Going Against the Grain (Part 3)

 There were three events put together from November 7, 1861-January 1, 1863 to form the history in the making. The first event occurred on January 1, 1863 where President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation known as the Emancipation of Proclamation which gave all states in rebellion the time between September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, to declare their allegiance to the United States and if they failed to do so their slaves would have been taken away and freed. So as the Civil War went on, several million slaves were freed. The war symbolically and practically became a crusade against slavery.

Even before the Emancipation of Proclamation, the first important event was the victory of Union troops over Confederate troops on Hilton Head Island. The second event was the Port Royal Experiment which was launched by Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase and others including abolitionist Robert Purvis, Forten’s uncle. The experiment had two parts. One part was the economic: “the thinking of the day was that the freed people on the Sea Islands needed to be managed in order to expedite the claiming of the land that they occupied by the U.S. government and also to expedite the development of the critical resources on the islands”(p.144). The second part of the experiment was focused on the “contraband” of the people. This was the distribution from the government of teachers, ministers, and superintendents to aid in the assistance of the freed people.

On September 16, 1863 President Lincoln sent instructions to the Board of Tax Commissioners for the District of South Carolina. This support of education marked the first federal funding for educational opportunity for African Americans.

Missionaries thought of African Americans as deserving freedom and educational opportunity, but they found it difficult to think of African Americans as being equal or to treat them as such. Charlotte did not view freed slaves as either contraband or unequal. She viewed them as downtrodden members of her own race, as her own people, and she felt obligated, as a person who had benefited from greater opportunity, to lend a helping hand. Forten demonstrated her love of learning, keeping an amazing account of the books she read and other literacy activities. At the age of 25 Forten was the first African American woman to participate in the very first federal-tax supported effort to educate African Americans. Forten became the first African American to teach at the Epes Grammar School in Salem, Massachusetts. Forten was also an active member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. In the meantime, she taught the freed slaves reading, writing, oral recitation, numbers, music, and whatever else she felt handy to share.

Laura Towne described the freed people she met as being strange, ignorant, barbaric, and unrefined. Talking about two African American women who was educated and talked well, Towne states “I actually forget these people are black, and it is only when I see them at a distance and cannot recognize their features that I remember it. The conversation at dinner flowed just as naturally as if it were Northern whites” (pg.150).

My response to this reading was with all the bias behavior from the Northern whites and disgust in the whites, I am shocked they stayed around to complete the mission. I feel that Charlotte Forten was strong enough to take on such a mission and stick with it even though she had medical problems that could have stopped her.



Works Cited

         

Royster, Jacqueline J. "Going Against the Grain: The Acquisition and Use of

                 Literacy" in Traces of Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among

                African American Women. U of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.