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“An Educated and Intelligent People Cannot be Enslaved”: The Struggle for Common Schools in Antebellum Spartanburg, South Carolina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Bruce W. Eelman
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Extract

As the political conflict over slavery's fate in the West intensified through the summer of 1849, Peter M. Wallace, editor of the Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, vowed that he was “utterly opposed now and forever to all political compromises” on the issue of slavery. Significantly, Wallace connected the success of such southern resistance to the improvement of South Carolina's free schools. The Carolina Spartan's columns, the editor explained, “will be open to the advocates of a more liberal but judicious appropriation of the public money” for common schooling because “an educated and intelligent people, cannot be enslaved.” Wallace was one of many antebellum Spartanburg leaders who linked schooling with southern nationalism and used slavery as a metaphor for dependence on northern institutions. In the process, these men espoused what historians often view as a very un-southern idea—liberal government support for public education—and contrasted it with an image central to the definition of southern white republicanism—the ignorant slave.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 250 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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