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EFACE
      In his most recent book,  a sweeping,  authoritative account of
slavery in the Western Hemisphere, the renowned historian David Brion
Davis emphasized "the revolutionary meaning of the Civil War--a
revolutionary message that the South and then the nation would long
struggle to repress. "��1�� Davis's point is one that historians have been
working to place at the center of the narrative of America's great upheaval
of Civil War and Reconstruction for the past two decades.  Eric Foner,
for example,  subtitled his definitive 1988 history of Reconstruction
"America's Unfinished Revolution," thereby drawing attention to the
repression--and oppression--that were the tragic aftermath of what Davis
presented as the revolutionary events of 1861 -1865.
     Among the most revolutionary of the war's outcomes was the mass
movement for the education of the four million men,  women,  and
children who had been liberated, and liberated themselves, from slavery
during the war.  This extraordinary drive for the uplift of an entire race--
a drive shared by thousands of whites,  including a high proportion of
white women--has been insufficiently examined by scholars.  Several
historians have concluded that the movement for black education was
primarily given form and direction by well-meaning,  and certainly

evoted and talented, Northern Christian missionaries affiliated with the
American Missionary Association (AMA).  While the AMA certainly
labored heroically to establish and maintain schools for freed people
throughout the  devastated  South,  however,  the  activities  of these
Northern philanthropists was only one part of a much larger and more
complex story.
      It is this richer story that Dr.  Ying Ye gives us in her excellent
book.  Dr.  Ye shows without doubt that,  rather than responding to
initiatives that came from the AMA or other Northern philanthropic
societies, black Southerners themselves initiated the drive for education.
In this sense, education became the first, radical mass social movement
for liberation undertaken by African Americans after 1861.
      Dr.  Ye places the wartime push for black education in a broader
context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century educational thought in
America, and she reveals that there had always existed a divergence of
views about the aims and even methods of education between Euro- and
Afro-American writers on the subject.  Also of great importance to this
story, given the specifically Southern context of wartime and postwar
black education, was the absolute prohibition in law, if not always in
practice, of providing even the most elementary forms of education, and
literacy in particular, to slaves.  "What he [ my master] most dreaded,
that I most desired,”wrote the great black abolitionist and escaped slave
Frederick Douglass about the dawning desire for knowledge that be felt
during his boyhood.  "That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully
shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the
argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only
served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.”��2�� This was

the reaction of millions of African Americans to the promise of literacy
and education as they experienced emancipation during the Civil War.
Douglass's booming voice in 1845 truly spoke for an entire striving people
twenty years later.
      ^ key event in the history of black education was the establishment
of a school in the camp of Federal armies at Fortress Monroe, Virginia,
in September,  1861.  This remarkable achievement, just six months
after the war began, serves as an empirical test for the hypothesis that
Northern benevolent societies were the initiators of black education,
while the freedpeople essentially reacted to the philanthropists' original
action.  Dr.  Ye shows that this iconic school was in every way the
outcome of black initiative, and not merely a response to the deeds of
others.  But the reason the school is in fact iconic is precisely because
the activities there were repeated again and again during the war and
subsequent Reconstruction period.
      Dr.  Ye therefore furnishes a new,  more appropriate sense of
proportion to our understanding of the relative roles that were played by
Northern white philanthropists (the American Missionary Association in
particular) and a proactive black community.  In conducting extensive
preliminary research in the secondary sources, Dr.  Ye began to consider
that African American initiative was much more important in the story of
 Civil War and  Reconstruction  black  education  than  the  standard
 narratives in the histories of Reconstruction have allowed.  The point of
 Dr.  Ye's research is by no means to denigrate the great work of the
 AMA, which indeed becomes more impressive the more closely it is
 examined,  but  to  challenge  the  simplistic  narrative  of  Northern
 philanthropic initiative followed by black response in the matter of early
 black education.
      In the course of her book, Dr.  Ye shows how, in this concrete
instance, education was not merely a tool for material advancement, but

an element in collective identity-formation as well.  Her research led her
to profound reflection on the purposes and effects of education, at all
levels.
      Dr.  Ye's book makes important contributions to the study of black
education, the social history of the Civil War, and education theory
itself.
Matthew J.  Mancini
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
June 2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
      First of all, I thank Dr. Shirley Loui, who gave me a chance in
1999 to come to Saint Louis University and study in the PhD program in
American studies. When I quit school and went back to China in the
same year because of some personal reasons, she kept in touch with me
and  encouraged  me  to  come  back  again  to  the  program.   Her
encouragement facilitated my return to SLU in 2002 and has contributed
to what I am today.
      Secondly, I thank Drs.  Elizabeth Kolmer,  Matthew Mancini,
Joseph Heathcott, Shawn M.  Smith, Jonathan C.  Smith and Wynne
Moskop.  They are all the best professors I have ever met in my
                                                                               
experience of being a student. In the past five years, they have not only
trained me into a scholar in the field of American Studies but also taught
me, by their own examples, how to be a good teacher.
     For planning this dissertation project, I want to express my thanks to
Drs.  Jonathan C,  Smith and Shawn M.  Smith.  Shawn read and
commented on my dissertation prospectus. Jonathan had given me a lot of
inspirations whenever I talked with him.
     For advice and encouragement in my dissertation research and
writing my greatest debt is to Dr. Matthew Mancini. He has given me
many useful suggestions and has carefully read and commented on an
earlier version of my manuscript.
     I want to express my particular thanks to Dr. Joseph Heathcott for

generously offering to be on my dissertation committee when Shawn, one
of my committee members, transferred from SLU to the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago.
      For financial support, I thank the Graduate School of Saint Louis
University. It awarded me a Dissertation Fellowship so that in the past
year I could concentrate my whole time and energy on the research and
writing of this dissertation.
      Finally, I want to express my thanks to my husband, Dr. Minglun
Cao, for his support and understanding in these five years.
Ying Ye
St. Louis, Missouri
April 2007

ABSTRACT
     This  dissertation  has  given  a  historical  explanation  for  the
extraordinary enthusiasm that the freed African Americans had displayed
for education in their first days of freedom, and has highlighted the
initiative role black people played in educating themselves before and
particularly during the Civil War.  Above all,  with sufficient and
irrefutable evidence, it has falsified the prevalent notions that it was
Northern educators who either brought schooling to the ex-slaves or
modeled and transmitted the values of education to them and that it was
Northern societies that established the first schools among the former
slaves  and thus initiated the educational movement for the freed people.

CHAPTER 3
MAINSTREAM AMERICAN AND AFRICAN
AMERICAN THEORIES OF EDUCATION IN
THE ANTEBELLUM YEARS
! am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I
possess, and for which I have got--despite of prejudices--only too much
credit, not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native
genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother--a woman,
who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is,  at present,
fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt.
--Frederick Douglass
In his article "Ex-Slaves and the Rise of Universal Education in the
New South, 1860 - 1880," historian James D.  Anderson points out
that the dynamic role ex-slaves played in the South's postwar movement
for universal education has escaped the attention of all but a few
historians.  He casts doubt on the validity of the theme that Northerners
either brought schooling to the ex-slaves or modeled and transmitted the
values of education to them.  He argues that ex-slaves' campaign for
schooling was firmly rooted in Southern soil and was not a Northern idea

imposed by Yankee missionaries and school teachers. (1)He says that
before the reason why African Americans emerged from slavery with a
particular desire for literacy can be understood, slavery and especially
slave literacy await refined and detailed study. (2)n her book "When I
Can Read My Title Clear ": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the
Antebellum South, Janet Duitsman Cornelius also argues that the roots of
the astonishing drive for education that the newly freed African Americans
displayed in the years of Reconstruction were traceable to the slave
experience. ~
      Anderson's and Cornelius's arguments direct us to reexamine freed
people's education in terms of their own beliefs of education, and impel
us to trace the evolution of black people's beliefs of education back to the
antebellum years, to their experiences in slavery.  Their arguments set
us thinking about questions like: What were African Americans' own
beliets of education? What was the distinctiveness of these beliefs of
education? And what brought about this distinctiveness? Indeed, it is
helpful and important to answer these questions at the outset of our
investigation of black cducation.
      The purpose of this chapter is to explore these questions.  In order
to highlight the distinctiveness of African American theories of education,
and to demonstrate better the dynamic relationship between education,
literacy,  freedom,  hegemony,  and  African  American  thoughts  of

education, the chapter situates black people's concepts of education
within the wider historical and cultural context, particularly within the
context of American theories of education at large.  It begins with a
survey of the major mainstream American theories of education during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a review of the cultural and
political beliefs that had generated and nourished them. (4) The chapter
then examines the contradiction between these mainstream notions of
education and the preservation of the slave system and how white
Americans reacted to this contradiction.  This examination leads further
to an  inspection  of the  dynamic  relationships  between  education,
literacy,  freedom,  hegemony  and  African  American  notions  of
                                                                                                     .
education.  The inspection of black educational theories chiefly focuses
on black literature on education,  namely,  those expressed in slave
narratives and in writings produced by David Walker and Frederick
Douglass, two prominent African Americans who had advanced and put
into words, in the antebellum years, clear and definite theories of black
education.
Education and Republican Citizenry
     A prevailing American theory of education in the late eighteenth and
zhe early half of the nineteenth centuries was that education was
indispensable for citizenship in a democratic society.  Thomas Jefferson
first put forward this concept. 

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