A coworker and I got into a debate. I stated slave owners were the landed aristocracy and would’ve sent their kids to be educated at universities. He stated they were uneducated yokels.
A coworker and I got into a debate. I stated slave owners were the landed aristocracy and would’ve sent their kids to be educated at universities. He stated they were uneducated yokels.
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Before getting into the specifics of your question, it’s helpful to unpack two assumptions around your question. In the modern era – 1960s or so to today – we tend to think of going to college as a time for a young person to figure out the final answer to the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s fairly chicken and egg, but that sentiment is what gave rise to the concept of a college major. While they have existed in some form since the early days of higher education in America, the process of a young person leaving home to pick an area of focus that would basically set the path for their life after college didn’t exist in Antebellum America. The second issue is to unpack is who we’re talking about when we talk about enslavers’ children.
In this post, I get into some of the history related to the breastfeeding and enslaved babies and here, in a question about Thomas Jefferson, I get into some of the history around some of those babies’ conception. When we talk about enslavers’ children and college, we’re talking about one demographic group and one group alone: their white sons. Depending on the family’s access to power and wealth, their white daughters were likely educated by a nanny or tutor in service to their future role as an enslaver and wife. Their multiracial children were legally prohibited from getting an education of any kind and could not have attended college – even one founded by and for Black people – until after the Civil War and the emancipation provided by the 13th Amendment or manumission by their enslaver.
The specific economic conditions of enslavers is a bit outside my wheelhouse but I feel comfortable saying most enslavers were not “uneducated yokels” as we know they raised their children to be educated enough to be enslavers themselves. While the American South did not have a public education system until after the Civil War (or later in some cases), a certain degree of education was expected for the children of white adults in power or with access to power, which included enslavers. They were expected to be able to read, write, and have succifident background to be able to move among men with power. Part of that was purely pragmatic; paperwork, such as ownership deeds, played a large role in wealth transfer in the south and white people were expected to know how to read them. (The conditions were likely different for white people who rented enslaved people or had limited wealth and could only afford to enslave one or two people but again, I’ll defer to others on that point.) Enslaved adults and children were routinely given as gifts, especially as wedding gifts. In some instances, the wealth associated with the gift was significant, meaning the new bride could sell an enslaved person if she no longer needed their labor in her new home or if she needed money for an unexpected household expense. These deeds would lay out just how much the enslaved person was purchased for, their skills and values, and in some cases, how the enslaved person was to be used.
As another example of the importance of education among enslavers, they supported a fairly thriving juvenile literature industry for white boys and girls in the American south. Caroline Howard Gilman, born and raised in New England, moved to South Carolina in 1819 and in 1832, started a children’s newspaper called “Rose-bud.” That she was a New England transplant is significant – she grew up around anti-slavery activists but within two decades of living in the South, became a vocal advocate of the Southern lifestyle and culture. It’s just one example but speaks to how pervasive slave culture was. She walked a very particular line in her newspaper: the plantation system wasn’t perfect and slavery did have some downsides but overall, a hierarchy with white men at the top was the way things were supposed to be.
> The South, as it appeared in Gilman’s children’s stories, exemplified a particular domestic paternalism that sought to normalize the gender and racial hierarchies of a slave society by tying characters together with bonds of affection instead of bonds of ownership. The children and adults in Gilman’s writing model mastery and paternalism for white boys and girls so that they could rule with kindness instead of violence. Gilman tried to soften slavery by showing it as an organic institution deriving from the gentleness of family bonds, but a close reading of her stories reveals that she could not write out the violence underlying southern society.^+
To then, the older white sons of Southern enslavers. The purpose of sending their sons to college wasn’t, strictly speaking, for them to get an education. Rather, it was to ensure they had the skills and knowledge needed to move among men with power. More importantly, that they would meet and build relationships with the men who, would someday be or already were in power. Some Southern men did attend northern universities and in some cases, brought one of the people their family enslaved with them. It was more likely, though, that they would attend one of the Southern colleges established during the antebellum period such as the University of Virginia. Jefferson, the founder of the college, was a vocal advocate for public education and tried to get a state or national system established. The college was one outcome he was able to achieve.
Generally speaking, enslavers would ensure their sons made the best connections they could and learned what they needed to learn to take advantage of those connections. Sometimes, that required sending their son to college.
+Kenny, G. L. (2006). Mastering Childhood: Paternalism, Slavery, and the Southern Domestic in Caroline Howard Gilman’s Antebellum Children’s Literature. Southern Quarterly, 44(1), 65.