Ronald E. Butchart . Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Pp. xxii, 314. $39.95.

Abstract

Ronald E. Butchart's new book is an invaluable addition to the historiography of African American education during and after the Civil War. To date, this text offers the most in-depth analysis of the teachers of freed people. It challenges more than a century of historical scholarship that has repeatedly typecast these teachers as being almost exclusively young white evangelical Protestant women from six New England states who went South to promote abolitionism, upended the southern way of life, and proselytized formerly enslaved African Americans into becoming pious and temperate men and women. “Working from a broader range of sources and a database of thousands of teachers,” which Butchart names the Freedmen's Teacher Project database, he writes the definitive revisionist history on the subject and offers a completely new portrait of those who taught freed people in the first two decades of emancipation (p. xi). As he illustrates in great detail, teachers of freed people were far more diverse than previously realized. For example, one of every six northern teachers was African American, not white, and “more than one-third of all the teachers in the southern black schools between 1861 and 1876 were African American” (pp. xi–xii). At least one-half of all teachers for freed people were male; nearly as many were southerners, not northerners from New England; and few if any of the teachers self-identified as abolitionists or evangelical in their applications for teaching positions. In this regard, Butchart's study moves the historiography on the education of freed people during and after the Civil War in decidedly new directions; it is a path-breaking book that is rich in detail and analysis. It is the most evidentiary rich history ever written on the teachers of freed people in the first decades of freedom.