Smith Papers, SU; Lewis Tappan to Charles Sumner, Jan. 16, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU; L. C. Lockwood to George Cheever, Jan. 29, 1862, Cheever Papers, AAS; Gerrit Smith to Lewis Tappan, Nov. 23, 1862, Tappan Papers, LC.

8 N.A.S. Standard, Nov. 23, 1861.

9 Willie L. Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1962, 19-32.

10 Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship, 77, 82-85.

11 ibid., 90-91.

12 Boston Transcript, Jan. 27, 1862.

13 Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship, 67-68; Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 36-45; Liberator, Mar. 7, 1862.

14 N.A.S. Standard, May 3, 1862.

15 N.A.S. Standard, Feb. 15, 1862; Stebbins to Garrison, May 20, 1862, in Liberator, May 30. See also N.A.S. Standard, May 3, 1862, and Liberator, May 16, 1862.

16 McKim to Samuel May, Jr., May 20, 1862, McKim Papers, Cornell.

17 Rupert S. Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-84 (Cambridge, Mass., 1912), 8; Sarah Pugh to Mary Edmundson, Aug. 5, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

18 Ray Allen Billington, ed., The Journal of Charlotte Forten (Collier Books, New York, 1961), 165; Tomlinson to J. M. McKim, Sept. 20, Oct. 17, 1862, Jan. 16, 1863, McKim Papers, Cornell. See also Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 54-66; William H. Pease, “Three Years Among the Freedmen: William C. Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment,” Journal of Negro History, XLII (April 1957), 98-117; Sarah Pugh to Elizabeth Gay, Apr. 6, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; Frank Sanborn to Gerrit Smith, Apr. 13, 1862, Smith Papers, SU; Maria W. Chapman to Anne G. Chapman, July 6, 1862, Weston Papers, BPL; T. W. Higginson to Louisa Higginson, Oct. 24, 1863, Higginson Papers, HU.

19 Harriet Ware to ?, Apr. 21, 1862, in Elizabeth Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal (Boston, 1906), 20-21; Holland, Letters and Diary of Laura Towne, 7; Billington, Journal of Charlotte Forten, 142.

20 Holland, Letters and Diary of Laura Towne, xiv-xv

21 ibid., 68.

22 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 300-03; Pease, “Three Years Among the Freedmen,” op.cit., 100-01; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 11, 18, 60, 75; Pierce to Sumner, Mar. 20, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU.

23 New York Express, quoted in N.A.S. Standard, Apr. 5, 1862; New York Journal of Commerce, quoted in Liberator, May 9, 1862; Louisville Democrat, quoted in the Columbus Crisis, Dec. 31, 1862.

24 Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship, 97-102. Pierce’s report was widely publicized by the antislavery press.

25 McKim to Sarah McKim, June 19, 1862, McKim Papers, NYPL. See also Oliver Johnson to Garrison, June 27, 1862, McKim to Garrison, July 13, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL.

26 J. M. McKim, The Freedmen of South Carolina: an Addreses Delivered in Sansom Hall, July 9, 1862 (Philadelphia, 1862), 18, 30, and passim.

27 Ware and Philbrick quoted in Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 98-99, 180.

28 Forbes to Charles Sumner, June 21, 1862, in Sarah Forbes Hughes, ed., Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes (2 vols., Boston, 1899), I, 317-18.

29 L. M. Child to Francis G. Shaw, Jan. 28, 1862, Shaw Correspondence, NYPL; Phillips’ statement quoted in Liberator, May 16, 1862.

30 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 205-06.

31 Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 25.

32 Tomlinson to J. M. McKim, Feb. 19, Mar. 16, 1863, McKim Papers, Cornell.

33 Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 33-34; Francis George Shaw to S. P. Chase, Jan. 13, 1864, Chase Papers, LC.

34 Beard, Crusade of Brotherhood, passim; Julius H. Parmelee, “Freedmen’s Aid Societies, 1861-1871,” in Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States; U.S. Dept. of Interior: Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1916, no. 38 (Washington, 1917), 269-80.

35 Henry Lee Swint, The Northern Teacher in the South, 1862-1870 (Nashville, 1941), 26-28.

36 George E. Baker to Gerrit Smith, July 25, 1864, Smith Papers, SU; Joseph W. Parker, “Memoirs,” typescript of MS written by Parker in 1880, supplied to the author by Parker’s granddaughter, Mrs. Perce J. Bentley, pp. 105-28; Richard J. Hinton to Charles Sumner, Feb. 27, 1862, enclosing circular of the Kansas Emancipation League, Sumner Papers, HU.

37 Samuel J. May to Garrison, Sept. 9, 24, 1862, Garrison Papers, BPL; Thirteenth Annual Report of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (Rochester, 1864); Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati, 1880), 619-50.

38 F. D. Gage to S. P. Chase, Mar. 4, 1863, Chase Papers, LC; F. D. Gage to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nov. 20, 1863, Gage Papers, Radcliffe Women’s Archives; Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., New York, 1881-1922), II, 26-39.

39 Sarah Hopper Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons (2 vols., New York, 1896-97), I, 248, 296-395, II, 1-42, 70-101, 108-32. The letter to Mrs. Gibbons is quoted from ibid., II, 39.

40 Parmelee, “Freedmen’s Aid Societies,” op. cit., 273, 277, 284; Nineteenth Annual Report of the American Missionary Association (New York, 1865), 18-29; Philadelphia Ledger, Aug. 10, 1865.

41 Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly, XII (Sept. 1863), 302-15; Charlotte Forten, “Life in the Sea Islands,” Atlantic Monthly, XIII (May 1864), 587-96, and (June 1864), 666-76; Mansfield French to S. H. Gay, Oct. 14, 21, 23, 1862, Gay Papers, CU; Frances D. Gage to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nov. 20, 1863, Gage Papers, Radcliffe Women’s Archives; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 12, 1863, Mar. 26, 1864.

42 Linda Slaughter, The Freedmen of the South (Cincinnati, 1869), 177, 179.

43 The two letters were published in the Principia, June 25 and July 23, 1863.

44 Liberator, Apr. 3, 1863.

45 William H. Pease, “William Channing Gannett, A Social Biography,” Ph.D. dissertation, U. of Rochester, 1955, passim.

46 Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 177-79.

47 Clipping from Bristol Post (England), Oct. 23, 1865, in the Gannett Papers, BU.

48 [William C. Gannett], “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” North American Review, CI (July 1865), 1.

49 ibid., 2-3.

50 ibid., 13.

51 ibid., 11-13.

52 ibid., 25-28.