Abstract

How long ought the Freedmen's Bureau be in the business of educating Freedmen? This simple question was posed to all officers of the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina in March 1867. Of all the responses, one stood out from the rest: The freedmen ought to be educated, answered the agent in Goldsboro, So long as their |sic~ are freedmen to educate.(1) His answer had a certain seductive symmetry. And if the goal of the Freedmen's Bureau was to educate freedmen, then it was also the perfectly logical response. It said, in effect, that the Bureau ought to carry on until its job was done -- which might happen to be forever. Strangely enough, this commonsensical reply was an anomaly. No other agent defined the mission of the Bureau as open-ended; each foresaw a specific point in time when their agency would cease to serve any purpose. In other words, each understood the Freedmen's Bureau's mandate not as the education of the freedmen, but as the education of the freedmen until such a time as another entity was prepared to assume the responsibility. Though they talked as if they intended to stay until the millenium, the Bureau officers knew that they would be lucky if they lasted the decade. Paradoxically, the educational division of the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina was an organization whose members unanimously considered it to be illegitimate. In mid-nineteenth-century America, the federal government was understood to have no authority outside the areas enumerated in the Constitution. Although the conception and creation of the Freedmen's Bureau indicated that some Americans in Washington were beginning to shed this mentality, the Bureau's mandate could be only as broad as the officers in the field interpreted it to be. Resigned to a fate of limited resources and limited time, the Freedmen's Bureau educators could hope to reach a small proportion of freedmen schoolchildren at best. At the end of five school years, it was to have taught only 50,000 children to read (according to its own optimistic estimates), in a state with 136,000 school-aged blacks.(2) While these figures compare favorably with the 10 percent of school-aged blacks who attended freedmen's schools nationwide, they could hardly be deemed satisfactory, unless the Bureau had in the process secured the principle of freedmen's education in Southern thinking -- hopefully among all Southerners, but, failing that, at least among the freedmen themselves. The Bureau must be evaluated on its own terms. If it viewed itself as a preparatory institution, then it was successful only insofar as it prepared Southern society for black education. Out of the morass of Bureau records emerge two distinct strategies, embodied respectively by the two successive superintendents of education, F. A. Fiske and H. C. Vogell. One sought to devolve responsibility upon the state government, and the other to prepare the black community to meet its own needs. Each approach was grounded in a distinctive understanding of Southern society, and each called for a different set of goals and policies, but their starting point was the same. Federally funded education was universally recognized as a strictly interim affair. Even had the Bureau conducted itself impeccably, both strategies were doomed to failure because of this inherent constraint. Hostility to the schools in the white community was relatively subdued at first, erupting sporadically into a minor act of violence. But suddenly, in the span of three months in early 1866 -- at about the same time that a plague of smallpox was ravaging the countryside -- four schoolhouses were burnt to the ground.(3) To a devout man, all the forces of God and man must have seemed arrayed against the work of the Bureau. All things considered, Reverend F. A. Fiske was remarkably complacent. The superintendent cheerily boasted that, in spite of everything, not one school had closed due to opposition and asserted that some whites were steadily becoming friendlier. …

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