Textbook Slavery: Debates Over Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in U.S. Moral Philosophy Textbooks, 1795-1859

• In Event: Discourses of Education and Citizenship in Historical Policy Contexts

Abstract

As Lacy K Ford has pointed out in Deliver Us from Evil (2009), historians have recently debated the extent to which white Southerners adopted pro-slavery views during the decades leading up to the Civil War. To date, no study has attempted to address this issue by analyzing the evolving treatment of slavery in the moral philosophy texts that commonly appeared in antebellum schools. This study tackles the question by analyzing the debates over slavery, emancipation, and citizenship for freed blacks in American moral philosophy textbooks during the period from 1795 to 1859.
Most scholars have characterized textbooks as reflecting a conservative social consensus. This interpretation is most evident in the landmark work of historian Ruth Miller Elson, (1964) who depicted schoolbooks as “guardians of tradition.” According to Elson, who examined hundreds of nineteenth-century textbooks, such texts presented an uninterrupted continuum of conservative puritan values from the 1790s through the 1890s. A number of researchers, including Michael Apple (1979) Eugene F. Provenzo (2010) and others, have argued that textbooks can serve as important sources of information about traditional social norms in American culture. But like Elson, these scholars generally have portrayed textbooks as promoting mainstream social values.
To understand how changing editions of moral philosophy texts reflected national debates, this paper uses a research method known as discourse analysis, derived from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Discourse analysis concentrates on a relatively large quantity of primary sources that are connected by a common topic or discipline. The goal of such analysis is to understand the way people of a given time interpreted the world. From this perspective, textbooks in antebellum schools were part of a “discursive field” and thus reflected not only mainstream, but also a wide range of social values.
This study analyzes the chapters on slavery in 52 moral philosophy textbooks, of which 12 were published for use in public schools from 1825 to 1859. Some of texts consulted in this study are housed in Special Collections at the Green Library, Stanford University, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and Special Collections at Harvard’s Gutman Library. Many are now publicly available online.
This study concludes that despite a relatively widespread consensus in the historiography regarding the inherent conservatism of school textbooks, not every moral philosophy text popular in American schools portrayed socially conservative values. In fact, of the texts published for use in Northern common schools, a small minority recommended immediate emancipation and citizenship for freed black men and women as early as 1825, several years before the rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society. One surprising and significant finding is the appearance of several liberal texts in some southern private schools and academies up to the 1840s. By and large, the texts appearing in southern institutions appear to have promoted a more liberal position on slavery than that adopted by the three largest southern Protestant churches during the same period.

Author

• Kim Tolley, Notre Dame de Namur University