Schoolmarms and Other Newcomers

Many good people came down to do good to us and the negroes; we were not always so nice to these as we ought to have been. But very good people can try other very good people sorely sometimes. Besides, some who came in sheep’s clothing were not sheep, and gave false ideas of the entire flock.

Terms of professional philanthropy were strange in the Southerner’s mouth. It never occurred to the men, women and maidens who visited all the poor, sick, old and feeble negroes in their reach, breaking their night’s rest or their hours of recreation or toil without a sense of sacrifice—who gave medicines, food, clothing, any and everything asked for to the blacks and who ministered to them in neighbourly ways innumerable—that they were doing the work of a district or parish visitor. Southerners have been doing these things as a matter of course ever since the negroes were brought to them direct from Africa or by way of New England, making no account of it, never organizing into charitable associations and taking on corresponding tags, raising collections and getting pay for official services; the help a Southerner gave a darkey he took out of his own pocket or larder or off his own back; and that ended the matter till next time.

Yet, here come salaried Northerners with “Educator,” “Missionary,” or “Philanthropist” marked on their brows, broidered on their sleeves; and as far as credit for work for darkeys goes, “taking the cake” from the Southerner, who had no warm welcome for the avalanche of instructors pouring down upon him with the “I am holier than thou” expression, and bent as much upon teaching him what he ought to have been doing as upon teaching the negro to struggle indecorously for the semblance of a non-existent equality.

Newcomers were upon us like the plagues of Egypt. Deserters from the Federal Army, men dismissed for cause, followers in its wake, political gypsies, bums and toughs. Everybody in New York remarked upon the thinning out of the Bowery and its growing orderliness during enlistments for the Spanish-American War; and everybody knew what became of vanishing trampdom; it joined the army. The Federal Army in the sixties was not without heavy percentage of similar element; and, when, after conquest, it returned North, it left behind much riff-raff. Riff-raffs became politicians and intellectual and spiritual guides to the negroes. From these, and from early, unwise, sometimes vicious Freedmen’s Bureau instructors, Southerners got first ideas of Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms.

“Yankee schoolmarms” overran the country. Their spirit was often noble and high as far as the black man’s elevation—or their idea of it—was concerned; but towards the white South, it was bitter, judicial, unrelenting. Some were saints seeking martyrdom, and finding it; some were fools; some, incendiaries; some, all three rolled into one; some were straight-out business women seeking good-paying jobs; some were educational sharps.

Into the Watkins neighbourhood came three teachers, a male preacher and two women teachers. They went in among the negroes, ate and slept with them, paraded the streets arm-in-arm with them. They were disturbed to perceive that, even among negroes, the familiarity that breeds contempt is not conducive to usefulness; and that they were at a disadvantage in the eyes of the negroes because white people failed to recognise them.

Mr. Watkins, master of the manor, was a shining light to all who knew him. In summer his verandah, in winter his dining-room, was crowded Sunday afternoons with negroes on his invitation: “I will be glad to have you come to sing and pray with me.” He would read a chapter from the Bible, lead the opening prayer, then call upon some sable saint to lead, himself responding with humble “Amens.” White and black would sing together. When the newcomers found how things were, they felt aggrieved that they had not his countenance.

He had seen one of them walk up to his ex-hostler and lay her hand on his coat-collar, while she talked away archly to him. I hardly believe a gentleman of New York, Boston or Chicago would conclude that persons making intimates of his domestic force could desire association with his wife and daughters or expect social attentions from them; I hardly believe he would urge the ladies of his family to call upon these persons. Mr. Watkins did not send his women-kind to see the newcomers; at last, the newcomers took the initiative and came to see his family. His daughters did not appear, but Mrs. Watkins received them politely. They went straight to the point, lodging complaint against the community.

“We had no reason to suppose,” said she, quietly, “that you cared for the coÖperation of our white people. You acted independently of us; you did not advise with us or show desire for affiliation. We would have been forcing ourselves upon you. I will be as frank as you have been. Had you started this work in a proper spirit and manner, my husband for one would have responded to the limit of his power to any call you made upon him.”

They dragged in the social equality business and found her adamant. When they charged “race prejudice,” she said promptly: “Were I to visit relatives in Boston, the nice people there would, I doubt not, show me pleasant attentions. Were I to put myself on equal terms with their domestics, I could hardly expect it. The question is not altogether one of race prejudice, but of fitness of things.” “But we are missionaries, not social visitors.” “We do not feel that you benefit negroes by teaching them presumption and to despise and neglect work and to distrust and hate us.”

A garrulous negress was entertaining one of these women with hair-raising accounts of cruelties practiced upon her by whites when, as a slave, she cooked for them. The schoolmarm asked: “Why didn’t you black people poison all the whites and get your freedom that way? You’re the most patient people on earth or you would have done so.” A “mammy” who overheard administered a stinging rebuke: “Dat would ha’ been a sin even ef our white folks wuz ez mean ez Sukey Ann been tellin’. Mine wuz good tuh me. Sukey Ann jes been tellin’ you dem tales tuh see how she kin wuk you up.” Perhaps the school-teacher had not meant to be taken more literally than Sukey Ann deserved to be.

Until freedom, white and black children could hardly be kept apart. Boys ran off fishing and rabbit-hunting together; girls played dolls in the garret of the great house or in a sunny corner of the woodpile. They rarely quarrelled. The black’s adoration of the white, the white’s desire to be allowed to play with the black, stood in the way of conflict. An early result of the social equality doctrine was war between children of the races. Such strife was confined almost wholly to white and black schools in towns, where black and white children were soon ready to “rock” each other. A spirit of dislike and opposition to blacks, which their elders could hardly understand, having never experienced it, began to take possession of white children. The following story will give some idea of these dawning manifestations of race prejudice:

Negro and white schools were on opposite sides of the street in Petersburg, the former a Freedmen’s Bureau institution, the latter a private school taught by a very youthful ex-Confederate, Captain M., who, though he looked like a boy himself, had made, after a brilliant university course, a shining war record. The negro boys, stimulated by the example of their elders who were pushing whites off the sidewalks, and excited by ill-timed discourses by their imported white pedagogue, “sassed” the white boys, contended with them for territory, or aggravated them in some way. A battle ensued, in which the white children ran the black off the street and into their own schoolhouse, the windows of which were damaged by rocks, the only serious mischief resulting from exchange of projectiles.

In short order six Federal soldiers with bayonets fixed marched into the white schoolhouse, where the Captain was presiding over his classes, brought by this time to a proper sense of penitence and due state of order, their preceptor being a military disciplinarian. The invading squad came to capture the children. The Captain indignantly protested, saying he was responsible for his boys; it was sufficient to serve warrant on him, he would answer for them; it was best not to make a mountain out of a mole-hill and convulse the town with a children’s quarrel. The sergeant paid him scant courtesy and arrested the children. The Captain donned his old Confederate overcoat, than which he had no other, and marched down the street with his boys to the Provost’s office.

The Provost, a soldier and a gentleman, after examining into the case and considering the small culprits, all ranged in a terrified row and not knowing but that they would be blown next moment into Paradise or the other place, asked the Captain if he would guarantee that his children would keep the peace. The Captain assured him that he could and would if the teacher of the coloured boys would keep his charges in bounds, adding that he would have the windows repaired at his expense. The Provost accepted this pledge, and with a withering look at the pedagogic complainant, said to the arresting officer: “Sergeant, I am sorry it was necessary to send six armed men to arrest these little boys.” This happened at ten o’clock in the morning. Before ten that night the Provost was removed by orders from Washington. So promptly had complaint been entered against him that he was too lenient to whites, so quickly had it taken effect! Yet his course was far more conservative of the public peace than would have been the court-martialing of the children of prominent citizens of the town, and the stirring-up of white and black parents against each other.

“It’s no harm for a hungry coloured man to make a raid on a chicken-coop or corn-pile,” thus spoke Carpet-Bagger Crockett in King William County, Virginia, June, 1869, in the Walker-Wells campaign, at a meeting opened with prayer by Rev. Mr. Collins, Northern missionary. Like sentiment was pronounced in almost the same words by a carpet-bag officer of state, a loud advocate of negro education, from the steps of the State House in Florida. Like sentiment was taught in direct and indirect ways by no small number of preceptors in negro schoolhouses.

A South Carolina schoolmarm, after teaching her term out at a fat salary, made of her farewell a “celebration” with songs, recitations, etc.; the scholars passed in procession before the platform, she kissed each, and to each handed a photograph of herself for $1. She carried off a harvest. Various other small ways of levying tribute were practiced by the thoughtless or the unscrupulous; and negroes pilfered to meet demands. Schoolmarms and masters did not always teach for sweet charity’s sake. With moving stories some drew heavily upon the purse of the generous North for contributions which were not exactly applied to the negro’s relief or profit. In order to attract Northern teachers to Freedmen’s schools in Mississippi salaries were paid out of all proportion to their services or to the people’s ability to pay. “Examinations for teachers’ licenses were not such as to ascertain the real fitness of applicants or conduce to a high standard of scholarship,” says James Wilford Garner in “Reconstruction in Mississippi.” “They were asked a few oral questions by the superintendent in his private office and the certificate granted as a matter of course.”

“While the average pay of the teachers in Northern schools is less than $300 a year, salaries here range from $720 to $1,920,” said Governor Alcorn to the Mississippi Legislature in 1871. The old log schoolhouses were torn down by the reconstructionists, new and costly frame and brick ones built; and elegant desks and handsome chairs, “better suited to the academy than the common school,” displaced equipments that had been good enough for many a great American’s intellectual start in life. In Monroe County, schoolhouses which citizens offered free of charge were rejected and new ones built; teachers’ salaries ranged from $50 to $150 a month; schools were multiplied; heavy special taxes were levied. In Lowndes, a special tax of $95,000 over and above the regular tax for education was levied. Taxpayers protested in formal meetings. The Ku Klux whipped several male teachers, one an ex-Confederate, and warned a schoolmarm or two to leave. Expenses came down.

What was true of one Southern State was true of others where costly educational machinery and a peculative system covering “deals” and “jobs” in books, furniture, schoolhouse construction, etc., were imposed. Whippings with which Ku Klux visited a few male teachers and school directors here and there, and warnings to leave served upon others of both sexes, were, in most cases, protests—and the only effective protests impoverished and tax-ridden communities could make—against waste of public funds, peculation, subordination of the teacher’s office to that of political emissary, Loyal League organizer, inculcator of social equality doctrines and race hatred. Some whippings were richly deserved by those who got them, some were not; some which were richly deserved were never given. It was not always Ku Klux that gave the whippings, but their foes, footing up sins to their account. It became customary for white communities to assemble and condemn violence, begging their own people to have no part in it.

I have known many instances where Southern clergy maintained friendly relations with schoolmarms, aiding them, operating with them, lending them sympathy, thinking their methods often wrong, but accepting their earnestness and devotion and sacrifice at its full value. I have heard Southerners speak of faculties of certain institutions thus: “Those teachers came down here in the spirit that missionaries go to a foreign land, expecting persecution and ostracism, and prepared to bear it.” I have deeply respected the lovely and exalted character of some schoolmarms I have personally known, who suffered keenly the isolation and loneliness of their position; to missionaries and teachers of this type, I have seen the Southern attitude change as their quality was learned. I have seen municipal boards helping with appropriations Northern workers among negroes, while these workers were ungraciously charging them with race prejudice. And I have seen the attitude of such workers gradually change towards their white neighbours as they understood our white and black people better.

Early experiments must have sometimes perplexed the workers. Negroes had confused ideas of education. Thus, a negress who did not know the English alphabet, went to a teacher in Savannah and demanded to be taught French right off. Others simply demanded “to know how to play de pianner.” The mass were eager for “book-learnin’.” Southerners who had been trying to instruct indifferent little negroes beheld with curiosity this sudden and intense yearning when “education” was held up as a forbidden fruit of the past.

It has been said that Southern whites would not at first teach in the negro schools. “Rebels” were not invited and would not have been allowed to teach in Bureau schools. Reconstructionists preferred naturally their own ilk. Certainly all Southerners were not opposed per se to negro schools, for we find some so influential as the Bishop of Mississippi advising planters in 1866 to open schools for their negroes. Leading journals and some teachers’ conventions in 1867 advocated public schools for negroes, with Southern whites as teachers. It has been said, too, that Northern teachers who came to teach the negroes could not secure board in respectable white families, and, therefore, had no choice but to board in black. I think this may be wholly true. The Southerner firmly believed that the education given the negro was not best for him or the country; and he was deeply prejudiced against the Northern teacher and all his or her ways. The efforts of Black and Tan assemblies to force mixed schools upon the country was a ground of prejudice against teachers and the schools; so, too, the course of some teachers in trying to compel this.

How could rational people, with the common welfare at heart, advocate mixed schools when such feelings were in evidence at outset as the captain and the pedagogue incident and many similar ones in many States proved existent? Such feelings were not and are not limited to the South. Only a year or two ago the mixed school question caused negroes to burn a schoolhouse near Boston. Many white and black educators at the North seem to agree that it is not best to mix the races there. Prominent negroes are now asserting that it is not best for the negro child to put him in schools with whites; he is cowed as before a superior or he exhibits or excites antipathy. Besides, he casts a reflection upon his own race in insisting upon this association.

If white Southerners at first objected to teaching negroes, this objection speedily vanished before the argument: “We should teach the negroes ourselves if we do not wish them influenced against us by Yankees,” and, “We should keep the money at home,” and the all-compelling “I must make a living.” As the carpet-bag governments went out of power, Northern schoolteachers lost their jobs and Southern ones got them. As negroes were prepared, Southern whites appointed negroes to teach negroes, which was what the blacks themselves desired and believed just.

School fights between the races ceased as Southern whites or Southern negroes came in charge of schools for blacks, and as Northern people who came South to work in charitable enterprises understood conditions better. Those who had unwittingly wrought ill in the first place had usually meant well. The missionary of the sixties and seventies was not as wise as the missionary of today, who knows that he must study a people before he undertakes to teach and reform them, and that it is all in the day’s work for him not to run counter heedlessly to established social usages or to try to uproot instantly and with violence customs centuries old. A reckless reformer may tear up more good things in a few weeks than he can replant, or substitute with better, in a lifetime.

THE CARPET-BAGGER