Readers, Readers Everywhere, Despite What You Might Think

Abstract

Readers, Readers Everywhere, Despite What You Might Think Hilary Moss (bio) Beth Barton Schweiger, A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ix + 288 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00. In 1863, on the eve of Emancipation, less than five percent of black people enslaved in South Carolina could read and write, according to W.E.B. Du Bois.1 Writing in 1935, Du Bois sought to quantify the extent to which antebellum white southerners had curtailed black access to literacy. But settling on hard numbers proved slippery. Two decades earlier, in 1915, historian Carter Wood-son had undertaken a similar endeavor. His estimate—a 90 percent illiteracy rate among enslaved people—proved modestly more optimistic. And yet, Woodson acknowledged, trying to answer such a query with certainty was foolhardy. “[W]e are anxious to know exactly what proportion of the colored population had risen above the plane of illiteracy,” he explained. “Unfortunately this cannot be accurately determined” for many reasons.2 First, Woodson observed, few enslaved people felt comfortable revealing their literary abilities to white people, particularly when “such a disclosure would often cause [them] to be dreadfully punished or sold to some cruel master of the lower South.”3 Second, white people who had traveled throughout the region also left behind conflicting accounts. Abolitionists maintained that white power to withhold black access to literacy remained absolute. And yet, many narratives written by enslaved people included dramatic accounts of learning to read. Even decades after Emancipation, Federal Writers Project interviewers struggled to quantify enslaved black literacy. Ultimately, this cohort settled on an estimate as depressing as that proposed by Du Bois. They also reported that just five percent of their interviewees recalled learning to read before Emancipation.4 Contemporary historians generally accept these bleak estimates. Scholars of African American educational history usually report that just five to ten percent of enslaved people were literate. Regardless of whether one settles at the high or low end of the best-guess spectrum, historians typically agree that definitive answers remain elusive. Among the many challenges of quantification include definition. What, exactly, did it mean to be literate? Did this term refer to reading and writing or just reading? How far must a person advance [End Page 246] to be considered literate? Must one master basic spelling? Be able to write a sentence? A paragraph? Be able to sign her name? And yet, scholars do agree that African Americans’ demonstrable enthusiasm for both self-education and public schooling upon Emancipation attests to their limited access to literary instruction under slavery. As historian Janet Duitsman Cornelius observes, “The tremendous drive by black people to grasp learning once it was legal for them to do so and the numbers of literate former slaves who appeared from the ranks where literacy was supposedly forbidden show how much enslaved African Americans valued the liberating qualities of literacy within the slave community.”5 Likewise and more recently, Christopher Hager, who rejects Cornelius’ decision to connect literacy and liberation, similarly describes enslaved African Americans as “largely illiterate . . . [and] whose every move in such direction was brutally suppressed.”6 Given the longstanding and generally accepted assertion that antebellum white southerners regularly, and at times violently, opposed enslaved blacks’ literacy, Beth Barton Schweiger’s decision to refer to the region as A Literate South appears puzzling, if not paradoxical. Schweiger does not gloss over the brutality of slavery. Nor does she challenge white slaveholders’ desire to curtail black access to literacy. But she does challenge the assumption that the existence of slavery, in and of itself, subverted a desire to read. Yes, Schweiger acknowledges, many white lawmakers, particularly after 1830, did criminalize black education. And yes, some southern states did decline to invest in public schools, particularly when compared to their northern counterparts. And, yes again, most southerners, white as well as white black, resided miles from a printing press or publishing house. And absolutely, many of the black men and women who did become literate did so under the most harrowing circumstances. And yet, print suffused the region. Put succinctly, she asserts, “Print insinuated itself into every life in the nineteenth century. There was simply...