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Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ronald E. Butchart
Ronald E. Butchart*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Georgia, and immediate past president of the History of Education Society
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Extract

At the end of her spring term in 1862, Martha Hale Clary bade farewell to her classmates at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary one year before she was to graduate. She was a 24 year-old teacher, the daughter of a farming family from Conway, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Westfield State Normal School five years earlier. By the autumn of 1862, she was living in an abandoned plantation house in Beaufort, South Carolina, organizing a school for the Gullah people not many miles from Confederate lines, one of the earliest participants in the Sea Islands’ “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” For the next eleven years she taught scores of the islands’ freed slaves in Beaufort and Hilton Head, one of the hundreds of teachers sponsored by the venerable American Missionary Association (AMA). By the early 1870s, young former slaves had themselves gained sufficient education to become their people's elementary teachers, so in 1873 Martha Clary accepted a position with the Presbyterian Committee on Missions to the Freedmen to teach in its academy for black students in North Carolina, Scotia Seminary. She would remain there for another fourteen years, finally retiring to her native state in 1887 after twenty-five years of service to southern African Americans.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Martha Hale Clary file, Alumni Collection, College Archives, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter: Mount Holyoke Archives); Mount Holyoke College, One Hundred Year Biographical Directory of Mount Holyoke College, 1837–1937, Bulletin Series 30, No. 5. 713 (South Hadley, MA: Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, 1937), p. 110; American Missionary Association, Annual Reports of the American Missionary Association and the Proceedings at the Annual Meeting (New York: American Missionary Association, annual), reports for 1863–1873, various pages (hereafter AMA, Annual Reports); Presbyterian Church in the U.S., Annual Reports of the Presbyterian Committee on Missions for Freedmen (New York: Presbyterian Publishing Committee, annual), reports for 1874–1887, various pages. The full story of the transition from slavery to “one kind of freedom” on the Sea Islands is detailed in Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Vintage, 1964). Martha Clary never married; she died in 1913.Google Scholar

2 Quotation from note in Graduates and Formers Files, College Archives, Oberlin College (hereafter: Alumni files, Oberlin Archives); American Missionary 11 (April 1867): 75; American Missionary Association, American Missionary Association: Its Missionaries, Teachers, and History ([New York?]: AMA, 1869), p. 6; Freedmen's Friend 1 (April 1872): 1; Oberlin College, Seventy-Fifth Anniversary General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908 (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1909), p. 12; Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth': Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education 52 (Spring 1983): 147–48, 153; Lawson and Merrill, The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1984), p. 309. Louisa Alexander died in 1911 in Washington, D.C. Her older sister, Rachel Alexander, attended the Oberlin College from 1862 to 1864, and also taught briefly in the South.Google Scholar

3 Caroline Hale Merrick file, Mount Holyoke Archives; Mount Holyoke College, One Hundred Year Biographical Directory, p. 65; George W. Clower, ed., “Some Sidelights on Education in Georgia in the 1860s,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 37 (1953): 249.Google Scholar

4 Caroline, H. Merrick to Lydia Shattuck, 25 Oct 1862, Letters of Lydia Shattuck, No. 81, Alumnae File, Mount Holyoke Archives; AMA, Annual Reports, 1867–1870; Merrick to E. P. Smith, 8 August 1869, American Missionary Association Archives #93455, Amistad Archives, Tulane University (hereafter: AMA#); American Baptist Home Mission Society, Baptist Home Missions in North America; Including a Full Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Jubilee Meeting, and a Historical Sketch of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, Historical Tables, Etc. 1832–1882 (New York: Baptist Home Mission Rooms, 1883), p. 565; Jacqueline Jones, “Women Who Were More than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen's Teaching,” History of Education Quarterly, 19 (Spring 1979): 47–59. Caroline Merrick died in 1893 in El Paso, Texas.Google Scholar

5 Between 1861 and 1875, white males accounted for only one-fifth of the white freedmen's teachers. By contrast, black men made up half of the black teachers. See Ronald E. Butchart, “Perspectives on Gender, Race, Calling, and Commitment in Nineteenth-Century America: A Collective Biography of the Teachers of the Freedpeople, 1862–1875,” Vitae Scholastica 13 (Spring 1994): 15–32.Google Scholar

6 College, Oberlin 75th Anniversary General Catalogue, p. 555; AMA, Annual Reports, 1863–1864; unsigned note, dated 30 October [1862], AMA #86207; Oberlin Evangelist 4 [24] (3 Dec 1862): 195; 1850 census, New York State, Niagara County, Town of Hartland, from typescript copy of 1850 Federal Census, Niagara County, in Local History Collection, Onondaga County Library, no page, no identification number; Samuel L. Horst, Education for Manhood: The Education of Blacks in Virginia during the Civil War (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 116, 142. King was apparently never married; the cause of his death has not yet been ascertained.Google Scholar

7 Alumni files, Mount Holyoke Archives; quotation from The Second Letter of the Class of ‘63. October, 1866 (Northampton, MA: Printed by Metcalf & Company, 1866): 16–17; Mount Holyoke College, 100 Year Biographical Directory, p. 106; Northwestern Freedmen's Aid Commission, Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Northwestern Freedmen's Aid Commission (Chicago: James Barnet, 1865), p. 18; Freedmen's Record 2 (June 1866): 123; and 2 (November 1866): 203. We have not yet ascertained Etta Payne's birth year; she died in 1886 in Philadelphia.Google Scholar

8 Dickey, Sarah A. file, Mount Holyoke Archives; American Missionary 14 (June 1870): 127; Martha Huddleston Wilkins, “Education for Freedom: The Noble Experiment of Sarah A. Dickey and the Mount Hermon Seminary” (PhD. diss., University of Mississippi, 1985); Helen Griffith, Dauntless in Mississippi: The Life of Sarah A. Dickey, 1838–1904 (South Hadley, MA: Dinosaur Press, 1965).Google Scholar

9 Dickey, Sarah A. to “My Dear Classmates,” 4 March 1872, in Correspondence File, Dickey, Sarah A., Class of 1869, Alumnae files, Mount Holyoke Archives.Google Scholar

10 Wilkins, “Education for Freedom,“ pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

11 Alumni files, Oberlin College Archives; Oberlin College, 75th Anniversary Biographical Catalogue, p. 791; “Caroline F. Putnam,” New York Evening Post; 27 January 1917; Ronald E. Butchart, “Caroline F. Putnam,” in Maxine Seller, ed., Women Educators in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 389–96; Katherine Lydigsen Herbig, “Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam,” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1977); Samuel May Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.Google Scholar

12 The primary source data reported in this essay is drawn from the Freedmen's Teachers Project, a research effort by Butchart and Rolleri, that is tracking across space and time over 7400 teachers who taught between 1861 and 1875. The structure of the research is described more fully in Ronald E. Butchart, “Recruits to the ‘Army of Civilization': Gender, Race, Class, and the Freedmen's Teachers, 1862–1875,” Journal of Education, 172:3 (1990): 76–87. For a provisional exploration of some of the results of this research, see Butchart, “Perspectives on Gender, Race, Calling, and Commitment,” 15–32; and Butchart, “‘We Best Can Instruct Our Own People': New York African Americans in the Freedmen's Schools, 1861–1875,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 12 (January 1988): 27–49.Google Scholar

13 We know the highest level of education for hundreds more, but do not necessarily know what institution all attended. For example, we know of scores of the teachers who attended or graduated from a normal school or a normal course within a secondary school, but have not yet identified the institution.Google Scholar

14 Significantly, however, over one-quarter of the Oberlin teachers were African Americans, while black students never made up more than 5 percent of the Oberlin student body before the Civil War, and not more than 8 percent during Reconstruction; see W. E. Biggleston, “Oberlin College and the Negro Student, 1865–1940,” Journal of Negro History 56 (July 1971):198. Twenty-two black freedmen's teachers were graduates of Oberlin; 23 had attended but did not graduate; 33 had attended or completed Oberlin's academy. By comparison, 110 white freedmen's teachers had graduated from Oberlin, 60 had attended without graduating, and 53 had attended or completed the academy.Google Scholar

15 More precisely, 2.97 percent of all Mount Holyoke students who graduated between 1837 and 1860 taught in the freedmen's schools in the period covered by this study; at Oberlin, 1835–1860, 2.6 percent of those enrolled in a collegiate program, and 0.7 percent of those enrolled in the preparatory program, taught in the freedmen's schools. Of course, many of the teachers graduated after 1860. We have chosen that date for convenience in comparisons. If black Oberlin students were excluded, the proportion of teachers from each school would favor Mount Holyoke even more clearly. Statistics compiled from Mount Holyoke College, One Hundred Year Biographical Directory, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1837–1937 (South Hadley, MA: Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, 1937); Oberlin College, General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833 to 1908 (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1909); and Freedmen's Teacher Project data base.Google Scholar

16 We have, to date, checked the Freedmen's Teachers Project data-base against alumni registers for the colleges named above and twenty other colleges, universities, and theological schools, along with about a dozen normal schools and academies.Google Scholar

17 A very few white colleges did occasionally admit a particularly qualified black student prior to mid-century, notably Dartmouth, Antioch, Knox, Bowdoin, Brown, and Yale. Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1979), pp. 166–70; Meyer Weinbert, A Chance to Learn: The History of Race and Education in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 263–65.Google Scholar

18 See Fletcher, Juanita D. “Against the Consensus: Oberlin College and the Education of American Negroes, 1835–1865,“ (PhD. diss., American University, 1974), as well as sources cited below.Google Scholar

19 Porterfield, Amanda “A Sister to Oneida: The Missionary Community at Mount Holyoke,“ Communal Societies 16 (1996): 1–13; James Oliver Horton, “Black Education at Oberlin College: A Controversial Commitment,” Journal of Negro Education 54 (Fall 1985): 478; Lisa Natale Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters: Mount Holyoke's First Students, 1837–1849” (PhD. diss., Princeton University. 1988), p. 1.Google Scholar

20 Porterfield, Amanda Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. Chap. 2; David F. Allmendinger, Jr., “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 1837–1850,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979):27–46; Horton, “Black Education at Oberlin College,” 478.Google Scholar

21 I.e., while Oberlin did initially hope that its manual labor system would reduce costs (it did not), the college justified the system just as much on the grounds that it would keep students from becoming effete; drawing on faculty psychology, it also held that a manual labor system would maintain a healthy balance between intellectual, manual, and spiritual aspects of human life. Mary Lyon, on the other hand, had no interest in any potential financial rewards for her domestic system, nor did she expect the students to gain domestic skills from the tasks assigned (the work was fragmented and routinized to the point that no student was likely to gain a sense of the skill required for the overall task, anyway). She expected the system to teach efficiency and economy, generalized skills needed, she was certain, in the emerging industrial age, though she did not expect her students to put those skills to the direct service of industry. She also expected the system to separate those truly capable of service from the slothful: in her words, “it would form an important part of a moral sieve which would naturally bring into the school those very individuals who would best meet the views & designs of the benevolent founders of the institution—those, whether more or less wealthy, who were preparing to labor for the good of society & of the world, & who were ready to practice self denial in doing good….” Arthur C. Coles, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College: The Evolution of an Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 24–40, quotation on p. 25; Tiziana Rota, “Between ‘True Women’ and ‘New Women': Mount Holyoke Students, 1837 to 1908” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1983), pp. 58–65; Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 65–101; Geoffrey Blodgett, “Myth and Reality in Oberlin History,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine (May/June 1972): 5–10); Ronald W. Hogeland, “Coeducation of the Sexes at Oberlin College: A Study of Social Ideas in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Social History 6 (Winter 1972):160–76; Fletcher, “Against the Consensus,” 80.Google Scholar

22 Rota, “Between ‘True Women’ and ‘New Women,'“ 109–111.Google Scholar

23 Mary Lyon to Zilpah Polly Grant, Ipswich, 1 March 1833, Mount Holyoke College Archives.Google Scholar

24 Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, passim; Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 18–19, 104–11; Porterfield, “Sister to Oneida,” 1–13; Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979).Google Scholar

25 Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, 141 (quotation), 1–67; see also the citations above relative to Mount Holyoke, and Bonnie S. Handler and Carole B. Shmurak, “Mary Lyon and the Tradition of Chemistry Teaching at Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1837–1887,” Vitae Scholasticae 9 (Nos. 1–2, 1990): 53–73; Carole B. Shmurak and Bonnie S. Handler, “‘Castle of Science': Mount Holyoke College and the Preparation of Women in Chemistry, 1837–1941,” History of Education Quarterly 32 (Fall 1992): 315–342; Sherrie A. Inness, “‘Repulsive as the Multitudes by Whom I Am Surrounded': Constructing the Contact Zone in the Writings of Mount Holyoke Missionaries, 1830–1890,” Women's Studies [United Kingdom] 23:4 (1994): 365–384.Google Scholar

26 Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 49–53; Rota, “Between ‘True Women’ and ‘New Women,’” Chapter 2.Google Scholar

27 Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 108–10, 258–59; Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 27, 52–53, 352, n. 19.Google Scholar

28 Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 148 (quotation), 59–61.Google Scholar

29 Lyon's theology and modes of conversion are covered in excellent depth in Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, esp. Chapters 1 and 2; Drakeman, “Seminary Sisters,” 1–2, 58, 65–101; Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 107–11; and Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke, 50, 196–200, 242–52. Alfred Habegger, “Evangelicalism and Its Discontents: Hannah Porter Versus Emily Dickinson,” New England Quarterly 70 (September 1997): 386–414, provides a fascinating glimpse into the individualistic, intrusive form of evangelism pursued at Mount Holyoke Seminary.Google Scholar

30 Horton, “Black Education at Oberlin College,“ 488.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 483. Other historians cast Finney as antislavery, if not abolitionist; following Horton, I find his actions at Oberlin a far better gauge of his abolitionist commitments than his words. Cf. James David Essig, “The Lord's Free Man: Charles G. Finney and His Abolitionism,” Civil War History 24:1 (March 1978): 25–45.Google Scholar

32 Merrill, Lawson and “Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth',“ 142–55; Horton, “Black Education at Oberlin College,” 483.Google Scholar

33 Barbara Miller Solomon, “The Oberlin Model and Its Impact on Other Colleges,” in Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World, Carol Lasser, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 83.Google Scholar

34 Biggleston, “Oberlin College and the Negro Student,“ pp. 198–201; Horton, 477–499. Cally L. Waite, “The Segregation of Black Students at Oberlin College after Reconstruction,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Fall 2001): 344–64, provides rich detail on Oberlin's post-Reconstruction retreat from its abolitionist heritage, though the seeds were planted much earlier than she implies.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Herbig, “Friends for Freedom,“ pp. 68–72.Google Scholar

36 Fletcher, Robert S. A History of Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1943), pp. 85–117. On the school's interest in missions to the Native Americans, see W. E. Biggleston, “Oberlin College and the Beginning of the Red Lake Mission,” Minnesota History 45 (Spring 1976):21–31; Henry W. Bowden, “Oberlin and Ojibwas: An Evangelical Mission to Native Americans,” in The Evangelical Tradition in America, Leonard I. Sweet, ed. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 149–79.Google Scholar

37 See Hardman, Keith J. Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Robert Lynn Asa, “The Theology and Methodology of Charles G. Finney as a Prototype for Modern Mass Revivalism” (PhD. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1983); James H. Moorhead, “Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism,” Church History 48:4 (December 1979): 416–30, and the sources cited in note 30.Google Scholar

38 See particularly Palmer, Bryan D. Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, Habermas (New York: Guilford, 1995). Cf. Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).Google Scholar

39 Butchart, “Perspectives on Gender, Race, Calling, and Commitment,“ esp. 28–32.Google Scholar

40 Butchart, “Caroline F. Putnam,“ pp. 389–96.Google Scholar