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Article Excerpt
In February 1860, Curtis W. Jacobs, a Maryland state legislator, proposed a series of measures to end the problem of "free negroism." Convinced that African colonization was a failure despite more than $200,000 in state appropriations, Jacobs demanded that measures be passed to restrict free African Americans in Maryland so that they would willingly accept reenslavement. The state would deny hawkers and peddlers licenses to free blacks; prohibit them from owning dogs, guns, and real estate; and forbid them from operating or attending schools. "Unlawful assemblages" of black Marylanders would earn each participant thirty-nine lashes whether slave or free. If any free black were to "knowingly call for, receive or have in his possession any abolition book, handbill, newspaper or other paper of an inflammatory character, having a tendency to create discontent amongst, or stir up to insurrection, the negroes of this State, or induce them to abscond, he or she shall, upon conviction, be sold for life as a slave." The state would sell black convicts into slavery and revoke past manumissions so that free blacks could be sold into slavery for ten-year terms. All profits were to be used to promote public education for white children. (1)
While Jacobs's proposal to set aside the accumulated funds to support public schools for white children may seem an afterthought, his dual juxtaposition of blackness and servility with whiteness and educational opportunity foreshadowed the tensions of public education in postemancipation Maryland. In 1860, white and black Marylanders did not know that slavery's end was but four years away. When the state Constitution of 1864 finally ended what David Brion Davis so succinctly called "the problem of slavery in the age of revolution," (2) white Baltimoreans confronted the problem of race in an age of freedom. Public schools were the focal point of that contest because they were seen as "pillars of the Republic." While formal schooling does not loom large in antebellum historiography, schools were nevertheless understood as pivotal institutions because they shaped young white men and women for civic engagement, inculcating republican values believed to be essential to the survival of the nation. Thus it is little surprise that the rhetoric of sectional conflict was laden with references to republicanism. Republican language also permeated school board decisions about the content of public schooling, and the worthiness of teachers, during the Civil War. When the Constitution of 1864 emancipated enslaved African Americans and mandated public education for all children statewide, Maryland Unionists made public schooling a symbol of black freedom and, therefore, a target of later conservative reaction. Imbued with symbolic importance because of its ties to Revolutionary ideals, public schooling in Baltimore served as an ideological battleground before, during, and after the Civil War.
Public education was the lasting legacy of early American political thought. As Sean Wilentz suggests, republicanism at the beginning of the nineteenth century incorporated four ideological dimensions from the Revolutionary era--commonwealth, virtue, independence, and citizenship. To these the "middling sorts" of the late eighteenth century added equality, by which they meant equal opportunity and respect under the law. Of these dimensions, the supporters of state-funded education drew most heavily on virtue and equality. Public schools could teach children the necessity of placing the good of the many before their own self-interests, thus fitting them for civic responsibility as adults. In nineteenth-century parlance, public schools were "common schools" as well. "The common school," writes Ronald Butchart, "was 'common' not in the sense of 'ordinary' or 'plain,' but in that everyone attended in common, supported it in common, and learned a common curriculum." Equal schools held out the meritocratic promise of success in return for hard work regardless of students' class background. Indeed, republican sentiments continued to possess considerable significance within public education long after the market revolution of the early nineteenth century eroded them elsewhere in American society. (3) Republican ideals, as evinced by the founding fathers, became cornerstones of popular education because they provided a shared belief system that smoothed class conflict and substituted for the lack of a common heritage in a diverse, immigrant nation. By the mid--nineteenth century, as Richard Brown observes, "the idea of an informed citizenry had grown into an article of national faith." The public school had become the self-proclaimed secular temple of that faith. (4)
The unforeseen consequences of the Civil War transformed public schooling and weakened the role of republicanism in educational thought. Schools, once primarily repositories of civic belief, became the means by which city officials reinforced white supremacy once all African Americans were free. Unionists funded the first black public schools after emancipation in order to instill the values of hard work and deference in a people they believed benighted by slavery. When Conservative Democrats. regained control of city government, they initially sought to eliminate black public schools but reluctantly accepted segregated schooling because they feared the federal government would place Baltimore's African Americans under the care of the Freedmen's Bureau. Much as enslavement contradicted the ideal of equality during the "age of revolution," separate and unequal schools ran counter to public education's republican ethos. Regardless of political affiliation, city and school officials never intended the ideals of virtue, independence, and equality to apply to black education. But the significance of these events was not limited to their immediate effect on African Americans. During the Civil War, city officials first proffered public education as a panacea for civic ills. Segregation limited the emancipatory possibilities of black public education and became the first--but by no means the last--instance in which politicians and educators refashioned public schools to serve as a means of social containment. (5)
Baltimore's geographical location, as well as its recent political history, set the stage for the transformation of public education. In 1860, Maryland stood at the crossroads of nineteenth-century America. Tidewater plantations beckoned south, while growing commercial and industrial interests stretched both west and north. The secession crisis fractured state politics, although it is important to note that pro-Southern sentiments were not always synonymous with a desire to secede, and pro-Union sentiments did not readily translate into support for the war. Whereas the legislature appears to have been very much in earnest when it promised "to cling to the Union" but guaranteed that "should the hour ever arrive when the Union must be dissolved, Maryland will cast her lot with her sister states of the South and abide their fortune to the fullest extent," (6) it was not an accurate barometer of Maryland as a whole. Slave-holding counties within the state were guaranteed disproportional representation in the legislature because they counted enslaved free and enslaved African Americans for the purposes of apportionment. Furthermore, it should be apparent that if public sentiment is understood in its most obvious sense, then few scholars have ever inquired into the feelings of the more than 170,000 African Americans in Maryland, who constituted one-quarter of the state's total population. This is especially surprising considering that no city in the antebellum era had a larger free black population than Baltimore. (7)
Although Baltimore school board reports in the late 1850s still considered it necessary to distinguish "common schools" from public charity, schooling was nevertheless an accepted fact of city life before the Civil War. The city first had appropriated funds for common schools in 1829. A boys' high school (City College) was founded ten years later; Eastern and Western Female High Schools opened in 1844. By 1860, eighty-six schools with 300 teachers served a student population of almost 13,000, slightly more than half of whom were girls. (8) Public education was not flee, nor was attendance required. As late as the 1870s, no more than one-third of all white children attended a public school for even part of the year. Another third attended denominational schools or secular academies. The rest did not attend at all. Before the Civil War, black Baltimoreans maintained their own private academies but mounted public campaigns for their schools through petitions in 1839 and 1850. Sabbath schools were instrumental in providing basic educational skills alongside religious instruction. When the Reverend Noah Davis, a black Baptist minister, accepted an appointment in Baltimore in the 1840s, he found the city's free blacks "advanced in education, quite beyond what I had conceived of." Davis estimated that sabbath schools--as distinct from day academies--instructed 2,665 on the eve of the Civil War. (9) Yet white and black Baltimoreans saw schooling differently. For the former, education inculcated a sense of civic responsibility and appreciation for American democracy. For the latter, schooling was synonymous with freedom from servitude, both personal and intellectual.
As the sectional crisis between North and South deepened, white Baltimoreans viewed the sectional crisis through the republican language of civic virtue. (10) In the 1850s, republican values had dovetailed neatly with nativist rhetoric, providing Maryland Know-Nothings with a repository of patriotic symbols that could substitute for a lack of party history. A familiarity with "American" institutions--the sort provided by the common schools--was deemed necessary before immigrants could vote. In comments steeped in nativist educational sentiments, Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis (later the state's most prominent Unionist) proclaimed in 1856, "Foreigners who have grown up under despotic governments must learn the habits of republicanism. A boy of fifteen of American birth carries more of [the] inherent and living republic in his breast than any man born in a foreign country can." Such claims paralleled those made a decade earlier by Horace Mann, the foremost school reformer of the mid-nineteenth century: "Everybody acknowledges the justness of the declaration that a foreign people, born and bred and dwarfed under the despotisms of the Old World, cannot be transformed into the full stature of American citizens, merely by a voyage across the Atlantic, or by subscribing the oath of naturalization. If they retain the servility in which they have been trained, some self-appointed lord or priest, on this side of the world, will succeed to the authority of the master they have left behind them." (11) For the Unionists and Republicans who succeeded the Know-Nothings in power, public school administrators and teachers had an obligation to inculcate virtue and independence among their pupils.
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