The White Child

Upon the Southern white child of due age for schooling the effects of war fell with cruel force.

The ante-bellum planter kept a tutor or governess or both for his children; his neighbours’ children sometimes attended the school which he maintained for his own. Thus, were sons and daughters prepared for academy and college, university, finishing school. Private schools were broken up quite generally by the war. It became quite the custom for the mother or an elder sister to fill the position of instructor in families on big plantations. Such schooling as this was none too plentiful in rural Dixie just after the war. Sisters of age and capacity to teach did not stay in one family forever. Sometimes they got married; though many a beautiful and brilliant girl sacrificed her future for little brothers and sisters dependent upon her for mental food. The great mass of Southern women had, however, to drop books for broomsticks; to turn from pianos and guitars and make music with kettles and pans. Children had to help. With labour entirely disorganised, in the direst poverty and the grasp of such political convulsions as no people before them had ever endured, the hour was strenuous beyond description, and it is no wonder if the claims of children to education were often overlooked, or, in cruel necessity, set aside.

Sometimes neighbours clubbed together and opened an “old field school,” paying the teacher out of a common fund subscribed for the purpose; again, a man who could teach went around, drummed up pupils at so much a head, opened a school and took chances on collection of dues. Many neighbourhoods were too poor for even such expedients; to get bread itself was a struggle to which children must lend labour. The seventies found few or no rural districts without a quota of half-grown lads and lassies unable to read and write. It was no strange thing to see little white boys driving a plow when they were so small they had to lift their hands high to grasp the handles; or little white girls minding cows, trotting to springs or wells with big buckets to fill, bending over wash-tubs, and working in the crops.

The public school system was not put in operation at once, and if it had been, could not have met conditions of the hour. Planters lived far apart; roads in some sections long unworked, in others lately plowed by cannons or wagon-trains, were often impassable for teams—if people were so fortunate as to have teams; and much more so for little feet; then, too, the reign of fear was on; highways and by-ways were infested by roving negroes; many were harmless; would, indeed, do a child a kindness; but some were dangerous; the negro, his own master now, was free to get drunk at other times than Christmas and corn-shucking. An argument against the success of the public as of the “old field” school, lay in the strong spirit of caste animating the high-born Southerner. It was against his grain to send his children—particularly his daughters—to school with Tom, Dick and Harry; it did not please him for them to make close associates of children in a different walk of life—the children of the “poor white trash.” This spirit of exclusiveness marks people of position today, wherever found. Caste prejudice was almost inoperative, however, having small chance to pick and choose. Gaunt poverty closed the doors of learning against the white child of the South, while Northern munificence was flinging them wide to the black.

Soon as war ended, schools for negroes were organised in all directions with Government funds or funds supplied by Northern charity; and under Northern tutelage—a tutelage contributing to prejudice between the races. These institutions had further the effect of aggravating the labour problem—a problem so desperate for the Southern farmer that he could not turn from it to give his own child a chance for intellectual life.

He was not pleasantly moved by touching stories that went North of class-rooms where middle-age, hoary-head and pickaninny sat on the same bench studying the same page, all consumed with ambition to master the alphabet. It did not enter into these accounts that the plows and hoes of a sacked country had been deserted for the A B C book. He resented the whole tendency of the time, which was to make the negro despise manual labour and elevate book-learning above its just position. Along with these appealing stories did not go pictures of fields where white women and children in harness dragged plows through furrows; the artists did not portray white children in the field wistfully watching black children trooping by to school; had such pictures gone North in the sixties and seventies, some would have said, so bitter was the moment, “Just retribution for the whites,” but not the majority. The great-hearted men and women of the North would have come to the rescue.

“There were two reasons for Northern indifference to the education of the Southern white child,” an embittered educator says; “natural prejudice against the people with whom they had been at war, and the feeling that the negro had been persecuted—had been ‘snatched from his happy home in Africa’ (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the snatching); brought over here and sold into slavery (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the selling), and thereby stripped of all his brilliant opportunities of life in Africa and the advancement he might else have had; the Southern white man, instead of sending him to college, had made him work in the fields; to even up matters now, the negro must go to college and the white man work in the fields. This was the will of Providence and they its executors.”

The two reasons given—undue prejudice against the Southern white and overweening pity for the negro—were the grand disposing cause of Northern indifference to the white child and abnormal sensibility about everything concerning the black. But at the bottom was ignorance of actual conditions here. The one story was put before them, the other was not. It was not to the interests of Freedmen’s Bureau agents to let the other be known; and, of course, the business of teachers and missionaries was to make out the strongest case possible in order to draw funds for negro education. The negro’s ignorance, in a literary sense, could hardly be exaggerated, nor his poverty; but he was a laborer and an artisan and held recuperative power in his hands.

It was not in the thought of the proud old planter to cry for help; it was his habit to give, not take; he and his wife and children made as little parade as possible of their extremities to their nearest neighbour; such evidences as would not down were laughed over with a humour inherent as their spirit of independence.

In 1867, Mrs. Sarah Hughes said: “Since leaving Kentucky last December, I have travelled many thousand miles in the South; I have seen spreading out before me in sad panorama solitary chimneys, burned buildings, walls of once happy homes, grounds and gardens grown with weeds and briers; groups of sad human faces; gaunt women and children; old, helpless men; young men on crutches, and without arms, sick, sad, heart-broken. Words cannot describe the destitute condition of the orphaned children. It excites my deepest commiseration. The children of the dead soldiers are wandering beggars, hand in hand with want. Except in large cities, there are no schools or homes for the fatherless. An attractive academy has been built near Atlanta by citizens of Northern cities for the children of the freedmen; and it is in a flourishing condition,” etc. An editorial in a newspaper of the day reads: “The white children of the South are growing up in pitiful neglect, and we are wrong to permit it.”

General Pope, commanding Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, wrote General Grant, April 14, 1867: “It may be safely said that the remarkable progress made in the education of these people (the negroes), aided by noble charitable institutions of Northern societies and individuals, finds no parallel in the history of mankind. If the white people exhibit the same indisposition to be educated that they do now, five years will have transferred intelligence and education so far as the masses are concerned, to the coloured people of the district.” Does it not seem incredible that an Anglo-Saxon should regard with complacency a situation involving the supreme peril of his race, should consider it cause of congratulation? The state of affairs was urged as argument that the negro was or quickly would be qualified for exercise of the franchise with which he had been invested and his late master deprived.

The Sunday School acquired new interest and significance. I remember one that used to be held in summer under the trees near a blacksmith’s shop, in which Webster’s Spelling Book divided attention with the New Testament. The school was gotten up by a planter in kindly effort to do what he could for the poor children in the neighbourhood. There were grown girls in it who spelled out rather than read Bible verses. On weekdays, the planter’s daughter received and taught free of charge a class of poor whites. A Georgia friend, who was a little boy at the close of the war, tells me: “The Sunday Schools made more impression upon me than any other institution of the period. There were, I suppose, Sunday Schools in plenty before and during the war, but somehow they seemed a new thing thereafter.”

This movement was at once an expression of a revival of religious sentiment (there was a strong revival movement at the time), the desire for social intercourse, and an effort to advance the educational interests of the young, who in countless instances were deprived of ordinary means of instruction. Hon. Henry G. Turner wrote of the conditions of that day: “Cities and great tracts of country were in ashes. Colleges and schools were silent, teachers without pupils, pupils without teachers. Even the great charities and asylums were unable to take care of lunatics, the deaf and the blind.... Repudiation by States of bonds, treasury notes, and other obligations issued during the war reduced to penury thousands of widows and orphans, and many people too old to start life over again.” Congress demanded this repudiation at the point of the bayonet.

The South was not unmindful of her orphans; there were early organised efforts such as the land was capable of making; the churches led in many of these. And there were efforts of a lighter order, such as the bazaar which the Washington and Lee Association held in Norfolk. The Baltimore Society for the Liberal Education of Southern Children was a notable agency. Individual effort was not lacking. Few did more according to their might than Miss Emily V. Mason, who provided for many orphans gravitating towards her at a time when she was paying for her nieces’ board with family silver, a spoon or a fork at a time. One of her most sympathetic aides was a Miss Chew, of the North, with whom during the entire war she had maintained an affectionate correspondence begun in times of peace. Illustrative of a rather odd form of relief is this extract from a letter by Mrs. Lee to Miss Mason:

“My dear Miss Em, did I ever write you about a benevolent lady at the North who is anxious to adopt two little ‘rebel’ children, five or six years old—of a Confederate officer—and she writes General Lee to recommend such a party to her. She wants them of gentle blood. I have no doubt there are a great many to whom such an offer would be acceptable. Do you know of any?” In regard to Baltimore’s work, she says: “How can we ever repay our kind friends in Baltimore for all they have done for us?” When the Confederate General, John B. Hood, died, he left a number of very young children in poor circumstances; one of their benefactors was the Federal General McClellan, I have heard.

Doubtless many hands were outstretched from the North in some such manner as is indicated in Mrs. Lee’s letter. Thousands would have extended help in every way had the truth been known. What the Southern white child really needed, however, was the removal of an oppressive legislation which was throttling his every chance in life, and a more temperate view on the part of the dominant section of the negro question—a question that was pressing painfully at every point upon his present and future. He had a right to an equal chance in life with the negro.

That quality in Northern people which made them pour out money for the freedmen, would have stirred their sense of justice to the white child had the situation been clear to them. One of the earliest homes for orphans of Confederate soldiers was established at Macon by William H. Appleton, of New York, at the suggestion of his friend, Bishop Beckwith, of Georgia. Vanderbilt and Tulane Universities, the Seney benefactions to Emory and Wesleyan Colleges, and other evidences of awakening interest in the South’s white youth, will occur at once to my readers. Chief of all was the Peabody Fund, in which white and black had share. Dr. Sears, of Boston, first administrator, was sharply blamed by William Lloyd Garrison and others because he did not make mixed schools a condition of bestowal upon whites; his critics grew quiet when shown that, under the terms of the gift, such a course would divert the whole fund to white children.

To illustrate white need: Late as 1899, I heard, through Miss Sergeant, Principal of the Girls’ High School, Atlanta, of a white school in the Georgia mountains where one short shelf held all the books—one grammar, one arithmetic, one reader, one history, one geography, one spelling-book. Starting at the end of the first bench, a book would pass from hand to hand, each child studying a paragraph. There are schools of scrimped resources now, where young mountaineers make all sorts of sacrifices and trudge barefoot seemingly impossible distances to secure a little learning. Nobody in these communities dreams of calling for outside help and sympathy, and when help is tendered, it must be with the utmost circumspection and delicacy, or native pride is wounded and rejects. Appalachia is a region holding big game for people hunting chances to do good.

MISS EMILY V. MASON

Photograph by Vianelli, Italy

The various Constitutional Conventions adopted public school systems for their commonwealths. In Virginia, it was not to go into operation until 1871, after which there was to be as rapid extension as possible and full introduction into all counties by 1876. The convention made strenuous efforts, as did that of every other State, to force mixed schools, in which, had they succeeded, the white child’s chance of an education would have suffered a new death.

Early text-books used in public schools grated on the Southerner; they were put out by Northern publishing houses and gave views of American history which he thought unjust and untrue. The “Southern Opinion” printed this, August 3, 1867: “In a book circulating in the South as history, this occurs: ‘While the people of the North were rejoicing because the war was at an end, President Lincoln, one of the best men in the world, was cruelly murdered in Washington by a young man hired by the Confederates to do the wicked deed.’ It calls Lee ‘a perjured traitor;’ says ‘Sherman made a glorious march to the sea;’ prints ‘Sheridan’s Ride’ as a school recitation.” To comprehension of the Southern mind as it was then and is now in some who remember, it is essential that we get its view of the “Ride” and the “March.”

“Have you seen a piece of poetry,” a representative Southern woman wrote another in the fall of 1865, “called ‘Sheridan’s Ride’? If you can get it, do send it to me. I want to see if there isn’t some one smart enough to reply to it and give a true version of that descent of armed ruffians upon store-rooms, stables, hen-roosts and ladies’ trunks—even tearing the jewelry from their persons—even robbing the poor darkies of their watches and clothing. Not a single Confederate soldier did they encounter. They ought to live in history! My Vermont friend, Lucy Adams, says these things ‘are not true, no one at the North believes them, they are impossible.’ But we know they are true. I was very anxious to send you Sherman’s speech at Cincinnati—perhaps you have seen it—in which he unblushingly sanctions all the outrages committed by his men. I really think some notice ought to be taken of it, but our papers, you see, are all ruined now; and in New York, only ‘The News’ dares publish anything true.... I have found a copy, but this says at ‘Lancaster, Ohio’; perhaps he said the same thing twice; it was at the close of a grand speech: ‘Soldiers, when we marched through and conquered the country of the rebels, we became owners of all they had; and I don’t want you to be troubled in your consciences for taking, while on our great march, the property of the conquered rebels—they had forfeited their right to it.’”

“For several years since the nineties it has been my privilege to serve a large charitable institution here,” a Southern friend writes me from a Northern city. “On the Fourth of July I join with as much fervor as anybody in the flag salute, in singing ‘America’ and all the other patriotic songs, until they come to ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ That takes the very heart out of me! Sometimes it is all I can do to keep from bursting into tears! Then again I feel as if I must stand up and shout: ‘We should not teach any American child to sing that song!’ You know the home of one of my dearest friends was in the way of that march; it was burned to the ground and she, a little girl, and her aged grandfather wandered homeless in the night. I wonder, O, I wonder, if our soldiers in the Philippines, Northern and Southern boys, are giving grounds for any such songs as that! I’d rather we’d lose the fight!”

A cause operating against education of both races remains to be cited. The carpet-bag, scalawag and negroid State Governments made raids on educational funds. In North Carolina, $420,000 in railroad stock belonging to the Educational Fund for the Benefit of Poor Children were sold for $158,000, to be applied in part payment of extended per diems of legislators. These legislators gave at State expense lavish entertainments, and kept a bar and house of prostitution in the Capitol; took trips to New York and gambled away State funds by thousands; war had left a school fund, taxation increased it; but for two years no child, white or black, received benefits. There was money enough for the Governor to raise and equip two regiments, one of negroes, for intimidation of whites, but none for education. Of Georgia’s public school fund of $327,000, there seems not to have been a penny left to the State when her million-dollar legislature adjourned in 1870.

Louisiana’s permanent school fund for parishes vanished with none to tell where it went. Attention was called to its disappearance by W. E. Brown, the negro State Superintendent of Education. When Warmouth, was inaugurated (1868), the treasury held $1,300,500 for free schools. “Bonds representing this,” states Hon. B. F. Sage, “the most sacred property of the State, were publicly auctioned June, 1872, to pay warrants issued by Warmouth.” Warmouth, like Holden of North Carolina, and Scott and Moses of South Carolina, raised and maintained at State expense a black army. In 1870, the Radical Governor of Florida made desperate efforts to lay hands on the Agricultural Land Scrip, property of the Agricultural College of that State; to save it from his clutches C. T. Chase, President of Public Instruction, asked President Grant’s intervention. A forger, embezzler and thief presided over Mississippi’s Department of Education. In every State it was the same story of public moneys wasted by nefarious tricksters who had ridden to power on the negro ballot; the widow and the orphan robbed, the gray-beard and the child; the black man and the white.

SCHOOLMARMS AND OTHERS