The Teacher Wars

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Authors: Dana Goldstein
her relative privilege to serve the race, and because she was a girl, this meant she was expected to teach. In 1856 she became the first African American to enroll in the Salem Normal School, one of the teachers colleges founded in Massachusetts by Horace Mann. While enrolled at Salem, Forten taught herself Latin in the evenings. She submitted poems and essays to
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
The Liberator
, an abolitionist newspaper. A few of her pieces were published, but Forten still considered herself a teacher first and a writer second. “I will spare no effort to become what [my father] desires that I should be,” she promised her journal, “to prepare myself well for the responsible duties of a teacher, and to live for the good that I can do my oppressed and suffering fellow creatures.”
    Forten was appointed the first black teacher in the Salem public schools, but she was soon forced to abandon her work when shesuffered a life-threatening respiratory infection. She was back in Philadelphia when the Civil War broke out, and by her twenty-fifth birthday on August 17, 1862, Forten vowed to overcome ill health in order to play her part, as a teacher, in the great unfolding drama of the war. She signed up to teach in one of the newly established Sea Islands schools for emancipated children. As Forten anticipated a physically challenging voyage into an active war zone, she prayed “that God in his goodness will make me noble enough to find my highest happiness in doing my duty.”
    Forten described her eighteen months teaching on St. Helena Island as “a strange, wild dream,” one that challenged many of her pious preconceptions about lifting her people out of dependence and poverty. She lived with other northern volunteers and officers’ wives in a drafty house abandoned by a rebel doctor and his family. There were too few blankets in the winter, and she confessed to “intense mental suffering” due to the constant threat of a Confederate invasion. Her students’ lives were even more difficult. They lived in former slave quarters, typically two-room huts with open holes for windows. In winter, fire pits clogged the air with poisonous smoke. Forten longed to teach modern habits of sanitation and personal hygiene, but she admitted it would be impossible to expect much improvement under such crowded conditions, without stoves or running water.
    The school met inside a one-room Baptist church, where Forten and another volunteer presided over 140 students, ranging in age from toddlers to a sixty-year-old woman who contentedly sat on the ground among her grandchildren, eager to learn her ABCs. Forten referred to them all as “my scholars,” and at first she was delighted by the freed slaves’ enthusiasm for learning. *1 “Coming to school isa constant delight and recreation to them,” she wrote. “They come here as other children go to play.” But she found the work “dreadfully wearying.” Some of her pupils were so young that they needed babysitting more than teaching;she wrote to philanthropists in Philadelphiato send picture books for toddlers. The older children, who just months before had been toiling in the fields, were unaccustomed to “intellectual concentration,” as Forten called it, and needed constant stimulation “in order to keep their thoughts from wandering. Teaching here is consequently far more fatiguing than at the North.”
    Forten created lessons meant to supplant memories of slavery with those of racial pride. She taught her students aboutHaitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had been born a slave. “It is well that they should know what one of their own color could do for his race,” she wrote in her journal. “I long to inspire them with courage and ambition.” At Forten’s request, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier sent the children of St. Helena a Christmas hymn he had

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