Chapter 3: “Fitted to Serve their Community”: Race and Power at Penn School and the Transition to Vocational Education

In the early spring of 1862 a “Gideon’s Band” of fifty teachers, missionaries, and plantation superintendents descended on the sea islands of South Carolina in response to a call from the federal government. The Union capture of Port Royal Sound the previous November and the subsequent flight of white planters had resulted in the abandonment of 100,000 acres of land planted in long-staple cotton of great value to the Union cause and the 10,000 enslaved blacks who had worked it. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase and his protégé Edward Pierce convinced President Lincoln to accept the unharvested cotton and the human “contraband” as reason to undertake an experiment in free labor and education for the culturally isolated people of these remote islands. The federal government agreed to provide plantation supervisors for the labor. It would be up to relief societies and missionary groups in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to find and fund the teachers who would bring literacy “and all the fundamental lessons of civilization—voluntary industry, self-reliance, frugality, forethought, honesty and truthfulness, cleanliness and order”—to the formerly enslaved (Appeal of the Education Commission 1862; John Murray Forbes, in Hughes 1899, 300).