In 1830, the United States comprised 24 states and a population of some 13 million of whom, about 2 million were slaves. Most of them toiled on plantations and farms in the south. Some 320,000 free blacks were located for the most part, in cities of the North and upper South. Their freedom, and consequently their educational opportunity, was severely constrained by white society. Laurence Kernan calls it a quasi-freedom. >> White Southerners came face to face with the stark reality that illiterate slave population undoubtedly would rise up to throw off its chains. On the night of August 22nd, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved field hand by day, and visionary Evangelical preacher by night, led a violent slave revolt in a black belt county of southeastern Virginia. Over a two day period, Turner and his disciples slaughtered 57 Whites, 46 of them were women and children. A combination of White vigilantes, state militia, and federal troops brutally suppressed the rebellion. Scores of Blacks were killed in the fighting. Others like Turner were hanged from trees. In the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion, not only in Southern Virginia but also throughout the South's Black belt counties, Whites tightened slave codes, outlawed slave literacy, restricted Black religious assemblies and mounted nightly slave patrols drawn from county militias to root out offenders Black and White. This panicked reaction by Whites notwithstanding, about 10% of enslaved Blacks acquired reading and numeracy skills in informal ways. This group likely included slaves in skilled occupations necessary to the agrarian economy. It also included household slaves taught by religiously minded masters and mistresses. Others attended clandestine slave schools, some of which were taught by sympathetic Whites. >> In the North, free Blacks in the large cities had access to Quaker sponsored African free schools. Some free Blacks has sufficient means to send their children to inexpensive Black taught Hayes schools. Whether provided by White charitable means or by their own tuition payments, the opportunities free northern Blacks had for elementary education did little to advance their social mobility, for they were denied access to White controlled labor markets and in most northern states, to the ballot box and political participation. >> As for American Indians, a much smaller population than Blacks, the decades of the 1820s and 1830s witnessed the transformation of federal policy from attempts to assimilate Native Americans in their ancestral homelands to their removal to federal lands west of the Mississippi river. What had begun as a policy of Thomas Jefferson's administration in the first decade of the 19th Century to support Protestant missionary work in Christianizing the eastern tribes and teaching them to be farmers, evolved into something quite different as the nation's westward expansion gathered momentum after the War of 1812. >> The Cherokee tribe, whose villages and hunting lands were in the Appalachian mountains of Georgia, the two Carolinas and Tennessee acceded to the government's plan for assimilation. The tribe cooperated with missionary and federal efforts to build a total of eight boarding schools in the region. Here youngsters were taught reading, agricultural practices and domestic arts. English was the language of instruction and a Lancasterian monitorial system was used. By the late 1820s, the Cherokees had their own written language and printing press. By degrees, they were becoming literate and agricultural. Yet the tide of American expansion was moving against them and the other eastern tribes. The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the cession of Indian lands in exchange for lands west of the Mississippi, where the tribes were to be relocated and educated for assimilation. The term reservation would not appear until after the Civil War. Between 1831 and 1838, the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee Nations were expelled from their tribal lands east of the Mississippi and marched to the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, along what was notoriously called the Trail of Tears. >> Thus far in this module, we've discussed the social and economic contexts of the common school movement, particularly its foundations and the religious fires of the second Great Awakening, and the turbulence of the national market economy. We've witnessed the growth of the common school movement from its origins in the early decades of the 19th century when the landscape of New England and the upper Midwest was pockmarked by poorly tended district schools to the 1830s and 1840s when a national movement for state systems of universal free common schools was underway and growing. We've also considered the exclusion of two social groups from the common school movement, Blacks free and slave and American Indians. In our next episode, we take up the subject of secondary education, looking at two institutional forms that stake the claim to older pupils seeking an education beyond the elementary level of the common school. These institutions were the academy and the fledgling U.S. high school. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
