In November of 1861 federal troops took control of Port Royal, South Carolina for the Union. Realizing that their way of life was no longer tenable in Sea Islands, the white land owners fled and the slave-holding... [ view full abstract ]
In November of 1861 federal troops took control of Port Royal, South Carolina for the Union. Realizing that their way of life was no longer tenable in Sea Islands, the white land owners fled and the slave-holding plantation economy disappeared with them. The slaves, however, remained, which left them and their liberators with the task of constructing a new and entirely different society on the Sea Islands. In 1862, northern missionaries ventured south to undertake the mammoth task. One of the best known of these missionaries was Laura Towne.Seeing the need for an organized school system, Towne founded the Penn School in Port Royal.
This honors thesis focuses on the educators who followed in Laura Towne’s footsteps throughout the American South for decades to come. Activists from the Freedman's Aid Society travelled to various Southern schools to teach and advocate for equality, and like Laura Towne and the Penn Center, these teachers and schools challenged existing, racist social orders and became important foundations for the Civil Rights Movement. The project uses the extensive records of the Freedmen’s Aid Society to describe the development of schools throughout the South. The thesis also uses the letters from Nelly Hankins, a teacher from Maine who ventured to Atlanta, Georgia in 1920 to teach at Spelman College to show the lasting effects of the teaching tradition Laura Towne established. Nelly Hankins’s letters have never been published or used in an academic project before now.
Recent literature lacks a discussion of the lasting effects of missionary efforts in the post-Civil War South. My work will show that the Port Royal experiment, however, did not end in Port Royal, as the continuing flow of Northern teachers to the South demonstrates. Laura Towne and her fellow missionaries were the first in a line of Northern educators to venture southward, and their efforts served as a model for other educators for decades to come.
