Limitations

The South. Reformers called for "free schools for a free people," but few focused on the South in their efforts to establish public school systems. As winds of educational reform blew through the North, public education withered on the vine in the South, where the literacy rate lagged far behind that of the rest of the country. The vast majority of Southern black people, free or enslaved, remained illiterate, as did a large proportion of the Southern white population. Political leaders in the South tended to focus their educational interests only on providing the best for the sons of wealthy planters while remaining uninterested in or even hostile to popular education, even for poor whites. As the proslavery theorist George Fitzhugh explained in 1857, "we must unfetter genius, and chain down mediocrity. Liberty for the few—Slavery, in every form, for the...