Education

Following the Civil War, money from wealthy American philanthropists, especially businessmen, began to influence both private and public education in the United States. These funds were directed toward primary education in the impoverished and war-devastated Southern states and higher education elsewhere. Antebellum Southern states had invested little in common schools. After the war, if they were to teach theretofore neglected white and black children, they would have to rebuild, expand, and rethink their educational systems. This was a tall order in the postwar Reconstruction period, and Northerners recognized the need to raise private funds from churches and individuals to supplement the educational efforts of the federally financed Freedmen’s Bureau.

Private and federal funding for Southern education focused on the secondary and college level to train teachers (black and white) for common, agricultural, and trade schools. Between 1865 and 1869 the American Missionary Association cooperated with the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish Howard University in Washington, D. C., and seven other black institutions, including Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta University in Georgia. Individual philanthropists joined in this federal-religious effort to rebuild Southern education. Beginning in 1867 George Peabody, a London, England, merchant and financier by way of Massachusetts and Baltimore, set aside $3.5 million to establish the Peabody Education Fund. Peabody’s aim was to “benefit the destitute areas of the South” and especially to aid the “children of the common people” by rebuilding its school system. He hoped that educational opportunity could bind the republic’s wounds and improve the Southern economy. The Peabody Fund was administered by a board of trustees that included Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes. It was ultimately used to establish the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (now part of Vanderbilt University).

In 1882, inspired by Peabody’s example and the successful work of the fund’s managers, John Slater, a Connecticut textile industrialist, donated $1 million to create the Slater Fund for “the uplifting of the lately emancipated population of the Southern States.” Hayes chaired the Slater Fund trustees, and under his leadership the fund invested in secondary and industrial training schools across the South, including Hampton Institute in Virginia, to produce prosperous black artisans, farmers, and businessmen. The Slater Fund also supported the efforts of individual scholars such as W. E. B. DuBois, who went to Germany to further his graduate training in Berlin.

With few exceptions white southerners welcomed the support of these funds because their industrial education focus was nonthreatening. The funds carefully followed local social customs and did not attempt to integrate schools or, as was the case of the Peabody Fund, support the mixed-race common schools that existed in New Orleans until the mid-1870s. Although the Slater Fund aided DuBois, the funds ignored his elitist notion that educational investment should concentrate on the “black talented tenth” who would attend universities and lead the black race. Between 1870 and 1900 northern philanthropy was a conservative but constructive force in southern society. In 1870, 80 percent of the African-American population 10 years or older was illiterate; by 1900 illiteracy had been reduced to 45 percent.

Philanthropists also established innovative universities in the post-Civil War years. Ezra Cornell founded Cornell University in 1868 by combining his $500,000 endowment with New York State’s Morrill Act land grant. The new institution was unusual in that instruction was offered in agriculture and engineering, as the Morrill Act intended, as well as in the liberal arts; the classics were taught, but students could substitute German and French for Greek; it was open to the poor as well as to the rich and, starting in 1872, to women as well as to men; and there were no religious requirements for either faculty or students. Cornell was noted for its “liberal, progressive, and practical spirit.”

Among other philanthropists, Johns Hopkins endowed both Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital, which he intended to be a teaching hospital for the university’s medical school. Hopkins died before the university opened in 1876, but unlike other American universities, it emphasized a graduate program designed to advance rather than to preserve knowledge. Leland Stanford endowed Stanford University, opened in 1891, with the largest American philanthropic gift up to that time. Stanford was coeducational and nonsectarian from its beginning, and Leland Stanford wished it to offer a broad curriculum in the arts and sciences as well as manual training. In the 1880s industrial training was in vogue not only for former slaves but also for the children of the affluent. John D. Rockefeller began contributing heavily to the University of Chicago in 1889 ($35 million by 1910), but unlike most philanthropists, he made no effort to influence its trustees, president, faculty, or curriculum.

Although virtually all American children were educated in public schools, philanthropic aid helped reduce illiteracy by training more teachers. And while states, complying with the Morrill Act, established universities with broad-based practical curricula, philanthropists established private universities that differed from traditional institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Further reading: B. Edward McClelland, The Social History of American Education (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

—Harry Stein

Vote to the descendants of those who could not vote in 1867 (in South Carolina [1895] and Louisiana [1898]). to civiL service REEorm, government employees were no longer active in getting out the vote, and that factor—along with registration laws, the “solid” Democratic South, and huge Republican majorities in the rest of the country— led to lower voter turnout. But as a harbinger of a more democratic era for them, women had won the vote by state action in the western states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho by 1900.

Further reading: Paul Klepner, Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870-1980 (New York: Praeger, 1982).