Education during the slave period in the United States

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See also: Anti-literacy laws in the United States

“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom”

Booker T. Washington

Phillis Wheatley frontispiece 1834

For schooling during the Civil War see Education of freed people during the Civil War. For information after the war see Black school.

During the era of chattel slavery in the United States, the proper education of enslaved African Americans, with exception made for religious instruction, was highly discouraged and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states. After 1831 (The Revolt of Nat Turner), the prohibition against educating enslaved persons was extended in some states to free blacks as well.

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Historical context

Slave owners saw literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery and their financial investment in it. As a North Carolina statute stated,

"Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion."

Literacy enabled the enslaved to read abolitionist writings and learn about the slave revolution in Haiti and the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Learning to read also allowed slaves to learn about escape routes and safe refuges in the Northern states and Canada. Literacy was believed to make the enslaved unhappy and insolent. As stated by prominent Washington lawyer Elias B. Caldwell:

The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them, in their present state. You give them a higher relish for those privileges which they can never attain, and turn what we intend for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.

Nonetheless, both free and enslaved African Americans continued to learn to read through clandestine efforts of sympathetic whites and informal schools. In the Northern states, African Americans sometimes had access to formal schooling, and were more likely to have basic reading and writing skills.

Legislation and prohibitions

Illustration of black students excluded from school, 1839

South Carolina, established in 1670, relied on enslaved Africans for its agricultural economy. Educating enslaved people was seen as disruptive to this economic model. In 1739, after the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed laws prohibiting the education of enslaved people. This legislation was a response to fears among plantation owners concerning the spread of abolitionist materials.

After Nat Turner's Revolt in 1831, several states passed laws restricting education for enslaved people. Virginia abolished all colored schools and ordered teachers to leave the state. Mississippi and other states passed similar laws, requiring free African Americans to leave the state and black preachers to obtain permission to speak.

North Carolina, which had previously allowed free African-American children to attend schools, passed a law in 1830 punishing slaves for teaching others to read or write. By 1836, public education for all African Americans was strictly prohibited.

Education and subversion in the Antebellum Era

Enslaved people taught each other how to read and write.

Enslaved people received Biblical literacy from their masters as early as the 1710s. Phillis Wheatley, taught by her master, used her skills to write poetry. Many slaves learned to read through Christian instruction, but writing was rarely encouraged. Slave owners saw writing as a mark of status, unnecessary for slaves.

Evidence suggests that enslaved people practiced reading and writing in secret. Slates with carved writings were discovered near Mount Vernon, indicating literacy activities despite prohibitions.

Douglass's Perspective

Frederick Douglass understood that the pathway from slavery to freedom was through the power to read and write. Over 100 years later, Mark Twain echoed a similar sentiment, stating, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

Free black schools

Main article: Black school

Isaac and Rosa, formerly enslaved students at the Louisiana Free School

In the 1780s, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (PAS) and the New York Manumission Society (NYMS) established schools for free blacks. The African Free School, founded in 1787, provided education for blacks in New York City for over six decades.

In 1863, an image of two emancipated slave children, Isaac and Rosa, studying at the Free School of Louisiana, was widely circulated in abolitionist campaigns.

Reading the Emancipation Proclamation

Notable educators

• John Berry Meachum, a black pastor, created a Floating Freedom School in 1847 on the Mississippi River to circumvent anti-literacy laws.
• Margaret Crittendon Douglass, a white woman imprisoned in Virginia in 1853 for teaching free black children to read.
• Catherine and Jane Deveaux, a black mother and daughter who ran underground schools in Savannah, Georgia with the Catholic nun Mathilda Beasley.
• Mother Mary Lange, who with her Oblate Sisters of Providence founded St. Frances Academy in 1828.
• Mother Henriette DeLille, who with her Sisters of the Holy Family founded schools in New Orleans in the mid- to late-1800s, including St. Mary's Academy.

External links

• Harvard Educational Review, SELF-TAUGHT African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by HEATHER ANDREA WILLIAMS CHAPEL HILL: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2005
• Kimberly Sambol Toscol, The Slave Experience: Education, Arts, & Culture, PBS.com
• http://www.aaihs.org/rethinking-early-slave-literacy/

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