How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann.

Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive. For years, Mann had opposed slavery; he hoped his students would as well. He charged those he taught at Antioch to dedicate themselves to eradicating injustice with sedulous care. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” Mann told the graduating class of 1859.

Mary D. Brice was one of Mann’s students at Antioch, and she was a true believer in Mann’s vision. In December 1858, alongside her husband, Brice traveled 900 miles to New Orleans, to teach.

Brice found a city that was like no other in the antebellum South. In New Orleans, a small class of free Black people lived and worked as citizens alongside white people; they owned businesses and, in some cases, plantations. And if they were wealthy enough to afford tuition, or light-skinned enough to pass for white, they could attend school.

Yet the free Black New Orleanians who were neither wealthy nor light enough had few options. In 1865, Benjamin Rush Plumly, a white abolitionist politician who’d joined the Union army at the outset of the war, and who would eventually lead the Board of Education for the Department of the Gulf, described the antebellum situation in the region bluntly: “For the poor, of the free colored people, there was no school.”

Brice, a deeply religious person, believed