Literacy in the South

In the United States today, being literate—having the ability to interact with, understand, and produce written texts—is considered a fundamental right of all people. Americans expect their political and economic leaders to work to increase literacy so that everyone can enjoy the benefits that literacy can bring. Americans would be shocked to hear public proclamations that children should not be allowed to attend school, or that books should be limited in circulation. Yet, in the nineteenth-century South, it was commonplace to hear public [Page 478]figures talk about the need to prevent children from learning to read or write and to limit access to written materials to adults.

It was more than mere talk, however. Southern politicians used a variety of methods to limit literacy and its benefits in the antebellum era. Most significantly, an entire race was legally prevented from learning to read and write as states throughout the region prohibited the teaching of literacy to African Americans. In addition, public schools were grossly underfunded because the well-to-do largely decided to support an alternative set of private educational institutions and to send their children to schools outside the region.

State legislators held lengthy debates about how to prevent the spread of printed materials and in several instances passed legislation banning books and broadsides. State governments ordered federal postal officials to stop the delivery of books perceived as harmful. In the 1850s, missionaries from the northern United States offering religious tracts to Southerners were greeted with hostility and threatened with violence by sheriffs and armed patrollers. In the face of such opposition, the American Tract Society eliminated its once-thriving missionary service and pulled from the region virtually every individual charged with the duty of circulating these religious pamphlets.

Political and economic decisions also led to Southerners having restricted access to published materials because of an underdeveloped infrastructure. Books, journals, and newspapers were more difficult to obtain in the South than in the North. Southern publishing houses were virtually nonexistent. Consequently, throughout the nineteenth century, southern children were less likely to have attended school, and southern adults were less likely to be able to read or write than their counterparts in the North or West.

The initial aims of the efforts against literacy were relatively simple. Prevent the enslaved population of the South—African-born slaves and their descendants—from acquiring literacy so that they would be unable to either initiate revolts or flee to other regions. Whites in the antebellum South constantly were aware of the threat to their well-being by slaves seeking to end their oppression. Slaves frequently outnumbered Whites on the remote and isolated farms and plantations of the rural South.

Slaveowners throughout the Atlantic world were mindful of the experience of slaveowners of the French colony of Saint Domingue. The bloody revolution that slaves began in the colony in 1791 ended with the creation of an independent and free Haiti in 1804, forever reminding wary slaveowners and eager slaves of the possibility of a captive people rising in fury and successfully transforming a slave society into one that was free.

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