In years after civil War, white Americans north and south debated capacity of former slaves to be educated for citizenship, while leading African American authors (and some white supporters) used fiction, speeches, and other forms to demonstrate capabilities of race for full civic participation. As evident in teaching texts like Lydia Maria child's The Freedmen's Book and novels like Albion Tourgee's Bricks Without Straw, this discourse about democratic participation was often closely bound up with arguments about whether or not freedmen of south should or even could be educated. By 1880s, when Radical Reconstruction had been displaced by calls for national reconciliation, this contest frequently shifted focus to kind and degree of education most suitable for African Americans. Some New South leaders began to suggest to their constituencies that making some allowances for education of blacks could bring long-term benefits to region that clearly needed to become indu strialized. Meanwhile, northern foundations such as Peabody and Slater funds became increasingly powerful arbiters of African American education experiences, exercising much more decisive control over curriculum of institutions aimed at teaching blacks than loose confederation of Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies had in 1860s. In particular, small group of white male foundation agents who ran Slater Fund--Rutherford B. Hayes, Daniel Gilman and Atticus Haygood--consistently set African American educational programs within race-specific industrial model. Along those lines, Haygood's 1885 report to Fund's Board of Trustees, purportedly benign discussion of The Case of Negro, as to Education in Southern States, is representative of policy that was institutionalized at sites such as Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. Haygood's 1885 report depicted the negro as a good citizen:' but one whose status would remain inferior, constrained by very work habits of manual lab or Slater Fund's educational model would allow--a model denying access both to liberal arts study and to moral, ethical, and social leadership more appropriate to superior white race (5off). When we see how writing like Haygood's set such firm limits on African American education and citizenship, we have heightened appreciation of negotiation Frances E. W. Harper carried out in her 1880s serialized novel, Trial and Triumph, which addressed issues about blacks' education through experiences of characters being taught at home, in church, on job, and in school--that is, within nurturing community education model. And if we position Harper's portrayal of education alongside white middle-class tradition of home-guided teaching that assigned moral training to motherly mentors, we can understand how she used affiliation based on gender to counter Haygood's argument based on race. Overall, during post-Reconstruction, Harper's education-oriented literature faced what could have been debilitating dilemma evident in texts like Haygood's. Yet, in speeches like A Factor in Human Progress and in her Trial and Triumph serial, Harper encouraged members of her race to adapt domesticated learning practices and educational goals that had been touted, earlier in nineteenth century by white, middle-class women writers like Catharine Maria Sedgwick (e.g., in her Ella narrative in Stories for Young Persons) and Lydia Sigourney (e.g., in Letters to Mothers). Consistent with ideal of Republican motherhood, these antebellum narratives had argued for white women's increased access to learning so that they could prepare their children for civic responsibilities. Portraying women's home-based teaching as vital force uplifting nation, these domestic literacy management stories had later been adapted by writers like Sarah Josepha Hale to portray women schoolteachers as naturally extending middle-class women s rightful teaching role into larger community. …