Church and School
Reconstruction in the State was closely related to reconstruction in the
churches and the schools. Here also were to be found the same hostile
elements: negro and white, Unionist and Confederate, victor and
vanquished. The church was at that time an important institution in the
South, more so than in the North, and in both sections more important
than it is today. It was inevitable, therefore, that ecclesiastical
reconstruction should give rise to bitter feelings.
Something should be said of conditions in the churches when the Federal
armies occupied the land. The Southern organizations had lost many
ministers and many of their members, and frequently their buildings were
used as hospitals or had been destroyed. Their administration was
disorganized and their treasuries were empty. The Unionists, scattered
here and there but numerous in the mountain districts, no longer wished
to attend the Southern churches.
The military censorship in church matters, which continued for a year in
some districts, was irritating, especially in the Border States and in
the Union districts where Northern preachers installed by the army were
endeavoring to remain against the will of the people. Mobs sometimes
drove them out; others were left to preach to empty houses or to a few
Unionists and officers, while the congregation withdrew to build a new
church. The problems of negro membership in the white churches and of
the future relations of the Northern and Southern denominations were
pressing for settlement.
All Northern organizations acted in 1865 upon the assumption that a
reunion of the churches must take place and that the divisions existing
before the war should not be continued, since slavery, the cause of the
division, had been destroyed. But they insisted that the reunion must
take place upon terms named by the "loyal" churches, that the negroes
must also come under "loyal" religious direction, and that tests must be
applied to the Confederate sinners asking for admission, in order that
the enormity of their crimes should be made plain to them. But this
policy did not succeed. The Confederates objected to being treated as
"rebels and traitors" and to "sitting upon stools of repentance" before
they should be received again into the fold.
Only two denominations were reunited--the Methodist Protestant, the
northern section of which came over to the southern, and the Protestant
Episcopal, in which moderate counsels prevailed and into which
Southerners were welcomed back. The Southern Baptists maintained their
separate existence and reorganized the Southern Baptist Convention, to
which came many of the Baptist associations in the Border States; the
Catholics did not divide before 1861 and therefore had no reconstruction
problems to solve; and the smaller denominations maintained the
organizations which they had before 1861. A Unionist preacher testified
before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that even the Southern
Quakers "are about as decided in regard to the respectability of
secession as any other class of people."
Two other great Southern churches, the Presbyterian and the Methodist
Episcopal, grew stronger after the Civil War. The tendency toward
reunion of the Presbyterians was checked when one Northern branch
declared as "a condition precedent to the admission of southern
applicants that these confess as sinful all opinions before held in
regard to slavery, nullification, rebellion and slavery, and stigmatize
secession as a crime and the withdrawal of the southern churches as a
schism." Another Northern group declared that Southern ministers must be
placed on probation and must either prove their loyalty or profess
repentance for disloyalty and repudiate their former opinions. As a
result several Presbyterian bodies in the South joined in a strong
union, to which also adhered the synods of several Border States.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was confronted with conditions
similar to those which prevented the reunion of the Presbyterians. The
Northern church, according to the declaration of its authorities, also
came down to divide the spoils and to "disintegrate and absorb" the
"schismatic" Southern churches. Already many Southern pulpits were
filled with Northern Methodist ministers placed there under military
protection; and when they finally realized that reunion was not
possible, these Methodist worthies resolved to occupy the late
Confederacy as a mission field and to organize congregations of blacks
and whites who were "not tainted with treason." Bishops and clergymen
charged with this work carried it on vigorously for a few years in close
connection with political reconstruction.
The activities of the Northern Methodists stimulated the Southern
Methodists to a quick reorganization. The surviving bishops met in
August, 1865, and bound together their shaken church. In reply to
suggestions of reunion they asserted that the Northern Methodists had
become "incurably radical," were too much involved in politics, and,
further, that they had, without right, seized and were still holding
Southern church buildings. They objected also to the way the Northern
church referred to the Southerners as "schismatics" and to the Southern
church as one built on slavery and therefore, now that slavery was gone,
to be reconstructed. The bishops warned their people against the
missionary efforts of the Northern brethren and against the attempts to
"disintegrate and absorb" Methodism in the South. Within five years
after the war the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was greatly
increased in numbers by the accession of conferences in Maryland,
Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, and even from above the Ohio, while the
Northern Methodist Church was able to organize only a few white
congregations outside of the stronger Unionist districts, but continued
to labor in the South as a missionary field. ¹
¹ The church situation after the war was well described in 1866 by an
editorial writer in the Nation who pointed out that the Northern
churches thought the South determined to make the religious division
permanent, though "slavery no longer furnishes a pretext for
separation." "Too much pains were taken to bring about an ecclesiastical
reunion, and irritating offers of reconciliation are made by the
Northern churches, all based on the assumption that the South has not
only sinned, but sinned knowingly, in slavery and in war. We expect them
to be penitent and to gladly accept our offers of forgiveness. But the
Southern people look upon a 'loyal' missionary as a political emissary,
and 'loyal' men do not at present possess the necessary qualifications
for evangelizing the Southerners or softening their hearts, and are sure
not to succeed in doing so. We look upon their defeat as retribution and
expect them to do the same. It will do no good if we tell the Southerner
that 'we will forgive them if they will confess that they are criminals,
offer to pray with them, preach with them, and labor with them over
their hideous sins.'"
But if the large Southern churches held their white membership and even
gained in numbers and territory, they fought a losing fight to retain
their black members. It was assumed by Northern ecclesiastics that
whether a reunion of whites took place or not, the negroes would receive
spiritual guidance from the North. This was necessary, they said,
because the Southern whites were ignorant and impoverished and because
"the state of mind among even the best classes of Southern whites
rendered them incapable ... of doing justice to the people whom they had
so long persistently wronged." Further, it was also necessary for
political reasons to remove the negroes from Southern religious control.
For obvious reasons, however, the Southern churches wanted to hold their
negro members. They declared themselves in favor of negro education and
of better organized religious work among the blacks, and made every sort
of accommodation to hold them. The Baptists organized separate
congregations, with white or black pastors as desired, and associations
of black churches. In 1866 the Methodist General Conference authorized
separate congregations, quarterly conferences, annual conferences, even
a separate jurisdiction, with negro preachers, presiding elders, and
bishops--but all to no avail. Every Northern political, religious, or
ilitary agency in the South worked for separation, and negro preachers
were not long in seeing the greater advantages which they would have in
independent churches.
Much of the separate organization was accomplished in mutual good will,
particularly in the Baptist ranks. The Reverend I. T. Tichenor, a
prominent Baptist minister, has described the process as it took place
in the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. The church had nine hundred
members, of whom six hundred were black. The negroes received a regular
organization of their own under the supervision of the white pastors.
When a separation of the two bodies was later deemed desirable, it was
inaugurated by a conference of the negroes which passed a resolution
couched in the kindliest terms, suggesting the wisdom of the division,
and asking the concurrence of the white church in such action. The white
church cordially approved the movement, and the two bodies united in
erecting a suitable house of worship for the negroes. Until the new
church was completed, both congregations continued to occupy jointly the
old house of worship. The new house was paid for in large measure by the
white members of the church and by individuals in the community. As soon
as it was completed the colored church moved into it with its pastor,
board of deacons, committees of all sorts, and the whole machinery of
church life went into action without a jar. Similar accommodations
occurred in all the States of the South.
The Methodists lost the greater part of their negro membership to two
organizations which came down from the North in 1865--the African
Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
Zion. Large numbers also went over to the Northern Methodist Church.
After losing nearly three hundred thousand members, the Southern
Methodists came to the conclusion that the remaining seventy-eight
thousand negroes would be more comfortable in a separate organization
and therefore began in 1866 the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, with
bishops, conferences, and all the accompaniments of the parent Methodist
Church, which continued to give friendly aid but exercised no control.
For many years the Colored Methodist Church was under fire from the
other negro denominations, who called it the "rebel," the "Democratic,"
the "old slavery" church.
The negro members of the Cumberland Presbyterians were similarly set off
into a small African organization. The Southern Presbyterians and the
Episcopalians established separate congregations and missions under
white supervision but sanctioned no independent negro organization.
Consequently the negroes soon deserted these churches and went with
their own kind.
Resentment at the methods employed by the Northern religious
carpetbaggers was strong among the Southern whites. "Emissaries of
Christ and the radical party" they were called by one Alabama leader.
Governor Lindsay of the same State asserted that the Northern
missionaries caused race hatred by teaching the negroes to regard the
whites as their natural enemies, who, if possible, would put them back
in slavery. Others were charged with teaching that to be on the safe
side, the blacks should get into a Northern church, and that "Christ
died for negroes and Yankees, not for rebels."
The scalawags, also, developed a dislike of the Northern church work
among the negroes and it was impossible to organize mixed congregations.
Of the Reverend A. S. Lakin, a well-known agent of the Northern
Methodist Church in Alabama, Nicholas Davis, a North Alabama Unionist
and scalawag, said to the Ku Klux Committee: "The character of his
[Lakin's] speech was this: to teach the negroes that every man that was
born and raised in the Southern country was their enemy, that there was
no use trusting them, no matter what they said--if they said they were
for the Union or anything else. 'No use talking, they are your enemies.'
And he made a pretty good speech, too; awful; a hell of a one; ...
inflammatory and game, too.... It was enough to provoke the devil. Did
all the mischief he could ... I tell you, that old fellow is a hell of
an old rascal."
For a time the white churches were annoyed by intrusions of strange
blacks set on by those who were bent on separating the races. Frequently
there were feuds in white or black congregations over the question of
joining some Northern body. Disputes over church property also arose and
continued for years. Lakin, referred to above, was charged with
"stealing" negro congregations and uniting them with the Cincinnati
Conference without their knowledge. The negroes were urged to demand
title to all buildings formerly used for negro worship, and the
Constitutional Convention of Alabama in 1867 directed that such property
must be turned over to them when claimed.
The agents of the Northern churches were not greatly different from
other carpetbaggers and adventurers taking advantage of the general
confusion to seize a little power. Many were unscrupulous; others,
sincere and honest but narrow, bigoted, and intolerant, filled with
distrust of the Southern whites and with corresponding confidence in the
blacks and in themselves. The missionary and church publications were
quite as severe on the Southern people as any radical Congressman. The
publications of the Freedmen's Aid Society furnish illustrations of the
feelings and views of those engaged in the Southern work. They in turn
were made to feel the effects of a merciless social proscription. For
this some of them cared not at all, while others or their families felt
it keenly. One woman missionary wrote that she was delighted when a
Southern white would speak to her. A preacher in Virginia declared that
"the females, those especially whose pride has been humbled, are more
intense in their bitterness and endeavor to keep up a social ostracism
against Union and Northern people." The Ku Klux raids were directed
against preachers and congregations whose conduct was disagreeable to
the whites. Lakin asserted that while he was conducting a great revival
meeting among the hills of northern Alabama, Governor Smith and other
prominent and sinful scalawag politicians were there "under conviction"
and about to become converted. But in came the Klan and the congregation
scattered. Smith and the others were so angry and frightened that their
good feelings were dissipated, and the devil reëntered them, so that
Lakin said he was never able to "get a hold on them" again. For the
souls lost that night he held the Klan responsible. Lakin told several
marvelous stories of his hairbreadth escapes from death by assassination
which, if true, would be enough to ruin the reputation of northern
Alabama men for marksmanship.
The reconstruction ended with conditions in the churches similar to
those in politics: the races were separated and unfriendly; Northern and
Southern church organizations were divided; and between them, especially
in the border and mountain districts, there existed factional quarrels
of a political origin, for every Northern Methodist was a Republican and
every Southern Methodist was a Democrat.
The schools of the South, like the churches and political institutions,
were thrown into the melting pot of reconstruction. The spirit in which
the work was begun may be judged from the tone of the addresses made at
a meeting of the National Teachers Association in 1865. The president,
S. S. Greene, declared that "the old slave States are to be the new
missionary ground for the national school teacher." Francis Wayland, the
former president of Brown University, remarked that "it has been a war
of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism." President
Hill of Harvard spoke of the "new work of spreading knowledge and
intellectual culture over the regions that sat in darkness." Other
speakers asserted that the leading Southern whites were as much opposed
to free schools as to free governments and "we must treat them as
western farmers do the stumps in their clearings, work around them and
let them rot out"; that the majority of the whites were more ignorant
than the slaves; and that the negro must be educated and strengthened
against "the wiles, the guile, and hate of his baffled masters and their
minions." The New England Freedmen's Aid Society considered it necessary
to educate the negro "as a counteracting influence against the evil
councils and designs of the white freemen."
The tasks that confronted the Southern States in 1865-67 were two:
first, to restore the shattered school systems of the whites; and
second, to arrange for the education of the negroes. Education of the
negro slave had been looked upon as dangerous and had been generally
forbidden. A small number of negroes could read and write, but there
were at the close of the war no schools for the children. Before 1861
each State had developed at least the outlines of a school system.
Though hindered in development by the sparseness of the population and
by the prevalence in some districts of the Virginia doctrine that free
schools were only for the poor, public schools were nevertheless in
existence in 1861. Academies and colleges, however, were thronged with
students. When the war ended, the public schools were disorganized, and
the private academies and the colleges were closed. Teachers and
students had been dispersed; buildings had been burned or used for
hospitals and laboratories; and public libraries had virtually
disappeared.
The colleges made efforts to open in the fall of 1865. Only one student
presented himself at the University of Alabama for matriculation; but
before June, 1866, the stronger colleges were again in operation. The
public or semi-public schools for the whites also opened in the fall. In
the cities where Federal military authorities had brought about the
employment of Northern teachers, there was some friction. In New
Orleans, for example, the teachers required the children to sing
Northern songs and patriotic airs. When the Confederates were restored
to power these teachers were dismissed.
The movement toward negro education was general throughout the South.
Among the blacks themselves there was an intense desire to learn. They
wished to read the Bible, to be preachers, to be as the old master and
not have to work. Day and night and Sunday they crowded the schools.
According to an observer, ¹ "not only are individuals seen at study, and
under the most untoward circumstances, but in very many places I have
found what I will call 'native schools,' often rude and very imperfect,
but there they are, a group, perhaps, of all ages, trying to learn. Some
young man, some woman, or old preacher, in cellar, or shed, or corner of
a negro meeting-house, with the alphabet in hand, or a town
spelling-book, is their teacher. All are full of enthusiasm with the new
knowledge the book is imparting to them."
¹ J. W. Alvord, Superintendent of Schools for the Freedmen's Bureau,
1866.
Not only did the negroes want schooling, but both the North and the
South proposed to give it to them. Neither side was actuated entirely by
altruistic motives. A Hampton Institute teacher in later days remarked:
"When the combat was over and the Yankee school-ma'ams followed in the
train of the northern armies, the business of educating the negroes was
a continuation of hostilities against the vanquished and was so regarded
to a considerable extent on both sides."
The Southern churches, through their bishops and clergy, the newspapers,
and prominent individuals such as J. L. M. Curry, John B. Gordon, J. L.
Orr, Governors Brown, Moore, and Patton, came out in favor of negro
education. Of this movement General Swayne said: "Quite early ... the
several religious denominations took strong ground in favor of the
education of the freedmen. The principal argument was an appeal to
sectional and sectarian prejudice, lest, the work being inevitable, the
influence which must come from it be realized by others; but it is
believed that this was but the shield and weapon which men of unselfish
principle found necessary at first." The newspapers took the attitude
that the Southern whites should teach the negroes because it was their
duty, because it was good policy, and because if they did not do so some
one else would. The Advertiser of Montgomery stated that education was a
danger in slavery times but that under freedom ignorance became a
danger. For a time there were numerous schools taught by crippled
Confederates and by Southern women.
But the education of the negro, like his religious training, was taken
from the control of the Southern white and was placed under the
direction of the Northern teachers and missionaries who swarmed into the
country under the fostering care of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Northern
churches, and the various Freedmen's Aid Societies. In three years the
Bureau spent six million dollars on negro schools and everywhere it
exercised supervision over them. The teachers pursued a policy akin to
that of the religious leaders. One Southerner likened them to the
"plagues of Egypt," another described them as "saints, fools,
incendiaries, fakirs, and plain business men and women." A Southern
woman remarked that "their spirit was often high and noble so far as the
black man's elevation was concerned, but toward the white it was bitter,
judicial, and unrelenting." The Northern teachers were charged with
ignorance of social conditions, with fraternizing with the blacks, and
with teaching them that the Southerners were traitors, "murderers of
Lincoln," who had been cruel taskmasters and who now wanted to restore
servitude.
The reaction against negro education, which began to show itself before
reconstruction was inaugurated, found expression in the view of most
whites that "schooling ruins a negro." A more intelligent opinion was
that of J. L. M. Curry, a lifelong advocate of negro education:
It is not just to condemn the negro for the education which he received
in the early years after the war. That was the period of reconstruction,
the saturnalia of misgovernment, the greatest possible hindrance to the
progress of the freedmen.... The education was unsettling, demoralizing,
[and it] pandered to a wild frenzy for schooling as a quick method of
reversing social and political conditions. Nothing could have been
better devised for deluding the poor negro and making him the tool, the
slave of corrupt taskmasters. Education is a natural consequence of
citizenship and enfranchisement ... of freedom and humanity. But with
deliberate purpose to subject the Southern States to negro domination,
and secure the States permanently for partisan ends, the education
adopted was contrary to common-sense, to human experience, to all noble
purposes. The curriculum was for a people in the highest degree of
civilization; the aptitude and capabilities and needs of the negro were
wholly disregarded. Especial stress was laid on classics and liberal
culture to bring the race per saltum to the same plane with their former
masters, and realize the theory of social and political equality. A race
more highly civilized, with best heredities and environments, could not
have been coddled with more disregard of all the teachings of human
history and the necessities of the race. Colleges and universities,
established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches
and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant,
fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief.
It is irrational, cruel, to hold the negro, under such strange
conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education,
unwise teachers, reconstruction villainies, and partisan schemes. ¹
¹ Quoted in Proceedings of the Montgomery Conference on Race Problems
(1900), p. 128.
Education was to be looked upon as a handmaid to a thorough
reconstruction, and its general character and aim were determined by the
Northern teachers. Each convention framed a more or less complicated
school system and undertook to provide for its support. The negroes in
the conventions were anxious for free schools; the conservatives were
willing; but the carpetbaggers and a few mulatto leaders insisted in
several States upon mixed schools. Only in Louisiana and South Carolina
did the constitutions actually forbid separate schools; in Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas the question was left open, to the
embarrassment of the whites. Generally the blacks showed no desire for
mixed schools unless urged to it by the carpetbaggers. In the South
Carolina convention a mulatto thus argued in favor of mixed schools:
"The gentleman from Newberry said he was afraid we were taking a wrong
course to remove these prejudices. The most natural method to effect
this object would be to allow children when five or six years of age to
mingle in schools together and associate generally. Under such training,
prejudice must eventually die out; but if we postpone it until they
become men and women, prejudice will be so established that no mortal
can obliterate it. This, I think, is a sufficient reply to the argument
of the gentleman."
The state systems were top-heavy with administrative machinery and were
officered by incompetent and corrupt officials. Such men as Cloud in
Alabama, Cardozo in Mississippi, Conway in Louisiana, and Jillson in
South Carolina are fair samples of them. Much of the personnel was taken
over from the Bureau teaching force. The school officials were no better
than the other officeholders.
The first result of the attempt to use the schools as an instrument of
reconstruction ended in the ruin of several state universities. The
faculties of the Universities of North Carolina, Mississippi, and
Alabama were made radical and the institutions thereupon declined to
nothing. The negroes, unable to control the faculty of the University of
South Carolina, forced negro students in and thus got possession. In
Louisiana the radical Legislature cut off all funds because the
university would not admit negroes. The establishment of the land grant
colleges was an occasion for corruption and embezzlement.
The common schools were used for radical ends. The funds set aside for
them by the state constitutions or appropriated by the legislatures for
these schools seldom reached their destination without being lessened by
embezzlement or by plain stealing. Frequently the auditor, or the
treasurer, or even the Legislature diverted the school funds to other
purposes. Suffice it to say that all of the reconstruction systems broke
down financially after a brief existence.
The mixed school provisions in Louisiana and South Carolina and the
uncertainty of the educational situation in other States caused white
children to stay away from the public schools. For several years the
negroes were better provided than the whites, having for themselves both
all the public schools and also those supported by private benevolence.
In Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina the whites could get no
money for schoolhouses, while large sums were spent on negro schools.
The Peabody Board, then recently inaugurated, ¹ refused to coöperate
with school officials in the mixed school States and, when criticized,
replied: "It is well known that we are helping the white children of
Louisiana as being the more destitute from the fact of their
unwillingness to attend mixed schools."
¹ To administer the fund bequeathed by George Peabody of Massachusetts
to promote education in the Southern States. See The New South, by
Holland Thompson (in The Chronicles of America).
As was to be expected the whites criticized the attitude of the school
officials, disapproved of the attempts made in the schools to teach the
children radical ideas, and objected to the contents of the history
texts and the "Freedmen's Readers." A white school board in Mississippi,
by advertising for a Democratic teacher for a negro school, drew the
fire of a radical editor who inquired: "What is the motive by which this
call for a 'competent Democratic teacher' is prompted? The most damning
that has ever moved the heart of man. It is to use the vote and action
of a human being as a means by which to enslave him. The treachery and
villainy of these rebels stands without parallel in the history of men."
A negro politician has left this account of a radical recitation in a
Florida negro school:
After finishing the arithmetic lesson they must next go through the
catechism:
"Who is the 'Publican Government of the State of Florida?" Answer:
"Governor Starns."
"Who made him Governor?" Answer: "The colored people."
"Who is trying to get him out of his seat?" Answer: "The Democrats,
Conover, and some white and black Liberal Republicans."
"What should the colored people do with the men who is trying to get
Governor Starns out of his seat?" Answer: "They should kill them." ...
This was done that the patrons, some of whom could not read, would be
impressed by the expressions of their children, and would be ready to
put any one to death who would come out into the country and say
anything against Governor Starns.
The native white teachers soon dropped out of negro schools, and those
from the North met with the same social persecution as the white church
workers. The White League and Ku Klux Klan drove off obnoxious teachers,
whipped some, burned negro schoolhouses, and in various other ways
manifested the reaction which was rousing the whites against negro
schools.
The several agencies working for negro education gave some training to
hundreds of thousands of blacks, but the whites asserted that, like the
church work, it was based on a wrong spirit and resulted in evil as well
as in good. Free schools failed in reconstruction because of the
dishonesty or incompetence of the authorities and because of the
unsettled race question. It was not until the turn of the century that
the white schools were again as good as they had been before 1861. After
the reconstruction native whites as teachers of negro schools were
impossible in most places. The hostile feelings of the whites resulted
and still result in a limitation of negro schools. The best thing for
negro schools that came out of reconstruction was Armstrong's Hampton
Institute program, which, however, was quite opposed to the spirit of
reconstruction education.