“It Must Develop Men”: Frederick Douglass and Education in ..., Study notes of Printing

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[Expositions 8.2 (2014) 113–130] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 “It Must Develop Men”: Frederick Douglass and Education in Nineteenth-Century America EMILY HESS Ashland University Twenty-three years before the United States encountered the bloodiest and most divisive event in its history, Abraham Lincoln spoke to the Springfield, Illinois Lyceum on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” As a young Illinois congressman, Lincoln firmly asserted that while the Founding generation’s passion may have sustained the American Revolution and created the United States, cold, calculating reason provided the necessary foundation for its preservation.1 Reason furnished “general intelligence,” “sound morality,” and “in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws” to support and defend our country.2 Passion, on the other hand, threatened society with disorder and instability as mobs disregarded the law. Lincoln had cause for concern: divisive party politics and ethnic, religious, and racial animosities manifested early in the 1830s with “wild and furious passions” of “savage mobs” in the streets. “The most common targets of mob violence,” historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, “were the abolitionists and the free black communities that supported them.”3 Two months earlier and less than one hundred miles away from Springfield, the abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at the hands of a pro-slavery mob in his Alton, Illinois print shop. The emergence of organized abolitionism “explains much of the dramatic rise in the number of riots.”4 While Lincoln’s Lyceum Address alluded to this incident (“throwing printing presses into rivers, shooting editors”), he was not taking sides on the matter of abolitionism but, rather, indicting mob rule. In this time of massive immigration, internal improvements, westward migration, urban instability, growing sectionalism, and discord over the institution of slavery, Lincoln urged “reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother, “let it be taught in schools,” and “let it be written in primers, spelling books and in Almanacs.”5 Again, over twenty years later and a month before the Civil War, Lincoln explained why reverence for the Constitution and the laws was “the only guide to safety in the present crisis.”6 Although Lincoln did not live to see Reconstruction, there is nothing to suggest that he would have departed from this belief that the fruits of reason provided the surest defense and successful reconstruction of the Republic. We also know, from his last public address, that Lincoln found the black man capable of such civic participation and responsibility, too.7 But in a time as racially tumultuous and divisive as the abolitionist age of the 1830s, what type of education should be provided to this newly emancipated race?8 Frederick Douglass and Education 114 The following paper will discuss how Frederick Douglass fostered a clear vision of education that would not only improve his race but also provide an intelligent, virtuous, and moral citizenry that “the proud fabric of freedom” could rest “as the rock of its basis.”9 He considered this both a necessity and act of justice. From his own experience, Douglass found education a vital component for full emancipation. Enlightenment made man “fit to be free” and capable of self- government.10 Ultimately, Douglass sponsored an integrated education that resurrected the materials of reason from Lincoln’s Lyceum address. Such education would elevate the black man to disprove stereotypes, overcome prejudice, and demonstrate his capacity for citizenship. This article examines Frederick Douglass’s education while enslaved, his road to enlightenment, what he considered an appropriate education for the emancipated race, and why the federal government should provide a universal and integrated education. “Slavery is the deadly foe of education.”11 In 1896, Booker T. Washington told a Brooklyn audience that his race “whether in slavery or in freedom” had always “been loyal to the Stars and Stripes” and no schoolhouse was opened that had not been filled.12 Indeed, in the three decades following the Civil War, freedmen responded to educational opportunities afforded them in such a manner that almost shocked white Southerners.13 Blacks moved from rural areas to towns, sacrificed to afford an education for their children, and established mock schoolhouses in churches, stables, basements, billiard rooms, plantation cotton houses, warehouses, and homes before missionary societies set up formal schooling. Even while negotiating labor contracts, some black men and women asked that the planter financially support the local black schoolhouse.14 Their desire for education was undoubtedly cultivated in the antebellum years as masters vehemently prohibited such activity. Educating slaves was highly discouraged and in most places unlawful. On one particular plantation, for example, if the master discovered a slave learned how to write, he cut off the slave’s fingers as punishment.15 As a child, little was available to the young, enslaved Frederick Douglass: he possessed no accurate knowledge of his age or parentage and he did not benefit from the appropriate lessons a family structure might afford. For his first eight years, the slave boy, Douglass recalled, “seldom has to listen to lectures on propriety of behavior, or on anything else. He is never chided for handling his knife or fork improperly or awkwardly, for he uses none. [. . .] He is never expected to act like a nice little gentleman, for he is only a rude little slave”; instead, “he literally runs wild; has no pretty little verses to learn in the nursery; no nice little speeches to make for aunts, uncles or cousins, to show how smart he is.”16 The barbarity and violence Douglass soon 117 Hess slaveholder.37 Douglass recalled never having met a young boy who defended the institution of slavery, “but I have often had boys console me, with the hope that something would yet occur, by which I might be made free.”38 For full emancipation, to reverse the conditioned slave and master, both races—all of society—needed new educations.39 Douglass worked as an itinerant abolitionist speaker for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society for a number of years after his escape. As he recalled in one of his autobiographies, “All that the American people needed, I thought, was light. Could they know slavery as I knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.”40 Like the articulate slave in The Columbian Orator, Douglass believed the United States simply needed an exposition of the horrors of slavery from an articulate, intelligent black man. He soon realized, however, a grander education would be necessary. The Civil War, according to Douglass, served the purpose as an “apocalyptic education” for the United States.41 Historian David Blight notes, “only small numbers of Americans would have willed emancipation in 1861; none could stop it in 1864–1865.”42 Douglass considered President Lincoln one of the war’s best students.43 He continued to recruit black soldiers for the Union cause, in part, because he was “so well satisfied” with Lincoln and “the educating tendency of the conflict.”44 Moreover, Douglass urged black men to enlist for the Union during the Civil War to demonstrate to all of society their capacity to reason: “you are a man [. . .] if you were only a horse or an ox, incapable of deciding whether the rebels are right or wrong, you would have no responsibility, and might like the ox go on eating your corn.”45 But, instead, “manhood requires you to take sides.”46 In January of 1864, a year after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass addressed the Women’s Loyal League at the Cooper Institute in New York City and spoke on the meaning of the Civil War. If the Union continued to fight, struggle, and sacrifice, this “abolition war” would produce a different country. With nothing “analogous to the old Union” and “great moral changes in the fundamental condition of the people,” this new country would not “brand the Declaration of Independence a lie.”47 However, this “new order” would not come by Union victory or emancipation alone. As Douglass wrote in Douglass’ Monthly, “the work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.”48 Education needed to be an integral part of the postwar process. Douglass hoped the New England schoolhouse would replace every Southern whipping-post: “Schools for the education of dusky millions will be required, and all the elevating and civilizing institutions of the country must be extended to these people” since slavery has “stood athwart the pathway of knowledge and progress” and “kept the nation from fully becoming what it was meant to be.”49 The institution of slavery inhibited Americans—both slave and master—from bettering themselves for their Republic. Frederick Douglass and Education 118 He dreamt this new country would be a place where general intelligence would flourish— where “no man shall be fined for reading a book”, “imprisoned for selling a book” or “flogged or sold for learning to read.”50 Drawing from his own experience in the Auld home and teaching Sabbath School, “nothing had given more meaning to his life than the freedom, self- understanding, and power he had attained through language and learning.” Thus, education “was indispensable to his social reform policy, as well as to his vision of Reconstruction.”51 Legal emancipation meant nothing without educating both races. Moreover, the emancipated race needed to be an educated race for the stability of the nation. This was not a matter of preference or prejudice but national importance: “we must (provide education) or give up the country.”52 Only Southern blacks provided the necessary stability for this new order that emerged after the Civil War. A country “based upon loyalty, liberty and equality” and “delivered from all contradictions” could only be maintained with “a profounder wisdom” and “holier zeal” than anything witnessed during the Civil War. The most courageous and patriotic Americans were needed to support the Republic.53 Ex-Confederates, while defeated, were not reformed. “It would be absurd and ridiculous,” Douglass wrote, “to expect that the conquered traitors will at once cordially cooperate with the Federal Government.” Instead, a “new class of men, men who have hitherto exercised but little influence on the State” would be needed in the South.54 Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner agreed. In a letter to John Bright in March of 1865, Sumner stated that without black Southerners and their vote, “the old enemy will reappear.”55 Because this emancipated race neutralized the potential passion of ex-Confederates, Douglass argued, “we shall have to educate the (emancipated) people.”56 As he told readers of The New National Era in September of 1870 (seven months after the ratification of the 15th amendment), “we are henceforth to fall or flourish together” as “the safety and prosperity of the Republic depends upon the intelligence of colored voters” standing together “in the maintenance of those great rights and liberties.”57 This process would not happen overnight, however, as “there is no such thing as immediate Emancipation either for the master or for the slave.” The slow work of Reconstruction needed to be a “radical revolution in all modes of thought” and only “time, experience, and culture” can “gradually bring society back to the normal condition from which long years of slavery have carried all under its iron sway.”58 Until then, Douglass wrote, “no colored voter shall either forget or forgive the men who have enslaved him until they have repented.” “How can you organize Reconstruction except on the everlasting foundation of education?”59 119 Hess The Freedman’s Bureau provided one of the first educational opportunities for freedmen postwar and attempted to create that safeguard for the Republic.60 Established by the federal government in March of 1865, the Bureau (officially known as The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) aided ex-slaves transition from enslavement to freedom. In addition to helping locate family members, providing rations, and negotiating labor contracts, the Bureau coordinated the schooling, activities, and institution building by Northern aid, abolitionist and missionary societies for freed people’s education. For abolitionists, their work remained unfinished until the black man held equal rights in postwar society. Indeed, many Northern white women who ventured south to teach in freedmen’s schools considered themselves “soldiers,” continuing the Union campaign their father, husband, brothers, and cousins started during wartime—that is, total emancipation of the black man.61 Not surprisingly, abolitionists’ post-bellum activities evoked similar violent responses as their antebellum emancipation efforts. Using Frederick Douglass’s life as example, James McCune Smith wrote in the introductory notes of Douglass’s autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom that education provided Douglass “first as a means of attaining liberty; then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood” and “determined courage.”62 As discussed earlier, Southerners knew the potential knowledge possessed to liberate the body and mind and many engaged in racial violence and mob rule in hopes of maintaining black illiteracy and inferiority. One Georgian recorded, “It is well known that the sight of a Negro school house stirs up the rabid feelings of the Ku-Klux-Klan gang, as the sight of water is said to disturb a mad dog.”63 In spite of this, by 1870, thousands of schools housed 3,300 teachers and almost 150,000 students.64 While this was a relatively small portion of the freed population, the Bureau’s educational advancements in the postwar South are considered their greatest success. Unlike the Bureau’s other efforts, education was the only activity that left permanent institutions in the South as bureau leaders were “convinced that blacks would benefit more by recognition as equal citizens than from being treated as a special class permanently dependent upon federal assistance and protection.”65 In his approach as Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard understood, like Douglass, that access to education was “central to the meaning of freedom” and served as the foundation “upon which all efforts to assist the freedmen rested.”66 Besides acquiring land, blacks looked to education to free them from mental and physical dependency on the Southern white population. A “mental appetite” needed to be awakened to “lift the freedman ‘to the proper position of manhood and equality.’”67 As one Mississippi freedman remarked, “If I nebber does do nothing more while I live, I shall give my children a chance to go to school, for I considers education next best thing to liberty.”68 Frederick Douglass and Education 122 the fundamental values of the community.”97 In his speeches, Douglass emphasized the third Lincolnian pillar for a stable Republic, “reverence for the Constitution and laws.” Political theorist Nicholas Buccola writes on this very subject, highlighting civic ceremonies where Douglass spoke and provided a “moral education” for Americans. “These occasions,” Buccola writes, “he hoped, would provide citizens with opportunities to think about and discuss the meaning of political lives.”98 From his most famous “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”— explaining the gap “between the moral ideals of the Declaration [. . .] and the realities of American life”—to Decoration Day speeches—this ritual served as a “celebration of the rights that are promised in the American founding documents and it is a reminder of the duties of citizenship.”99 Douglass also revered the country’s leaders, particularly Lincoln, in various speeches. He pointed to Lincoln’s humble beginnings when, with his “fortitude and industry which could split rails by day, and learn grammar at night at the hearthstone of a log hut . . . prepared this man for a service to his country to mankind.”100 When Douglass called for equal rights and education for the black man after the war, he did so believing this would complete their mental and physical emancipation and provide a more stable Republic that lived up to the founding creeds in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He never entertained the idea of colonization and “the love of the country,” he believed, would check the black man upon all schemes of such. “We are here, and here we are likely to remain,” Douglass declared, “we have grown up in this Republic, and I see nothing in her character, or even in the character of the American people as yet, which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.”101 However, in order to keep this Republic, the youth—all youth—must be educated, “it is everywhere an accepted truth,” he told The Colored Convention of Louisville: In a country governed by the people, like education of the youth of all classes is vital to its welfare, prosperity, and to its existence . . . the fact remains that the whole country is directly interested in the education of every child that lives within its borders. The ignorance of any part of the American people so deeply concerns al the rest that there can be no doubt of the right to pass laws compelling the attendance of every child at school.102 He urged Congress to “enter vigorously upon the work of universal education,” instead of waiting on the states, because “to withhold this boon is to neglect the greatest assurance it has of its own perpetuity.”103 For Douglass, an integrated and universal education encouraged “forms of moral responsibility that are essential to civic life,” “responsible behavior because educated people [. . .] are less likely to behave immorally,” and “the development of stronger bonds of civic 123 Hess education by bringing (or forcing) citizens together into a public space where they must interact with one another.”104 Providing universal education to the black man was a necessary act of justice and preservation.105 Douglass urged a manly education, with Lincolnian characteristics as the foundation of such education. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the 13th amendment. While Congressional debates have changed since Reconstruction, Douglass’s thoughts on education retain their currency today. Education provides moral and intellectual benefits to the individual, his/her community, and country. Douglass “believed education was crucial for the development of free and responsible citizens.”106 Thus, for Douglass, a thriving Republic requires public schools to place civic education at the forefront of instruction. Such education should emphasize students’ common nationality as opposed to “any measure that authorizes or deepens one’s self- identification in predominantly racial terms.”107 As Douglass addressed the Manassas Industrial School’s first attendees in 1894, he reminded them, “God and nature speak to our manhood and manhood alone.”108 Endnotes 1. Jaffa 2004, 345. 2. Basler 2001, 84. 3. Howe 2007, 432; also see 430–35. 4. Ibid. 5. Basler 2001, 81. 6. Jaffa 2004, 259. 7. Basler 2001, 799. 8. For more on racial violence and political terrorism during Reconstruction, see Litwack 1980 and 1997. 9. Basler 2001, 85. 10. Buccola 2012, 148. 11. Foner 1999, 188. 12. Brotz 1991, 364. Frederick Douglass and Education 124 13. For more on freedmen and women seeking and funding education in the postwar South, see Butchart 1980, 169–76. 14. Litwack 1980, 475–76. 15. Litwack 1997, 53. 16. Gates 1994, 15, 144–45. 17. Ibid., 142. 18. Ibid., 37, 218. 19. Ibid., 38. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Ibid., 224. 22. Ibid., 225. 23. Ibid., 226. 24. Ibid., 227. 25. Ibid,, 298. 26. Ibid., 299. 27. Ibid., 71. 28. McAfee 1998, 81. 29. Gates 1994, 727. 30. Ibid., 731–32. 31. Ibid., 215. 32. Foner 1999, 215. 33. Buccola 2012, 152. 34. Foner 1999, 119–20. 35. Buccola 2012, 155; also see Buchart 1980, 174. Black Nationalist Martin Delany, for example, warned black students to be skeptical of and not trust their white schoolteachers 127 Hess 78. Ibid., 85. Charles Sumner, like Douglass, pushed further and demanded integrated education as racial segregation in education creates a “caste, and, on this account, a violation of equality.” 79. Ibid., 86. 80. Fairclough 2007, 7. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 17; Buchart 1980, 169. Douglass hoped education would not only provide the tools for self-elevation but disprove stereotypes and prejudice. His initial criticism of the Freedman’s Bureau was that it would exclude the black race “from the general schemes of civilization [. . .] that they will be an injury to the colored race. They will serve to keep up the very prejudices which it is so desirable to banish from the country.” 83. Douglass 1894. 84. McPherson 1975, 204–5. 85. Litwack 1980, 85. 86. Ibid. 87. Foner 1999, 585. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 586. 90. Anderson 1988, 10. 91. Foner 2002, 144. 92. Litwack 1997, 61. 93. Foner 2002, 365; Perman 2003, 90. 94. Ibid. 95. Litwack 1997, 53. 96. Buccola 2012, 137. 97. Ibid., 137–38. Frederick Douglass and Education 128 98. Ibid., 144. 99. Ibid., 144, 146. 100. Foner 1999, 615–24. 101. Ibid., 216–17. 102. Ibid., 680. Douglass marked a state’s potential for success upon its public education program. Michigan, for example, established such a program and Douglass deemed this state to have “a great future.” An entire editorial, “A Progressive State,” was dedicated to the subject: Buccola 2012, 154. 103. Ibid., 680. 104. Buccola 2012, 155. 105. Douglass 1849. 106. Buccola 2012, 155. 107. Myers 2013. 108. Douglass 1894. Works Cited Anderson, James D. 1988. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Basler, Roy P. 2001. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Blight, David. 1991. Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in the Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Brotz, Howard. 1991. African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920. New York: Transaction Publishers. Buccola, Nicholas. 2012. The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty. New York: New York University Press. 129 Hess Butchart, Ronald E. 1980. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedman’s Education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Douglass, Frederick. 1847. “The Right to Criticize American Institutions.” May 11, 1847. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-right-to-criticize-american- institutions/. Accessed July 10, 2013. _____. 1849. “The Destiny of the Colored Americans.” November 16, 1849. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-destiny-of-colored-americans/. Accessed July 10, 2013. _____. 1894. “Blessings of Liberty and Education.” September 3, 1894. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/blessings-of-liberty-and-education/. Accessed July 10, 2013. Fairclough, Adam. 2007. A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foner, Eric. 2002. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: First Perennial Classics. Foner, Philip. 1999. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. New York: Lawrence Hill Books. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1994. Frederick Douglass Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America. Gutman, Herbert. 1987. “The Post-Emancipation Origins of Afro-American Education.” In Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Edited by Herbert Gutman, 260–297. New York: Pantheon. Howard, Brevet General Oliver O. 1869. Report of Commissioner Bureau of Refugees, Freedman and Abandoned Lands, to the Secretary of War, October 20, 1869. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Howe, Daniel Walker. 2007. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press. Jaffa, Harry V. 2004. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.