Article 2: Teaching, Learning, and Emerging National Identity in the Antebellum South

This epigram, titled “The Double Dearth,” first published in Vanity Fair in June 1861, and later in at least one northern newspaper, tells a story that both northerners and southerners readily recognized in the first summer of the American Civil War (“Double Dearth” 1861). That southerners would want to expel northerners from their midst on the eve of a civil war is understandable, but it also raises the question, why were northern teachers so common in the South in the first place? This paper examines why so many northern teachers ventured into the South, and the reasons southerners first sought them out, and later wanted the teachers “put to rout.” Changing attitudes toward teaching and learning, textbooks and teachers, were part of the emerging national identity of the antebellum South.