Second Annual Report of the New England Freedmen's Aid Society (Educational Commission). Presented to the Society, April 24, 1864.
Boston: Published at the Office of the Society, 1864. 86pp. Original printed wrappers bound into modern quarter morocco over marbled boards, gilt spine titles. Light chipping and soiling to wrappers. Contemporary notation to header of title, else internally clean. Very good plus. Item #12679
An account of the second year of the activities of the New England Freedmen's Aid Society (NEFAS), an activist group formed to assist emancipated Black Americans in may aspects of life, especially with gaining academic and practical educations following the Civil War. The present work is especially important for the long section titled, "Condition of the Freedmen" which occupies pages 11 to 51 (about half of the total work). This section details the population, state of education, labor and industry opportunities, general condition, and more of free African Americans in several regions of the country, namely the Military Department of the South, Key West and the Tortugas, Military Department of Virginia and North Carolina, the District of Columbia, the Mississippi Valley, Middle Tennessee, Western Arkansas, and Louisiana. Interestingly, a substantial subsection of the section on the Department of the South is devoted to a discussion of arable lands available to freed slaves around Beaufort and Port Royal, known to modern audiences as "Forty Acres and a Mule." Regarding the land in this area, the report states that "It was a matter of course that the lands should all be taken, for those blacks who did not wish to turn cultivators were perfectly aware that they could sell their 40 acres for many times the government price."
The organization was also notable for its mission, specifically aimed at education, and for the critical role women played in its work. "The New England Freedmen's Aid Society was founded in Boston in 1862, in response to an appeal...on behalf of 8,000 formerly enslaved people at Port Royal, SC. Originally named the Educational Commission, its mission was to provide teachers and other aid for 'the industrial, social, intellectual, moral, and religious' advantage of freedmen" (Massachusetts Historical Society). As was the case with many abolition and aid groups, women were in the vanguard of the NEFAS. They recruited, trained, and even served as educators in the program. For much of the twentieth century, if historians wrote about the first teachers among freed people at all, they characterized them as foolish, even dangerous, women...who bore a heavy responsibility for the racial tension after the Civil War and whose work caused Southern educators to avoid Black education" (The Freedmen's Teacher Project). Yet scholars in the 1960s and after -- particularly women and Black researchers -- have returned to the documents of the Society to uncover the serious and often intersectional work being done by both white and Black activists in Port Royal, reframing "the freedmen's education movement as not primarily a gift of northern largess...but as autonomous actions of hundreds of Black communities across the South demanding access to literacy and numeracy" (The Freedmen's Teacher Project). In this sense, those "dangerous" women were troubling because they heard the call of Black peoples, took their needs seriously, and reacted accordingly. The movement was thus "largely Black-inspired, abetted by female missionary teachers" whose shared goals were to prepare "former slaves for lives of freedom in a democratic America" (The Freedmen's Teacher Project).
The present Annual Report shows the early efforts of this Society including fundraising, allocation of funds, educational programs and educational gains, and future goals. Included in the list of Officers are eleven white women in leadership roles; indeed, women were the majority in the Committee on Teachers and the Committee on Clothing and Supplies. Among them are more well-known activists who appear in American Abolitionists and Antislavery Activists, i.e. Ednah Cheney and Sarah Barrett Cabot, who had raised her daughter to become a leader in the movement. Most, however, are lesser or unknown, denoted largely by their husbands' names rather than their own. Even less visible but even more important were the unlisted Black women who were members of the group and contributors to the grassroots work. "Nearly one-fifth of the Northern teachers were Black...Black teachers were fifteen times more likely to give a few years of their lives to Southern Black education...the rest of the recruited teachers were native to the South; many had been enslaved, while others were Southern free Black women and other men of color" (The Freedmen's Teacher Project). The accomplishments in the report -- fundraising, equipment, educational gains -- can largely be attributed to their efforts.
The report for the first year of the organization is exceedingly rare, with only one example listed in OCLC; twelve copies of the present report appear in OCLC, though no copies have appeared in modern auction records, and no other copies are currently in trade. An important and scarce historical document preserving the accomplishments of a fairly short-lived intersectional activist group with vital reports on the activities of freed slaves throughout the southern part of the country.
Price: $2,750