To illustrate white need: Late as 1899, I heard, through Miss Sergeant, Principal of the Girls’ High School, Atlanta, of a white school in the Georgia mountains where one short shelf held all the books—one grammar, one arithmetic, one reader, one history, one geography, one spelling-book. Starting at the end of the first bench, a book would pass from hand to hand, each child studying a paragraph. There are schools of scrimped resources now, where young mountaineers make all sorts of sacrifices and trudge barefoot seemingly impossible distances to secure a little learning. Nobody in these communities dreams of calling for outside help and sympathy, and when help is tendered, it must be with the utmost circumspection and delicacy, or native pride is wounded and rejects. Appalachia is a region holding big game for people hunting chances to do good.
MISS EMILY V. MASON
Photograph by Vianelli, Italy
The various Constitutional Conventions adopted public school systems for their commonwealths. In Virginia, it was not to go into operation until 1871, after which there was to be as rapid extension as possible and full introduction into all counties by 1876. The convention made strenuous efforts, as did that of every other State, to force mixed schools, in which, had they succeeded, the white child’s chance of an education would have suffered a new death.
Early text-books used in public schools grated on the Southerner; they were put out by Northern publishing houses and gave views of American history which he thought unjust and untrue. The “Southern Opinion” printed this, August 3, 1867: “In a book circulating in the South as history, this occurs: ‘While the people of the North were rejoicing because the war was at an end, President Lincoln, one of the best men in the world, was cruelly murdered in Washington by a young man hired by the Confederates to do the wicked deed.’ It calls Lee ‘a perjured traitor;’ says ‘Sherman made a glorious march to the sea;’ prints ‘Sheridan’s Ride’ as a school recitation.” To comprehension of the Southern mind as it was then and is now in some who remember, it is essential that we get its view of the “Ride” and the “March.”
“Have you seen a piece of poetry,” a representative Southern woman wrote another in the fall of 1865, “called ‘Sheridan’s Ride’? If you can get it, do send it to me. I want to see if there isn’t some one smart enough to reply to it and give a true version of that descent of armed ruffians upon store-rooms, stables, hen-roosts and ladies’ trunks—even tearing the jewelry from their persons—even robbing the poor darkies of their watches and clothing. Not a single Confederate soldier did they encounter. They ought to live in history! My Vermont friend, Lucy Adams, says these things ‘are not true, no one at the North believes them, they are impossible.’ But we know they are true. I was very anxious to send you Sherman’s speech at Cincinnati—perhaps you have seen it—in which he unblushingly sanctions all the outrages committed by his men. I really think some notice ought to be taken of it, but our papers, you see, are all ruined now; and in New York, only ‘The News’ dares publish anything true.... I have found a copy, but this says at ‘Lancaster, Ohio’; perhaps he said the same thing twice; it was at the close of a grand speech: ‘Soldiers, when we marched through and conquered the country of the rebels, we became owners of all they had; and I don’t want you to be troubled in your consciences for taking, while on our great march, the property of the conquered rebels—they had forfeited their right to it.’”
“For several years since the nineties it has been my privilege to serve a large charitable institution here,” a Southern friend writes me from a Northern city. “On the Fourth of July I join with as much fervor as anybody in the flag salute, in singing ‘America’ and all the other patriotic songs, until they come to ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ That takes the very heart out of me! Sometimes it is all I can do to keep from bursting into tears! Then again I feel as if I must stand up and shout: ‘We should not teach any American child to sing that song!’ You know the home of one of my dearest friends was in the way of that march; it was burned to the ground and she, a little girl, and her aged grandfather wandered homeless in the night. I wonder, O, I wonder, if our soldiers in the Philippines, Northern and Southern boys, are giving grounds for any such songs as that! I’d rather we’d lose the fight!”
A cause operating against education of both races remains to be cited. The carpet-bag, scalawag and negroid State Governments made raids on educational funds. In North Carolina, $420,000 in railroad stock belonging to the Educational Fund for the Benefit of Poor Children were sold for $158,000, to be applied in part payment of extended per diems of legislators. These legislators gave at State expense lavish entertainments, and kept a bar and house of prostitution in the Capitol; took trips to New York and gambled away State funds by thousands; war had left a school fund, taxation increased it; but for two years no child, white or black, received benefits. There was money enough for the Governor to raise and equip two regiments, one of negroes, for intimidation of whites, but none for education. Of Georgia’s public school fund of $327,000, there seems not to have been a penny left to the State when her million-dollar legislature adjourned in 1870.
Louisiana’s permanent school fund for parishes vanished with none to tell where it went. Attention was called to its disappearance by W. E. Brown, the negro State Superintendent of Education. When Warmouth, was inaugurated (1868), the treasury held $1,300,500 for free schools. “Bonds representing this,” states Hon. B. F. Sage, “the most sacred property of the State, were publicly auctioned June, 1872, to pay warrants issued by Warmouth.” Warmouth, like Holden of North Carolina, and Scott and Moses of South Carolina, raised and maintained at State expense a black army. In 1870, the Radical Governor of Florida made desperate efforts to lay hands on the Agricultural Land Scrip, property of the Agricultural College of that State; to save it from his clutches C. T. Chase, President of Public Instruction, asked President Grant’s intervention. A forger, embezzler and thief presided over Mississippi’s Department of Education. In every State it was the same story of public moneys wasted by nefarious tricksters who had ridden to power on the negro ballot; the widow and the orphan robbed, the gray-beard and the child; the black man and the white.