Reading, writing and rebellion: levels of formal education in the confederate army.

Knight, James Thomas

Introduction

The Confederate Soldier and the South he defended have been the subject of research and the object of adoration or hatred since Fort Sumter. The opinions about him, his time and his place have reflected one bias or another generally causing oversimplification of his vices and virtues depending largely upon what one cares to believe, and on occasion, what the evidence shows. After the slavery issue, it is education that brings out the greatest biases of section, politics or ancestry.

This study is intended to examine comparisons of education across several different planes: branch of service, state of enlistment or the part of a state from which the soldier was from, rank held or gained, and age.

Historiography

The two most important scholars of Southern educational history, Edgar W. Knight and Charles William Dabney viewed the growth of Southern education as in keeping with traditional Jeffersonian notions of small government applied to a predominately rural area. Additionally, Dabney saw not a neglected educational system but one in a region that fought specific problems unique to the South that caused inhibition of education efforts. (1) In making these allowances, both Knight and Dabney were agreeing with Lawrence, Cremin who wrote, "The southern states, with the exception of North Carolina, tended to lag behind [the New England and Midwestern states] and did not generally establish popular schooling until after the Civil War" (2) While the view of a lag with reason has gained credence within much of antebellum Southern social history, much is still made of the immediate post-war vitriol of Northern writers. Henry Adams declared in the nineteenth century, "Without Church, university, schools, or literature in any form that required or fostered intellectual life, the Virginians concentrated their thoughts almost exclusively upon politics." One hundred years later Howard K. Beale said political rulers of the antebellum South, "had fastened ignorance or inexperience on millions of whites as well as Negroes.... Wealthy Southerners...seldom recognized the need for general education of even the white masses." In a more recent application of this "misanthropic planter thesis of Southern History" Daniel J. Boorstin declared, "Colleges and military academies for the sons of ruling planters flourished." (3) The implication of such histories upon study of the army implies semi-literate men led by and fighting for great planters with little in between. The memoirs of many ex-Confederates discuss literacy of former comrades in such a manner as to suggest the reaction to an affront. (4)

The single greatest student of the common Confederate soldier, Bell I. Wiley, believed there were extremes of education within the Army but saw most lay between the extremes, "neither learned nor illiterate." (5) The questions are: What were these extremes? How common were they? And what was in the middle?

Educational Options

There were, not considering colleges and universities, four different types of schools available to the generation of Southerners that would fight the war. In all states the common schools, the lowest form of formal instruction available, offered fifty-four days to six months of the year. (6) Total months of instruction for one student seldom varied from seven through thirty-six. (7) The teachers were generally farmers with some modest intellectual attainment. Subjects were mostly limited to Reading, Mathematics, Spelling and Penmanship. On this same plain were the subscription schools across the South so called because a number of parents would subscribe for a teacher's instruction of their children for a number of weeks or months. This might supplement this basic level of instruction ten or twelve weeks each year. For many it was the only source of instruction. The curriculum was elementary and plebeian.

The old-field schools were local affairs usually with only one instructor and were essentially academies without the lineage or prestige. The intention here was to educate at any level demanded, but to do so more thoroughly than in the common and subscription schools. The academies were the height of precollegiate instruction. Tuition varied from fifteen to fifty dollars depending upon what was taught and the prestige of the institution. (8) Time spent varied from two to nine years in the old-field schools and academies depending upon family wealth and degree of instruction desired. (9) The school year was typically eight to ten months.

The number of colleges throughout the South was greater than any other section of the country at the beginning of the war. A survey of college-educated men in the Tennessee Civil War Veterans' Questionnaire illustrates who went. Of sixty-four former college students who said anything of their families' wealth before the conflict, twelve were from families worth less than $5,000 and another fourteen were from families worth between $5,000 and $15,000. Of eighty-four who recorded whether their families owned slaves, eleven came from non-slave owning families and fifty came from families owning less than the twenty required to be considered planters. (10) Southern colleges do not appear to be the bastion of sons of a ruling elite but an extension of superior education limited by one's ability to pay and pass entrance exams. Still, those fees and entrance requirements put college outside the realm of the "plain folk." The Liberal Arts curriculum was preferred to professional disciplines. (11)

In the absence of schools or inability to attend, the only options were illiteracy, semiliteracy and home schooling. While the number of those educated wholly at home is difficult to determine, and would vary largely by state and region, it must have been at least as high as the proportion of illiterates. (12) Wiley estimated illiteracy in the army to be between fifteen and twenty-five per cent. (13) Compared to the 1860 Census figures for illiteracy among only white Southern males this is excessive. The average for eleven states was twelve per cent and even this includes men beyond military age and areas of heavy Unionism. (14)

Variables

Perhaps the greatest variable affecting soldier's prewar education was that of social class. For that reason it becomes necessary to discuss the recurring "rich man's war, poor man's fight" thesis of the Southern war effort. This idea of inequality of service caused by conscription and its loopholes, though believed earnestly by some soldiers, is not supported and all classes of the society appeared in the army. Wiley's survey of occupations of 9,057 Confederate enlisted men shows professional men to have been 5.2 per cent of the army, white collar men 7 per cent, skilled tradesmen 14.1, unskilled workers 8.5 and farmers 61.5 per cent of the army. (15) The conscription acts and their enforcement did probably decrease the level of educational attainment in the army, not by exempting planters, but by including more men of indifferent education. One report from the Conscript Bureau as to the number of men exempted by the "20 Negro law" in the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia to have been only 822, while the total strength contributed from those states approached 400,000. (16) Further, the 85,000 white Union soldiers from Confederate states who came from generally the lower economic and educational castes of Southern society would have offset any educational imbalance by these exemptions. (17) Further, exemptions were not only granted to planters.

Conscripted or not, poorer men did not have the advantages of others. Even where schools were free, books had to be purchased by individual students and three or four months of school could mean loss of labor and income. In many counties throughout the South small tuitions or "rate bills" were usual in the common schools. (18) Alabama's school law of 1854 was not alone in requiting scholars to provide their own "books and implements of study." (19)

The common schools were a recent invention and the primary organ of instruction for most Johnnies. Naturally, age at time of enlistment would have a great effect on level of instruction received. According to Wiley's survey of the ages of eleven thousand Confederates at time of enlistment, four-fifths were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. These men would have attended school anywhere from 1838 till the very eve of the conflict. Men under eighteen were reckoned one-twentieth of the army. Those in their thirties, one-tenth (attending school in the late 1820's and 30's) and the rest, from forty through seventy-three, who would have attended school before 1840, one-twentieth. (20) Throughout the 1850's the number of all varieties of schools doubled or tripled throughout the Southern states. (21) Between the seventh and eighth census, illiteracy dropped in every Southern state. (22) Given the sharp progress in such a short time, an age difference of but a few years among contemporaries who would enlist together could make all manner of difference. Though being too young when enlisting could cause the opposite. As one under-aged Tennessean wrote after the war, "When I should have been in school I was shooting Yankees instead." (23)

The different branches of service seem to have attracted somewhat different calibers of men. Though the majority of all educational classes served in the Infantry, more educated men were likely to serve in the Cavalry. The cavalry was viewed generally as the most elite combat branch and another mason for the over representation of better-educated men in this branch is the Confederacy required cavalrymen to provide their own horses. The number of artillerymen in the sample was too small to judge but given the existence of such prominent organizations as the Richmond Howitzers and Washington Artillery a similar pattern is likely.

Rank and the chances for promotion could be determined in part by educational success or by other attributes that helped to determine how educated a given soldier might be. Still, most the well born young men who would enter the army were never told to add chevrons to their jackets and fewer ever buckled on a sword belt. The two most commonly used drill manuals of the Rebel army, Hardee's and Gilham's, put the proportion of privates in a company of infantry at a range of seventy-eight to eighty-four per cent. (24) In Bailey's tabulation of the Tennessee Civil War Soldiers' Questionnaires 85.6 per cent of the least affluent category never rose above private against 66.5 per cent of the most affluent category. The yeomanry slave owning and not, fell in between. (25) Of 503 names of University of Virginia alumni who died during the war, 233 were privates at the times of their death. (26) Given promotions from the ranks it is likely that over half began their service as privates and a majority were still enlisted men.

The Confederate army seems to have had no officer class. Companies were usually raised from one narrow area served by the same schools. In larger towns furnishing more than one company, men enlisted with those they knew and one's friends came generally from one's own class. This rule, with its exceptions, could only determine the character of a company, seldom the ten companies of a regiment. Thus one well-educated Mississippi lieutenant was able to complain to his wife in 1862:

 The want of capacity among our Company and Regimental
 officers is terrible. Some of the Captains cant [sic]
 read; others their are whose chirography would shame the
 hieroglyphics that bedeck the slopes of the Egyptian pyramids.
 Regimental officers are scarcely any better. (27)

While this man probably overstated the case with respect to the literacy of Captains, they were responsible for too much paperwork to be hopelessly illiterate; he was not serving with men of his own academic caliber. Captain Jason W. James was described in the Federal Writer's Project as "one of the bravest soldiers in service of the South during the Civil War," but, "had only the education he could master during a half term every winter, until he was fifteen years old." (28) John Carroll, who had only two terms in a subscription school, rose to Captain from Private. (29) By contrast, one sergeant wrote of billeting his detail of twenty-six men in a schoolhouse in Arkansas where the men got to meet the schoolmaster and exchanged pleasantries in Latin. (30) The vast majority, educated or not, remained enlisted men for the whole of their service. General Gordon wrote in his memoirs, "in our ranks there were lawyers, teachers, bankers, merchants, planters, college professors and students." (31)

Different states had educational advantages and deficiencies that were manifest in the men from those states. Some states went farther than others to make certain that the common schools were free schools. In 1858 Alabama expended over one half million dollars on public education. (32) Florida legislated for free instruction as early as 1848 although their sparse population made implementation difficult. (33) The Louisiana constitution of 1845 mandated a statewide free school system. (34) In contrast many areas of Tennessee, Mississippi and Virginia still had rate bills in the common schools. (35) It must be remembered that states that had begun the work of free schools were scarcely able to begin before the inevitable wartime disruptions.

Illiteracy also varied remarkably by state. As the principal concern here is the army rather than the society, only white male illiteracy is used. The highest, 17 percent, ironically, came from the Southern state with the most evolved system of common schools, North Carolina. Tennessee's was 13.5 percent. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Virginia were all between 11 and 12 percent. Louisiana, Mississippi (the lowest), South Carolina and Texas were all between 6.9 and 8 per cent. (36) Curiously, the lower South, often held as the great domain of disinterested planters, was collectively more literate than the states of the upper South where opinion on secession was more divided and Confederate military participation moderately lower.

The differences within a state could be as glaring as those among the several states. The Tennessee Civil War Veterans' Questionnaires record a disparity of academy attendance among the two poorer and two more prosperous regions of that state. (37) Of four coastal South Carolina districts and five coastal Georgia counties with a total white population of 186,000 in 1850, there were only 1,678 illiterates. In all those except Bryan County, Georgia, school attendance exceeded the state average. (38) As these were the wealthiest portions of these two states, mathematically, illiteracy must have been confined to the poorer regions.

Conclusions

The rank and file of the Confederate army was composed of men from each segment of society in rough proportion to civilian social structure and in both cases the basic yeomanry, literate enough, at least, to communicate in writing and make sense of a newspaper, predominated. Differences of education within a given company seem to have been minimal. Educated men, those of far lower academic credentials and everything between were found at every level of the fighting army at least at the company level.

Much has been made of the disparity in education between the adversaries in our Civil War. No doubt the Union army was more literate and those Union soldiers who attended the common schools got greater benefit of it. Still, of the great armies of the age, the Confederate was the third most literate behind their adversaries who, in turn, were second to the Prussians. (39) If education is determined by degree to which men of a classical and impressive educational background served at every level rather than a measurement of simple literacy, the Confederate Army becomes the world's most educated. (40) This is still but one criterion for judgment.

Chart 1: Total Months of Instruction by Type of School Attended

 Months of Common and Old-field Both Total
 School Subscription Schools Kinds of
 Attended Schools and Academies School
 N=851 N=162 N=51 N=1,064

 Under 3 6.2% 0% 0% 5.0%
 3-6 17.4 .6 0 14.0
 7-12 22.8 1.9 3.9 18.7
 13-24 26.3 3.7 11.8 22.2
 25-36 14.6 7.4 17.7 13.6
 37-48 6.4 14.2 13.7 7.9
 49-60 4.5 13.6 13.7 6.3
 61-72 1.4 13.0 7.8 3.5
 73-84 .4 9.3 9.8 2.2
 85-96 .1 12.4 9.8 2.4
 97-108 0 13.0 7.8 2.4
 109-120 0 6.2 2.0 1.0
More than 120 0 4.9 2.0 .9

From the Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaire

Chart 2: Branch of Service by Type of School Attended

Branch of No School Common and Old-field College
Service Subscription School or
 School Academy
 N=21 N=1063 N=222 N=103

Infantry 76.2% 71.1% 68.6% 63.1%
Cavalry 19.0 25.4 27.7 30.1
Artillery 4.8 3.3 2.7 3.9
Other 0 .1 1.4 2.9

from The Tennessee Civil War Veterans' Questionnaires

ENDNOTES

(1) Edgar W. Knight. A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860, 5 vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943) passim; Charles William Dabney, Universal Education in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936) passim.

(2) Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) 13.

(3) Howard K. Beale quoted in Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1965); excerpted in Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on American History, Volume I, The Colonial Period to Reconstruction (Seventh Edition) (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, 1997), 365.

(4) James Cooper Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Company, 1987) pp. 38-9 is the most acidic on this point; Carlton McCarthy, Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia (Richmond: 1882) passim; Randolph McKim, A Soldier's Recollections. (New York: 1910) passim.

(5) Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1943), 337.

(6) Cornelius J. Heatwole, The History of Education in Virginia (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1916) 109 and Dabney, Universal Education in the South. Vol. I, 312-3.

(7) Fred W. Bailey, Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 48.

(8) Dabney, 34-35; Adiel Sherwood, A Gazeteer of Georgia (Macon: S. Boykin, 1860), 148.

(9) Bailey, 152.

(10) Gustavus W. Dyer and John Trotwood Moore (comp.) The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires, 5 vols (Easley, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1985), passim.

(11) Ibid., passim.

(12) Knight, 207. North Carolina's Common School Superintendent Calvin Wiley estimated 4,000 North Carolina school children would grow up without instruction, of which half would grow to be illiterate.

(13) Bell I. Wiley, The Common Soldier of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 3.

(14) United States Census Office, Compendium of the Eighth Census (Washington, 1864), 508.

(15) James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), ix. McPherson tabulated the survey of occupations of Confederate soldiers done by Bell I. Wiley, which is largely given in Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb, 330.

(16) quoted in Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Free Press, 1954), 91.

(17) Richard M. Current, Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers From the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 133, 135, 213.

(18) Dyer, 70.

(19) Knight, 234; Dyer, 68.

(20) Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb, 331.

(21) Bailey, 51.

(22) Intercollegiate Consortium For Social and Political Research (ICSPR), Historical United States Census Browser, accessed throughout 1998, available from http://fisher.lib.Virginia.edu/cgi-local/census/cen.pl; Compendium of the Eighth Census, 505.

(23) Bailey, 158.

(24) Major William Gilham, Manual of Instruction for the Volunteers and Militia of the United States (Philadelphia: Charles Desilver, 1861), 32; Lieutenant William J. Hardee, Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (New York: J. O. Kane, 1862), 6-7.

(25) Bailey, 160.

(26) McKim, 114.

(27) quoted in Wiley, The Common Soldier of the Civil War, 13.

(28) Federal Writer's Project, Interview of Unnamed Subject by Georgia B. Redfield concerning Jason W. James (dec.) on 3-24-39, [database on-line] (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, accessed April 27, 1998, available from http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?wpa:1:./temp/~ammem dbfA::, Internet.

(29) John W. Carroll, Autobiography and Reminiscences of John Carroll, Electronic Edition, [book on-line] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, accessed May 26, 1998), available from http://sunsite.unc.edu/docsouth/carroll/carroll.html, Internet.

(30) William Watson, Life in the Confederate Army (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1888), 25.

(31) quoted in Nisbet, 36-7.

(32) Dabney, 329.

(33) Jim B. Pearson and Edgar Fuller, Education in the States: Historical Development and Outlook (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1969), 235.

(34) Dyer, 72.

(35) Bailey, passim.

(36) United States Census Office, Statistics of the United States in 1860, 506.

(37) Bailey, 52.

(38) Albanese, 101.

(39) Anonymous, "Progress of Education in the United States and Europe," DeBow's Review, J. D. B. DeBow, New Orleans, Vol. 18, Issue 1, 1854, 137-139, [periodical online] University of Michigan, available from http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/cgibin/moa/smgl/moa-idx?notisid=ACG 13336&byte=66791677, accessed on Aug. 26, 1998.

(40) ICSPR, Historical United States Census Browser; United States Census Office, Statistics of the United States in 1860, 506.