PolarBear
Major
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2007
- Messages
- 6,706
Mattie Washington, formerly a slave in Virginia but now a freedwoman brings her daughter Viola to the new school set up by the Freedmen's Bureau to provide education for the former slaves. White and African American teachers came down from the North to set up these schools often bringing on the wrath of the planters.
An agent for the Freedman's Bureau in Texas had this to say in an 1868 report (now in the National Archives) to his supervisor in Galveston on the relationship between Freedmen and their former masters:
"The planters will not now agree to having schools on their plantations, their excuse being that a teacher might be the cause of trouble in one way or another among the freed-people. But the secret of their opposition is (I firmly believe) their wish to keep the Negroes entirely under a cloud as to the nature of their position as freedmen under the present laws of Congress, in order that they may be easier controlled for political purposes. They fear that a teacher will directly or indirectly imbue the freedmen with ideas and sentiments antagonistic to their peculiar views of the whites, and by that means they will loose the controls they are seeking to obtain over these freedmen."
Figures from Wm. Hocker set 325
An agent for the Freedman's Bureau in Texas had this to say in an 1868 report (now in the National Archives) to his supervisor in Galveston on the relationship between Freedmen and their former masters:
"The planters will not now agree to having schools on their plantations, their excuse being that a teacher might be the cause of trouble in one way or another among the freed-people. But the secret of their opposition is (I firmly believe) their wish to keep the Negroes entirely under a cloud as to the nature of their position as freedmen under the present laws of Congress, in order that they may be easier controlled for political purposes. They fear that a teacher will directly or indirectly imbue the freedmen with ideas and sentiments antagonistic to their peculiar views of the whites, and by that means they will loose the controls they are seeking to obtain over these freedmen."
Figures from Wm. Hocker set 325
