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Article Excerpt
In John Bonner's A Child's History of the United States, published in 1866, schoolchildren read about the brave actions freedmen took on behalf of the Union cause. They read, for instance, about a "black man, Tillman, a steward on board a [Union] vessel seized by a rebel privateer, and left on board of her with the prize crew, [who] rose one dark night, ... and killed the prize captain and mate with an axe, and brought the vessel safely to the port of New York." Students were also introduced to a freedwoman washing the floors at a Union hospital who saved the life of a wounded and sick Union soldier whom doctors insisted was going to die. After days and weeks of caring for him "carefully and tenderly," feeding him with a spoon "as though he had been a baby," and sleeping on the floor while the sick soldier occupied her bed, the woman "had the pleasure of seeing her soldier completely restored to health." These and other events, Bonner explained, "dispel[led] the prejudice" against freedmen and opened the door for freedmen to serve as soldiers. Stories of brave freedmen and women convinced wartime Americans, and presumably Bonnet's young readers, that "there was something manly in the negroes after all." (1)
Written in the heady days after Appomattox, Bonner's classroom history was similar to many texts written in the North before and immediately after the American Civil War. In the midst of heated political battles about the Mexican War and slavery's expansion, slavery played a central role in classroom histories of the nation. Texts sought to establish an emancipationist legacy for the nation, and Bonner's history celebrated the realization of this legacy in the wartime enlistment of black soldiers. Samuel Goodrich had similar intentions in his Pictorial History of the United States. A picture portraying the arrival of the first slaves to Virginia in 1619 is included in the 1846 edition (fig. 1).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The accompanying text describes the slave trade and the emancipationist energy that followed the Revolutionary war and suggests that resistance to slavery grew in proportion to the extension of the trade. Recognizing slavery's central role in the narrative of American history, Goodrich wanted young schoolchildren to remember their ancestors who worked to end slavery and to block colonization schemes to send freedmen back to Africa. (2) But whereas the images and stories of individual slaves--and Northern abolitionists--grace the pages of antebellum Northern texts and texts written in the first decade after the war, slaves and slavery are conspicuously absent from later classroom histories. Indeed, the image of the first slaves arriving in the colonies was unceremoniously removed from the 1877 edition of Goodrich's Pictorial. Later editions of the text eliminated slavery altogether, an editorial decision that gave Goodrich the space to add glowing predictions for the nation's future rather than burdening his history text with the weight of the nation's slave past. In the 1877 edition of Pictorial, all images of slaves and slavery were gone, and Goodrich applauded national reconciliation efforts, because "the time had come to bury the past [for] both North and South were ready to forget and forgive." (3)
In the thirty-one years between editions of Goodrich's popular school history, Americans on the battlefield and on the home front argued about the end of slavery and the meaning of American nationalism. Wartime government policies such as emancipation and freedmen's civil rights, the wartime draft, and the income tax extended the scope and the powers of the federal government, permanently redefining the relationship between the individual citizen and the nation. The postwar nation that emerged held great possibilities for freedmen. Congress considered legislation requiring federal monitoring of elections and a generous aid to education bill, and, even in the redemption South, blacks continued to vote in the 1880s.
Yet even as politicians in the 1870s and 1880s considered a variety of measures designed to help former slaves achieve full citizenship, school-text authors like Goodrich quietly drew their own conclusions about the possibilities of a fully realized black citizenship. Abruptly writing slavery out of their classroom histories, textbook authors helped purge white Americans' memories of slavery and relieved postwar generations of the responsibility of rethinking the nation to include freedmen as citizens. By the 1880s, text authors' ambitious campaign of forgetting slavery was supported by de facto school segregation, paving the way for schoolchildren to "remember" a nation whose moral and industrial progress was briefly hindered by a war having nothing to do with slavery and a peace in which the freedmen were forgotten.
In a critical shift, children in postwar classrooms reconstructed a nation in which freedmen were workers but not citizens. By the 1880s, they read about slaves and freedmen as producers of cotton and other materials intended for industrial consumption. For example, in order to illustrate the positive influence of black emancipation for the young readers of his United States: Its History and Constitution (1889), Alexander Johnston contrasted the 51 million bales of cotton produced "in the last eighteen slave-labor crops" to the 75 million bales produced in "the first eighteen free-labor crops." (4) Johnston's is typical of classroom histories written twenty or more years after the end of the Civil War. In these texts, freedmen are rarely mentioned or pictured, and then only when their labor is translated into abstract dollar amounts.
Late-nineteenth-century revised classroom histories closely paralleled the political retreat from Reconstruction--the equivalent of Goodrich's call to forget and forgive. The national commitment to guaranteeing freedmen the rights of citizenship began in 1863 with Lincoln's adoption of emancipation as a wartime goal and largely ended with the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 and the collapse of Reconstruction governments in the South. C. Vann Woodward described the 1870s and 1880s, following federal withdrawal, as a period of "forgotten alternatives," when Southern race relations were variable and indeterminate. Nonetheless, by the 1890s, Woodward found that de jure segregation and disfranchisement marked the abandonment of federal support for black civil rights. While accepting Woodward's characterization, two recent studies have added depth to our understanding of the post-withdrawal period of Reconstruction. By examining a wealth of popular literature, public rituals, and political speeches delivered in the first five postwar decades, David Blight traced the erasure of African Americans from popular memory of the war, and Heather Cox Richardson linked Northerners' abandonment of the freedmen to turn-of-the-century fears of class conflict. (5)
By examining the school texts through which children "learned" about their nation's past and the composition of postwar classrooms that formed the setting for these history lessons, I seek to add another dimension to our understanding of the forging of a national memory of the Civil War. (6)
Charged with helping schoolchildren make sense of the momentous events of the war, school texts responded to the rapid way in which nationhood and citizenship were being redefined by shaping...
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