CHAPTER IX.. Church and School

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.