The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the efforts to extend the benefits of education to America's freed slaves the freedmen, in the parlance of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of the new scholarship, we now know much more about the women and men who braved the opprobrium of their northern neighbors, and the intimidation and ostracism of southern whites, to work among a people theretofore systematically denied access to literacy. The emerging image of the freedmeris education effort taking Black liberty as the measure of Reconstruction, more sympathetic to abolitionism, and informed in part by notions of the emancipatory potential of education has shed the race-baiting and abolition-hating tone of earlier interpretations (Bentley, 1955; Knight, 1913; Swint, 1941). In place of claims that the teachers were fanatical, arrogant, and misguided, the teachers are now depicted as courageous and visionary, if too often insufficiently abolitionist (Butchart, 1980, 1988b; Horst, 1987; Jones, 1979, 1980; McPherson, 1975; Morris, 1981; Small, 1979). The new scholarship on the freedmen's teachers has contributed to emerging understandings of the broader outlines of Black education in the post-Civil War South and of the meanings of northern support for Black schools (Anderson, 1988; Butchart, 1988a; Richardson, 1986). It is beginning to shed light in a once-neglected area of investigation, the social history of teachers and teaching (Warren, 1989). It has the potential to provide important insights into the burgeoning fields of curriculum inquiry and critical pedagogy (Apple, 1988; Beyer & Apple, 1988; Giroux, 1988; Greene, 1988). Yet the new work on freedmeris education continues to share three weaknesses of the traditional scholarship. First, both streams of interpretation rely on impressionistic readings of essentially the same evidence. New and extended evidence may contribute to clearer and more defensible interpretations.