Free The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein Page A

he concluded, were teachers. In the states that became the Confederacy, it had been a crime to teach the four million enslaved men, women, and children to read or write. Pierce had met a few literate black people on the Sea Islands, but they had learned to read clandestinely and only haltingly, usually by befriending a white child. “All of proper age, when inquired of, expressed a desire to have their children taught to read and write, and to learnthemselves,” he wrote. “On this point, they showed more earnestness than on any other.”
    In part on Pierce’s recommendation, the islands became the site of a massive government and philanthropic intervention, known asthe Port Royal Experiment. If given an education and collective custody over their former owners’ property, could freed slaves build a functioning, self-sufficient society? Pierce put out a call to the North to recruit volunteer teachers:
    There are at Port Royal and other places, many thousands of colored persons, lately slaves, who are now under the protection of the U.S. Government. They are a well-disposed people, ready to work, and eager to learn. With a moderate amount of well-directed, systematic labor, they would very soon be able to raise crops more than sufficient for their own support. But they need aid and guidance in their first steps towards the condition of self-supporting, independent laborers.
    These agents are called teachers, but their teaching will by no means be confined to intellectual instruction. It will include all the more important and fundamental lessons of civilization—voluntary industry, self-reliance, frugality, forethought, honesty and truthfulness, cleanliness and order. With these will be combined intellectual, moral and religious instruction.
    In Philadelphia, an extraordinary young woman named Charlotte Forten was moved by this call to action. She was the fourth generation of black Fortens to be born free, the granddaughter of James Forten, a Revolutionary War veteran who was taken prisoner aboard a British ship. Many black prisoners of war were exiled to the West Indies as slaves, but James impressed the English captain with his intelligence and sense of humor and won his release. He later owned his own sail-making company and became a wealthy man. His descendants enjoyed elegant homes and private educations at a time when most black Americans lived in bondage.
    By the time Charlotte was born in 1837, the Forten family hadled abolition and temperance efforts in Philadelphia for several decades. Her mother died when she was three years old, and Charlotte grew into an introspective young woman, prone to waves of despondency. From her adolescence into her late twenties she kept a keenly observed, beautifully written journal, in which she recorded the contradictions of a life lived between extremes: Forten received the best education available to a girl of her race and class and met and corresponded with many of her era’s most important freethinking activists and artists, including the poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the famous abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, both of whom were white. But Forten also experienced the pain and loneliness of living as a free black woman moving alongside, if not exactly within, the American upper crust. Most of the white girls with whom she associated as a student avoided her outside the classroom. She had few intimate companions of her own age or race. At age seventeen she wrote that racism produced in hera “constant, galling sense of cruel injustice and wrong. I cannot help feeling it very often, it intrudes upon my happiest moments, and spreads a dark, deep gloom over everything.” She found it incredible that “every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind.”
    Throughout her life Forten struggled not to succumb to her natural pessimism. She had been raised with the expectation that she would use