New schooling for a New South: a community study of education and social change, 1875-1885.

In May 1888, Wilson, North Carolina, "educationally speaking," had reached "a crisis in her existence." "Our future in every department of progress," wrote Josephus Daniels, the editor of the local newspaper, the Wilson Advance, "depends to an alarming extent upon the manner in which we sustain the schools we already have and the efforts we make to establish other institutions of learning."(1) The Wilson graded schools, one for white children and one for black children, had closed in 1884, and the editor now hoped to persuade merchants and planters in and about Wilson to finance the white graded school privately, although not the school for black children. Therefore, he appealed to the interests of moneyed men in the town, pointing to the profits that they had already made from a real estate boom that accompanied the establishment of the Wilson Collegiate Institute in the 1870s, a private school, and the Wilson graded schools in the early 1880s. He also pointed to the value of a middle class, the "desirable element," men who could manage the money and employees of the wealthy and many of whom were products of the local graded school for white children. Yet there was much the editor left unsaid about the impact of schools in Wilson. After 1881, the graded schools especially had introduced new ways of thinking and new forms of social relations that some planters and merchants found unsettling. Moreover, the establishment of graded schools in the early 1880s had led to a bitter and prolonged political crisis in the county that drew poor men, both black and white, into the political process, and thereby shifted the balance of power away from the wealthy. Hence, the editor sought to play down the innovations created by new schools, and to narrow the scope of their impact to that chief interest of the wealthy and powerful in Wilson - profits.

Yet, in retrospect, it is the broader view of education and social change that is the more interesting if we are to understand how the New South and its schools came into being. That transformation was thoroughgoing, touching every aspect of a person's life - what kind of work a person found, whom he or she associated with, and the fund of ideas with which to think about that rapidly transforming world. The changes to which the editor of the Wilson newspaper alluded, moreover, came on suddenly and raised a profound opposition in the countryside that culminated in the political challenge of Populism. In the face of such opposition, how, pondered Wilson's leaders, could ordinary people become accustomed to working for wages, to associating with strangers, and to seeing "progress" as a good thing. Those who had lived most of their lives in a slave society were largely lost to the future. It was the young who might be trained up to the rule of institutions and their managers in place of the personal sway of local notables. But how? Perhaps through new kinds of schools that sought to produce the social relations and ideas coordinate with an expanded market economy then emerging in the South. That is not to say that schools caused economic and political change, as the editor of the Wilson Advance seemed to argue. Rather, it was one of the elements of a broader set of measures - fence laws, new courts, local governments, taxes in cash rather than in kind, road building with convict labor - that pushed Southerners, often kicking and screaming and sometimes with good reason, into modernity.

The story of educational reform in the New South has been told many times. The older version, written mainly by schoolmen themselves in the early twentieth century, stressed the role of state government in transforming Southern schools. This story usually begins about 1900 and attributes change mainly to a handful of progressive reformers in the Democratic Party. It also measures that change mainly in quantitative terms - numbers of school houses built, teachers employed, and students enrolled. What happened in those schools was left largely to the imagination of readers, as were relations between the new schools and changes in the larger society. These latter issues have been more adequately addressed in recent years, especially in the work of William Link and James Leloudis, but still mainly at the state level. The local origins of school reform in the late nineteenth-century South remain obscure in these accounts, although both authors point in that direction. And it was at the local level that conflicts between the pre-industrial social relations of a slave society, now dead but not entirely gone, and the needs of capitalists in the New South first began. Hence the value of a case study which examines closely not only the politics of local reform but also the creation of new social relations among students and a distinctly progressive pedagogy among teachers. The advantage of such a study is not merely to trace out in greater detail themes raised by Link and Leloudis, but to demonstrate how local reform originated dramatic changes that occurred only twenty years later at the state and regional level in Southern society. For these purposes Wilson is particularly well-suited. Thousands of people visited the town's new graded schools in the 1880s and carried their observations back to their homes throughout the South. Moreover, several of Wilson's reformers would go on to play important roles, after 1900, in regional efforts to build progressive schools. Finally, the ideological battles waged in Wilson would inform later arguments for and against progressive schools, and indeed the main progressive trope in North Carolina for justifying state supported public schools would be developed by Josephus Daniels himself. Wilson then was not just one Southern town among many struggling to improve its schools in the late nineteenth century, but one of two or three on the coastal plain of North Carolina that proved to be a cradle of reform for the state and region.(2)

Wilson, the county seat of Wilson County, North Carolina, was little more than a crossroads as late as 1850. Located in eastern North Carolina, the local economy was dominated by cotton, a staple crop shipped by boat down the Tar River to the coast and then transported to New York. After the Civil War, a bridge over the Roanoke River opened direct rail service between eastern North Carolina and New York, and during the 1870s it reoriented trade from ports on the coast to North Carolina's eastern railroad towns, Wilson among them. Thereafter, the town grew rapidly in population and wealth. It became one of the leading cotton markets in the southeast and quickly attracted planters eager to make use of the county's cheap labor, mostly freedmen who flocked to the area. Those planters had come from both near and far, Methodists and Presbyterians from adjacent counties, and Primitive Baptists from the Albemarle Sound region in northeastern North Carolina. Each group organized a neighborhood around its own church and dominated public affairs there, including schools - both common schools, sometimes called old field schools which were literally in the fields, and select academies in the town of Wilson.(3)

After the Civil War, Wilson County operated several common school districts, some for whites and some for blacks, for two or three months each year. What this meant was that schools, such as they were, remained a neighborhood affair. Local men were chosen in township elections, or later in the 1870s appointed by the Board of County Commissioners to school committees; they petitioned the county for twenty or thirty dollars each month to help pay for a teacher; and they raised a one room log house to serve as a schoolroom. Teachers were usually young men and women in the neighborhood who had passed a year or two at a local academy, or a more or less literate farmer who hoped to make a few extra dollars during the winter months. And though extremely feeble, these schools were a source of much pride, contention, and sometimes advantage to the committeemen connected with them. A school on one's property often proved to be the decisive advantage to a planter, for example, who wished to attract laborers to his farm. Small crossroads merchants also often served on school committees in order see to it that a school was located conveniently near their place of business. The result was the creation of numerous schools of poor quality, but which accurately reflected the distribution of power in the county's neighborhoods. By 1881, there were fifty-five of these intensely local schools operating in Wilson County for about ten or eleven weeks during the year, thirty-six for white children and nineteen for black children. The schools enrolled a total of 2,541 children, including 1,435 whites and 1,106 blacks, out of a total of 5,275 children in the county between the ages of six and twenty-one, and they employed forty-five teachers.(4)

Although there is little in the local evidentiary record to indicate how these schools were taught in Wilson County, it is not unreasonable to assume that they conformed to the pattern that prevailed throughout the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, and arithmetic taught by means of individual recitations before a teacher. And there was anything but uniformity in this experience. Each child brought to school whatever textbooks the students' parents happened to have on hand at home, and at school each student worked his or her way laboriously page by page through the books, memorizing short passages for recital. For this the child received no credential, nor was there any graduation, although the schoolmaster might hold an exhibition at the end of the term consisting of set pieces of oratory and music. In short, this was a curriculum that prepared students to enter market society with basic skills, but did not presume any need for a broad knowledge of the world or for any preparation for advanced study. As for discipline and social relations in the schools, they varied as much as the curriculum. Local teachers often entered into prolonged contests with students for control of the schoolroom, and sometimes lost. Students organized themselves to trick teachers, avoid work, and often drove local teachers from the schoolroom, wielding all the social pressure that could be brought to bear by means of friends and relatives in the community. In other words, common school students in Wilson County early on engaged in precisely the same sort of very personal politics that characterized face-to-face social relations in any pre-industrial society.(5)

In addition to public common schools in the county, each religious denomination in Wilson sought to establish an academy that that would produce the next generation of local leaders. In 1872, for example, Primitive Baptists founded the Wilson Collegiate Institute, a proprietary institution that had been leased to Sylvester Hassell, the son of a leading Primitive Baptist minister and an 1862 graduate of the University of North Carolina. After Hassell's arrival, the Wilson Collegiate Institute ordinarily drew students from ten or fifteen different counties in eastern North Carolina as well as from Wilson. Indeed, some parents moved to Wilson to send their children to the Institute more cheaply. In this respect, the Wilson Collegiate Institute took its place as one of a handful of schools in North Carolina that trained a regional elite.(6)

Just as common school students learned to engage in personal politics so too did well-to-do students in the Wilson Collegiate Institute - both boys and girls. The boys at the Institute, for example, organized themselves into societies or gangs with a membership, leadership, rituals, factions, and activities, entry to which was possible only after enduring a humiliating hazing. New boys, for example, were told repeatedly by different old boys during breakfast that they looked sickly. Usually, the new boys panicked by mid-morning and called for a doctor. Afterwards, the new students caught on to the joke and vowed to take revenge on the next year's initiates, thus perpetuating the selection process. In doing so, the boys created a shared bond of humiliation that set them apart from their uninitiated peers, the story of which became a useful text for renewing those bonds in later years at every retelling.(7) Girls also challenged Hassell by regularly planning picnics for which they often failed to obtain the teachers' permission to hold. In short, membership in a gang was crucial for both boys and girls in learning how to act politically, that is, how to create a constituency of their peers in order to accomplish some particular goal.(8) Here it was, however, that any similarity in the social relations produced at the Institute and local common schools ended. Students at the Institute also were subjected to a disciplinary regime that firmly subordinated them to the personal will of Hassell and his assistant teachers who governed the school through a series of clearly stated rules of moral behavior, not subject to challenge, but perfectly amenable to appeals for mercy and forgiveness, that is to say a restoration of hierarchical social relationships.(9)

The curriculum at the Wilson Collegiate Institute, by contrast, itself sought to inculcate the habits and skills of command, rather than equality or subordination, and it did so in two ways. First, it sought to produce an independent thinker, one who could survey the political and economic landscape as a whole and imagine things otherwise than they appeared in dusty, provincial Wilson. As Hassell put it, "instead of telling our pupils everything, we endeavor to draw out, and thereby exercise and strengthen their own powers of thought." Second, the curriculum sought to introduce students to subjects not available in the common schools, some theoretical and others less so. Students took courses in advanced science and mathematics, the classics and several modern languages, and literary criticism, among other subjects. Practical courses for boys included oratory, bookkeeping, and agriculture taught on an experimental farm and, for girls, domestic science and music. These subjects qualified both boys and girls for college entrance, and also introduced them to knowledge of the larger world that drew them out of local society, making them competent intermediaries between Wilson and market society as a whole.(10) Yet there was an aspect of the Institute's curriculum that marked it as looking backward towards dead certainties, rather than forward towards modernity and relativism. Hassell always began with first principles and then moved to instances and examples; in other words he taught by means of an inductive logic. In 1880, Hassell regularly assigned problems in the New American Arithmetic series that organized each lesson around a "rule" that focused on a particular problem in business, the task being merely to apply the rule mechanically to reach the one and only possible solution.(11)

In short, Hassell taught the sons and daughters of Wilson's elite how to manage their personal relationships in a hierarchical plantation society with great skill - to muster the support of their peers and to command the deference of their inferiors. Such social skills depended not only on practice, but also in effectively conceptualizing the duties and privileges of rank. Hassell's homilies especially on honesty, openness, and forgiveness proved effective as a rationale for dealing lightly with wrongs, when those who wronged you would certainly remain in a community for decades to come and perhaps exact their revenge, or worse organize their kin and neighbors to help them. At the same time, the formal curriculum provided students with an understanding of the larger world outside Wilson that would enable them both to take part in state and national affairs and to make local political, economic, and social decisions based on a broad understanding of the workings of society as a whole. Still, the explorations Hassell encouraged his students to make of this world began always with first principles supplied to them from a higher authority, thus reinforcing personal power as the chief organizing principle of local social relations. These were crucial skills for young leaders in a divided society that, although participating in distant markets, remained structured at home by a thick web of connections - kin, neighbors, clients, and fellow churchgoers - all arranged in a strict hierarchy, a local society composed of "two great classes - a class of vast land owners, haughty, hospitable, insolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs," as one writer to the local newspaper put it.(12)

Life outside the schoolroom, however, was rapidly changing in Wilson during the 1870s and with it the purposes, uses, and meanings of schooling. The end of political Reconstruction had set in motion a rapid transformation in the local economy, vastly increasing the extent of the cotton crop. The local newspaper editor boasted that, in fact, merchants in Wilson "control a great portion of the trade of Nash, and large proportion of the trade of Greene, Pitt, Johnston, Wayne, Edgecombe, Franklin and Wake" counties. But labor to cultivate cotton could not be had cheaply in the Wilson area for two reasons. First, Primitive Baptists were unusual in that they were among the few whites in North Carolina willing to sell land to freedmen, and they did so in Wilson and surrounding counties. The result was the formation of a landed black peasantry in the countryside unwilling to work for large cotton planters as day laborers or sharecroppers. The second limit on cheap labor was the willingness of black people who did not own land to leave the area in order to seek higher wages in the North or in the western states. By 1880, this led to an "exodus" that was hotly opposed by local employers and by the sizable black elite that had begun to emerge in and about the town of Wilson. As a result, employers sought labor from immigrants and from laborers turned off the land in other North Carolina counties - in other words strangers from abroad. In addition, there was a considerable difference of opinion within the local white elite as to the value and nature of this economic expansion. Some of the older planters, including many Primitive Baptists who remained connected with the Wilson Collegiate Institute, had grave reservations about the kind of society an unbridled capitalism might produce in Wilson. In the end, all this change led to considerable conflict that played itself out in heated political campaigns, much gunplay, and a string of suspicious fires.(13)

For Wilson's leading merchants especially, the question became how to manage this conflict, how for the first time to lead a community of strangers, many of them with an independent means of producing a livelihood. As the town grew, local school graduates increasingly did not return to the countryside and to the homes and social relations from which they sprang. They often remained in town where they worked in stores, or tobacco warehouses and factories, or the railroad. Therefore they no longer dealt with people whom they had known all their lives and with whom they would continue to work until death. Now they began to live and work among strangers who often were merely temporary bosses or clients with few other social ties. For Wilson's commercial elite, that social role, more so for young men than for young women, called for little morality and forgiveness, knowledge of the Greek and Roman geography, or cooperation of any kind. It required instead competitiveness among individuals, practical skills such as bookkeeping, and a work discipline that meshed well with bureaucratic authority, especially for those who worked for the railroad. As for the county's farmers and laborers, life in this new society of strangers meant that the independence learned in the rough and tumble world of field schools now became dysfunctional. Moreover, mastery of only the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic became inadequate. Thus it was that education at all levels in Wilson began to change dramatically in the space of a few years.(14)

The road to managing this fractious new society began with a provocative pair of speeches given at the June commencement of the Wilson Collegiate Institute. In an address entitled "How to Make the Most of Life," Augustus S. Merrimon, a superior court judge, argued that North Carolina had done a poor job in preparing its children to exercise their free will, and then went on to connect the development of individuals with education, and education with prosperity in general. "Just in proportion as people are educated they will accumulate wealth," he concluded. The second speaker that day, Hugh E Murray, a local lawyer and Democratic politician who would become a prominent figure in local educational reform during the next five years, argued that a student must be free to choose his (not her) own career, that is to place his labor for sale in a market, implying that the time-honored practice of a son following in the footsteps of the father must be abandoned.(15) And while not altogether coherent, these speeches did raise certain themes that portended a dramatic change in educational practice in Wilson. Their unabashed advocacy of individualism or "free will" contrasted sharply with Hassell's emphasis on deference and reconciliation, in short, on molding students to the needs of a hierarchical plantation society. And Judge Merrimon's effort to equate education and wealth shifted the purpose of local education from character-building to the acquisition of marketable skills. Yet some in Wilson found these new ideas troubling, and one of those wrote a lengthy rebuttal to Merrimon's speech for publication in the local newspaper, saying that "I make the assertion without fear of contradiction that for every educated man in Wilson County, two uneducated ones can be shown, who are of more use to themselves and the community at large than the other." He clinched the argument, in his view, by describing a local manufacturer who had made good without any education, and by comparing that man's career to local blacks who had attended freedmen's schools and yet remained landless. "Men lose sight of the fact," he concluded, "that God put his almighty fist upon his creatures individually, and they waste much time and effort in attempts to improve or undo his work."(16)

In the end, it was the Democratic Party that took up the cause of the new education in the spring of 1881 when the North Carolina legislature, which it dominated, approved a bill that would significantly reorganize common schools in the state. Afterwards, although neighborhood school committees continued to hire teachers, set the curriculum, and build and move schoolhouses, a county superintendent was required by law to "examine" the professional qualifications of all teachers in the county and to remove those "who are incapable of conducting a school properly." The superintendent was also enjoined by law to hold local institutes "to teach the methods of teaching," to visit the schools and "give such instruction as to managing and conducting them as the teacher may need," and to act as a "counselor" to teachers, neighborhood school committeemen, and parents "in all difficulties of school affairs."(17) In short, Wilson County's school superintendent had been granted what amounted to a veto over the conduct of public education in the community by virtue of his power to pass judgment on the fitness of teachers for their jobs. By June 1881, James Murray, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher and father of Hugh E Murray, the local lawyer and school reform advocate, had been appointed superintendent of Wilson County schools. Within weeks the elder Murray had placed a notice in the local newspaper informing public school teachers that they all must submit to examinations for three days beginning the second Thursday of the month, and at about the same time he urged local teachers to participate in a state normal school to be held in Wilson as preparation for the examinations.(18)

In the summer of 1881, as a part of its efforts to transform the state's schools, North Carolina's legislature, for the first time, also funded several summer normal schools to be scattered around the state, and one of these was designated for Wilson to serve white common school teachers east of the fall line. Financed in part by the Peabody Fund and led by Sylvester Hassell, the Wilson Normal School opened on June 15, 1881, with a faculty of eight lecturers and with about fifty teachers in attendance, although the number attending would rise by the end of the session to 154. In addition, Mrs. John McDonald and her daughter Mary, both teachers at the Raleigh Graded School, each taught a model class of elementary students, and there were also a number of lecturers who each spoke for an evening or two. In the mornings, students attended lectures lasting thirty or forty minutes each on arithmetic; either history or geography; and either penmanship or drawing; as well as courses in school management and methods of teaching. In the afternoon, they attended lectures on Latin; French or bookkeeping and algebra; grammar or analysis; reading or vocal music; and spelling or pronunciation.(19)

This was a thoroughly old-fashioned normal school for the time and place, emphasis being placed less on teaching than on subject matter to be taught. This approach to pedagogy was further reinforced by the one text which all the normal students were required to read, The Normal: Or Methods of Teaching the Common Branches, by Alfred Holbrook, who had been principal of one of the first normal schools in Ohio and was a leading authority on teaching methods at mid-century. What is most striking about Holbrook's text, especially in view of the title he chose for the book, is its complete lack of a method for teaching. The book, in fact, says nothing about what ought to occur in a schoolroom or how a teacher might prepare for the day's events. Instead, Holbrook described an elaborate system of dividing knowledge into its parts, for what he called "systematizing" knowledge. This was a pedagogy that prevailed until about the middle of the century among academy teachers in America, and was linked to a taxonomic view of knowledge, the central problem of which was to bring order to a vast sea of minute details by arranging those parts according to similarities in appearance. In fact, Holbrook taught through his text not a teaching method, but a method for dividing knowledge into convenient segments, each segment to be fed to students until the knowledge was mastered. And it was these small segments of knowledge that the students at the Wilson Normal School were exposed to in units of thirty to forty minutes several times each day, their task being merely to repeat accurately what they were told, as their students afterwards were to do. Teaching then was to be merely a transfer of knowledge, in other words decisions about the nature of the world made by authorities elsewhere, not by students themselves. This was an inductive method of thinking suitable for a hierarchical society dominated by a handful of planters.(20)

The highlight of the 1881 Wilson Normal School, however, was the model class led by Mrs. McDonald and her daughter Mary which stood Hassell and Holbrook on their pedagogical heads. During the second week of the Normal School, Mrs. McDonald taught a class of about twenty children between the ages of seven and twelve, moving them as a group through a rotation of subjects during the day, much as any common school teacher of the time would. But, as the local newspaper editor who visited Mrs. McDonald's classroom put it, "her methods of teaching" were dramatically "different from what we have so long been accustomed to," the most striking departure being how she drew the children into their studies. He marveled at how "the children became interested in the recitations and gave their undivided attention to the teacher throughout." How exactly she did this the evidence does not reveal, but there is a clue in the teaching of her daughter. Miss McDonald taught by the "object method" that began, not with a general statement from an acknowledged authority, but with the physical world already known to the child. It was, in short, a deductive method of reasoning. She moved her students gradually from elementary exercises in reproducing on paper the size and form of various objects toward larger and more complex objects familiar to them, and finally to representations of the world itself as a whole. She, in fact, brought to show as the highest example of her teaching method a map of North Carolina that had been drawn by her students in Raleigh and which had been "executed with so much care and knowledge as to rival the maps made by regular publishing houses." This was a kind of exercise that could not be repeated word for word by a student to a teacher, and hence represented the thin end of a wedge of progressivism that would profoundly change education in Wilson over the next five years.(21)

But perhaps the most important event to occur at the first Normal School in 1881 took place one evening after classes when Alexander Graham, a young man who had recently been appointed superintendent of the graded school in Fayetteville, gave a "well attended" lecture on graded schools at the courthouse in Wilson which "awakened considerable interest among our leading citizens." Later that week, fueled by extensive coverage in the local newspaper, graded school enthusiasts held a series of meetings in town to drum up further support. And the following week yet another meeting was held at the courthouse. This one was notable for two things. First, the two men elected to run the meeting heretofore had been supporters of the Wilson Collegiate Institute. The Reverend B. S. Bronson, a local Episcopal minister, at one time had taught in Hassell's Institute, and John E. Woodard, a prominent Primitive Baptist in Wilson, had once served as a trustee. In other words, the balance of power in Wilson's elite had shifted. Second, a Prof. McGilvray, a lecturer at the Normal School who headed a graded school in Richmond, Virginia, spoke on "the practical workings of graded schools" and, in doing so, showed "in a clear and satisfactory manner" to local notables that "the schools had worked well where ever tried, economizing both time and money." As a result, some of the wealthier men in town pledged subscriptions to fund the school so that it could be opened without charging tuition and without submitting the question of a new school district to voters. The local newspaper editor also urged that the county devote all of the common school fund earmarked for Wilson to the graded school, which the County Commissioners later agreed to do.(22)

The Wilson Graded School opened on the first Monday in September 1881 with Julius L. Tomlinson serving as principal. He was a scion of a prominent Quaker family in North Carolina, a graduate of Trinity College (now Duke University) and Haverford College who had also taken normal training in Germany and coursework at the new Johns Hopkins University. Tomlinson was assisted by a deputy principal, James F. Bruton, a graduate of the prestigious Bingham School in North Carolina, and three "lady teachers" who had each taught for some years in the town. The school admitted for free all white children within the newly consolidated common school district that encompassed the town of Wilson, and offered schooling to students living outside the district and to those who wished to take "normal instruction" at "very fair rates of tuition." The new school's Board of Trustees consisted of six men, all local merchants and lawyers, plus James Murray, the county superintendent of schools. But unlike the Institute's Board there were no farmers from the countryside on this Board; this would be a school to serve merchants and their interests in the new market economy. Within a week, about 200 students had enrolled, evidently mostly children from the town, and by November, after children from the country had finished helping pick cotton, the school reported an enrollment of 273.(23)

The curriculum in the Graded School differed from that which had been taught in the county's field schools not so much in content as in its pedagogy. In contrast to the memorization required in the common schools, the Graded School presented knowledge as a series of explorations. And in contrast to the Collegiate Institute which worked from first principles to instances, the Graded School encouraged students to begin with the known and proceed to the unknown, and to focus less on the definition and classification of things than on relations among those things. In the study of English grammar, for example, Hassell's textbook, An Elementary Grammar of the English Language by George E Holmes, spent 154 pages simply defining the parts of speech and their functions. The actual use of those elements, syntax, required only thirty pages. Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, a text used in the Wilson Graded School, by contrast, devoted 133 pages to sentences, and only 36 pages to the parts of speech. Moreover, the method by which the two texts dealt with the basic elements of the English language could not have been more different. Parsing, the heart of the Holmes text, meant taking a word and reciting from memory the four or five classificatory rules that placed it in Holmes' larger hierarchy of grammar. Reed and Kellogg by contrast introduced sentence diagramming, which required students to analyze the function of words within sentences. In other words, Holmes imposed meaning from without and above, while Reed and Kellogg required students to seek their own meaning from the internal relations of a sentence, a distinctly modern and thoroughly relativist way of thinking about the world. In short, the Graded School curriculum shifted the locus of authority over knowledge from the teacher and the text, that is from authoritative sources, to the student and reader, that is to an observer of the world.(24)

But perhaps the greatest difference between the older schooling and the new Graded School lay in their respective disciplinary regimes. From the opening of the Graded School, students were not left to study lessons on their own, but were closely watched by a corps of monitors, thirteen in all - six boys and six girls each assigned to a designated rank - first monitor, second monitor and so forth, plus a "chief officer." They were responsible for seeing "that the ranks are well kept in marching from the school rooms to the play grounds" and they were "to act as leaders in calisthenic and gymnastic exercises, and on public occasions to act as marshals." According to one observer who arrived at the beginning of the school day: "After going to their various rooms and depositing their books, at the sound of the gong, a march is played on the piano, the little ones come tramping in, keeping perfect time to the music. They are marched around the chapel, each hanging his hat on his own hook as he passes. They turn back and within five minutes after the first stroke of the gong, they are all back in their rooms and ready for work. At the recesses and at dismission, this marching is repeated." Tomlinson appointed the monitors each month in a competition arranged by grade, each grade receiving one monitor, the criteria for selection being achievement in "scholarship and deportment." As a symbol of distinction and authority, the head monitor wore a "costly gold medal" presented during a formal ceremony in the school's Calisthenic Hall "in the presence of many visitors." The result of the new discipline was an extraordinary control over the actions of each student exercised not by the teacher personally but by the rules of the institution acting through students who held appointments as monitors. According to one eye-witness, "There was no shuffling of feet on the floor, no nerve-torturing noise of slates moved on the desks, no such questions as, 'Mr. B. may I get a drink of water?"May I go out?' No laughing, no whispering."(25)

Such a system of discipline produced social relations among students differing dramatically from those both at the Institute and in the county's common schools. It set students into competition among themselves for leadership positions, thus undermining the cooperative basis of the student culture that had prevailed earlier. It also made students literally an extension of the authority of teachers, their eyes and ears on the playground and the enforcers of rules in the school. The sparring that formerly marked relations between teachers and students had no place in this new social world. The new discipline also created an ongoing system of distinctions between elite and ordinary students. An examination of the lists of monitors and the honor roll reveals a great consistency of membership; about twenty percent of the student body dominated the competition for power. Distinctions in the Institute, by contrast, had been distributed for a variety of reasons, and almost all students could expect to receive some honorable mention. Moreover, free time available during the working day at the Wilson Graded School disappeared, in part because the school day lengthened from about three to six hours and in part because students were expected to complete their work entirely within the confines of the school. The result was an end to the common culture of students that once had flourished. No gangs arose to organize country picnics or support a boycott of school in favor of attending a circus. Instead, the social life of students became subjected to the constant surveillance of the institution and its deputies.(26)

Educational reform, however, had its greatest impact on the local common schools for white children. In a series of articles in the local newspaper, County Superintendent James Murray reported on sixteen schools taught by the "Normalites" and concluded that "in all of them, except one" there had been a "marked a change in organization, government and methods of instruction." In one schoolroom, Murray observed "a map of North America hanging on the wall, together with a reading chart." Also he found a "numerical frame," presumably a large abacus, as well as a "good blackboard, together with a globe." In another classroom he saw "beautiful mottoes upon the walls," all of which Murray deemed "unmistaken tokens of progress" which "gave hopes of coming life." Commonplace as all this seems in a later age, Murray's "tokens of progress" were, however, innovations at the time. They drew students away from their texts and into participation in a larger world of imagination represented by mottoes, and globes, and charts. They also presumed participation by the students in a common learning activity, as distinct from the individual recitations that had been the core of an older pedagogy. The blackboard in particular reoriented social interaction in the classroom from each child's individual work carried out on a personal slate to the actions of the teacher who wrote in large letters for all to see on the wall. In short, Wilson County's common schools now emphasized active engagement with other children and with the surrounding physical environment, but an engagement that was thoroughly structured by the teacher.(27)

The Wilson Graded School opened for a second year in September with many changes and improvements and with about 300 pupils in attendance. The school now employed seven teachers who taught eight grades, and Tomlinson had determined to add a ninth grade which would "give pupils thorough preparation for an easy entrance to the State University or any of the Colleges." In addition, the school had added courses at the eighth grade level in algebra, geometry, Latin, higher English, physics and physiology, as well as implementing work in vocal music through all grade levels. Physical exercise especially was emphasized, and the school had acquired "dumbbells, wands, etc." to that end. All of this, of course, undercut Hassell's efforts at the Institute which had focused mainly on training an elite of young men for the University, and on fitting out an elite of young women for a cultured life, especially through its extensive program in music. These changes also helped expand the Graded School's state and national reputation for innovation and excellence that had been established the previous year. In November, Tomlinson reported that during the past year there had been 8,291 visitors at the school, "of which 237 were by teachers in other schools," and during the previous two months alone 150 county superintendents and teachers from other schools had observed classes in the Graded School. About the same time, there came news of a glowing report of the school by J. L. M. Curry, who had visited the school some months earlier, to the trustees of the Peabody Fund, the most important foundation then involved in promoting educational change in the South, which already had provided $400 to the Graded School. Curry concluded that "Professor Tomlinson at Wilson, by his powers of organization and skillful management, has demonstrated that almost any town in the South can have a system of graded schools adapted to the entire population."(28)

Meanwhile, James Murray, the school superintendent, toured the countryside, inspecting schools and advocating educational reform to farmers and laborers as he went. While visiting a school in Black Creek, for example, he took care not only to observe the teacher, but also to address the pupils at some length on the value of education. "I was surprised to see how well it pleased them, and to witness the amount of good it did," so much so that afterwards there was "not one" that did not "express a desire" for Murray "to come again." This was exactly the attitude that he hoped the students would convey to their parents who, at this point, were still expected to shoulder much of the burden of building schools and equipping students. As he put it himself, "I saw the need of the fathers and mothers of the children being stirred up to a sense of their duty, and when I could, I got them together, and with good effect, got many to buy books, slates, pencils and copy-books." Similarly, Murray visited many private homes in the countryside and there talked "education to parents and children around their hearthstones." He pushed local farmers hard to fund their neighborhood schools better, especially to combine private moneys with the meager appropriation available from the state and to encourage common school districts to levy their own taxes for schools. "The work may seem unimportant," Murray wrote, "but looking at it in its future bearings upon our political and social relations, it must strike the thoughtful mind as the lever that moves all else."(29)

Yet all was not well. There was, in fact, considerable opposition to the new schooling arising from two groups in Wilson County. The first included those persons who objected strenuously to any form of elitist schooling, or as they called it "liberal" education. Represented by a writer in the local newspaper who signed himself R.W.E., these men were farmers of small means some of whom apparently owned land and others of whom did not. According to R.W. E., these men now opposed efforts at developing the local political economy as a whole, especially the newly proposed laws that would force them to fence their stock instead of their fields. But schools especially, of course, would require an enormous investment of capital which they did not have and eventually - in combination with new taxes for roads, cotton weighing stations, a new county poor house, and most importantly schools - would force them off their land and into tenantry. In this, it turns out, R.W.E. and his friends were not mistaken, but in the meantime they meant to mount a spirited opposition to the developers in Wilson, and especially to block any effort to impose a tax for a graded school. R.W.E. wrote to the Wilson Advance in early May 1883: "An election is to take place in Wilson town within a few days to decide whether or not a graded school shall be kept up by direct taxation. I as an humble citizen and tax payer enter my protest because it is unequal, unjust, and impolitick." Moreover, R.W.E. warned that the upcoming vote on a graded school tax in Wilson and the surrounding countryside would be decided along the same lines as a recent ballot taken on fence laws. Supporters of the graded school law, he expected, would be "largely in the minority, save a few policy men and demagogues."(30)

R.W.E. then went on to sketch a rationale for his prediction. "Everyone says," he wrote, that "education in books is good thing, so it is bound to be, so it elevates society. It advances progress and civilization and makes us a better and happier people. But for the life of me I cannot locate at this time so many laudable and beneficial results." Indeed, he continued, "Give a boy in this country a liberal education, he refuses manual labor. Give a young man plenty of property, four times out of five he will spend it." Therefore, he concluded, "it is safest to let him work out his own destiny if you want it to last," and he completed the thought by pointing to several examples of self-made politicians who had done just that, men such as W.W. Holden, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom had served as craft apprentices when young. As an alternative to the graded school and its "liberal" education, R.W.E. proposed establishing a school that "lets learning and earning go together," specifically, a manual labor school that would devote "5 hours for books and 5 hours for diversified labour." This he thought would not only improve the student's mind but also enhance the status of the laborer. "Labor will no longer be subjected to degradation, for it will be guided by education and identified with culture. Learn them to work with hands as well as brains and enable him to carve out his own fortune and while so doing the respect of their fellows and the confidence and support of society." In all this, R.W.E. did not seek to deny children a chance in life, nor was he an industrialist seeking trained operatives on the cheap as many later advocates of manual training would be in the South. Rather than producing the social relations and ideas that privileged a middle class and its culture, R.W. E. wanted schools that would value work and the culture of ordinary men and women, treating all children and their cultures equally.(31)

The second group opposed to the Graded School consisted of at least some members of the local African American community. When the Wilson Graded School had been founded, the County Board of Commissioners had consolidated all the small school districts around the town into one, and had designated the entire fund of poll taxes and property taxes ordinarily allocated for white common schools in that district for the Graded School. But no effort was made to consolidate black children into a graded school. In response, the black community in Wilson had attempted to organize a private academy, but evidently failed to raise sufficient funds to open the school. About the same time, legislation had been introduced into the North Carolina General Assembly by W. T. Dortch, a state senator from nearby Wayne County, which would require taxes collected in a "local assessment" from whites to be applied only to white schools; schools for black children would be financed entirely with tax moneys collected from black people. Not surprisingly, Wilson's African American community took a skeptical view of all proposals to "improve" schools which left them at a disadvantage, yet their votes would be crucial in any effort to approve a tax for the graded school for white children in Wilson.(32)

In early January 1883, an anonymous writer in the Wilson Advance opened the campaign for segregated school funding by explaining why such a measure could improve schools, at least for whites. "If the school fund arising from the taxes paid by the white people of the South could be appropriated to the education of the white children alone, the progress made within the last few years under our improved system of public schools" would pale by comparison to the complete annihilation of illiteracy among whites. He went on to point out that such an experiment already had succeeded in Kentucky. And he justified cutting off funds to schools for African American children by saying that "the persistent ingratitude of the colored people of this State for educational advantages bestowed at the expense of the whites, has forfeited all claims to any other than their legal rights." This was followed six weeks later by an article, most likely written by Josephus Daniels, that supported separate school funding, but also explained the political difficulties involved. "The education of the negro is a delicate question to handle and we think it would be unwise at this juncture to withdraw all aid from this class of our citizens and throw them on their own resources." In fact, the question of changing the school funding formula had raised a Pandora's box of proposals, including the possibility of no funding for public schools at all. The Raleigh News & Observer, for one, published a ringing defense of illiteracy that was reprinted in the Wilson Advance. "The great bulk of the American people were illiterate a century ago, and who will say that the old revolutionary patriots were less worthy because not learned in the alphabet."(33)

The statewide furor over segregated school funding quickly became entwined in Wilson County with the campaign to approve a local tax to support the Graded School. "An Act to Establish a Graded School in Wilson Township, Wilson County" had been approved by the state legislature in early 1883 and had established a graded school district in and around the town of Wilson. It had also authorized one election to be held on the first Monday in May to decide "whether an annual tax shall be levied therein for the support of a Graded Public school for the white children, and a Graded Public school for the colored children in said District," the tax not to "exceed one third of one per centum on property, and one dollar on the poll." Should the tax be approved, all tax moneys collected from white persons would go to the white graded school, and the moneys from black persons to the black school. The act further created a Board of Trustees for each school and appointed nine local residents to each board, but it also gave the board for the white school considerably greater powers than the board for the black school. Each board would elect a bonded treasurer, and have the power to fill all vacancies, to employ teachers, and generally to "keep up the school." Only the board of the white school, however, was empowered to purchase, own and sell school buildings and grounds, or to sell bonds and execute a mortgage on school property to secure the bonds. Although the law did not say so specifically, its authors must have meant for the board of the white school to act in these matters for the board of the black school because there was no similar provision in the law dealing specifically with the black school. In short, the Wilson graded schools law proposed a racially segregated scheme of taxation which would provide vastly smaller funding for a black graded school than a white one, while allocating crucial aspects of power over the black schools - property ownership and the ability to borrow money - to a board devoted first and foremost to the white school.(34)

As the election approached, however, supporters of the graded schools tax found that they had very possibly outsmarted themselves. The Wilson graded schools law had created an elaborate set of new boundaries for the graded schools district that included some but not all neighborhoods in Wilson township. These boundaries had been the subject of much discussion within the local Democratic Party and evidently had been drawn so as to increase the number of property owning men on the voter registration rolls, men who, it was argued, would benefit handsomely in the long run and therefore should vote for the new tax. Specifically, the idea was that a graded school would attract new enterprises to the town, and in doing so drive up the price of real estate, a process that, in fact, had been underway in Wilson for the past two years. The tax, in fact, could be considered a form of investment, the capital needed to fuel local economic development that would benefit everyone, but especially those who already owned property. "Moneyed man," wrote Josephus Daniels in his newspaper, "are you willing to place at compound interest the sum of money you will have to pay as tax to support the school? This school is the best bank, you can place it in.(35)

In addition, the law's authors evidently also had taken care to include in the new district as many black households as possible on the theory that black men in Wilson would vote for the tax in order to get a graded school that they had already tried and failed to establish. But Wilson's African American community apparently did not find the offer tempting. In late April, Josephus Daniels announced in the pages of the local newspaper that "it seems from the present condition of the registration books and other information we have as to the prospects of the Graded School bill, that there is actual danger of its defeat." The problem was compounded by the fact that the new Wilson graded schools law required a majority of all registered voters in the district to approve a tax, not just a majority of those voting. As a result, "If you stay at home and fail to vote," Josephus Daniels warned his readers, "your neglect of duty will help to kill the Graded School." All Wilson's black men had to do in order to defeat the tax was to make themselves scarce on election day, and that left one group in Wilson County, landless white farmers, or at least those few who had not been excluded from the school district, to become the crucial swing vote.(36)

The response of graded school supporters to the possibility of defeat was to make a last minute appeal to the self-interest of both landless white farmers and local African Americans. Daniels claimed that there were white men who "yet think of not voting because they are not large property holders themselves and do not wish to vote to tax others." He also argued that as citizens they must vote both as a civic duty to the community and in the interest of preserving their claim to vote on other matters. This was a disingenuous line of reasoning at best. Landless men in Wilson township did not shy away from taxing larger property holders; they objected to yet another poll tax on themselves. Moreover, cloaked deep within Daniels' call to civic duty lay a threat. "Now we submit that by the same course of reasoning these gentlemen might speedily and completely disfranchise themselves and not allow themselves to vote for a member of the Legislature or indeed any other officers." In a word, if they did not vote for this measure, the town's leadership might see to it that landless men would lose their vote altogether.(37)

Toward Wilson's African American community, the graded schools tax supporters struck a more conciliatory pose. They played down the racial inequalities written into the graded schools law, and instead focused on allaying the black community's fears with regards to funding for the common schools, fears that had been raised in part by the graded schools law and in part by various other proposals before the legislature that would fund white schools at the expense of black children. An article in the local newspaper announced that "if the Graded School bill becomes a law the [common school] fund for the colored people will be somewhat increased, and that of the whites decreased, owing to the change in the bounds of the district." The explanation for this somewhat puzzling state of affairs lay in the way the graded schools law had gerrymandered local school district boundaries. In excluding poor white voters, the law had also excluded their children. Hence, the number of white children in the Wilson common schools stood to decrease while the number of black children remained the same, which would have had the effect of shifting moneys in the school fund to the black schools. Ironically, all of this had been engineered by Democrats who had come to power by drawing a color line in local politics so as to mobilize poor white voters for their cause.(38)

In the end, the graded schools tax was approved in the new Wilson school district by a vote of 284 to 78, but not as a result of any groundswell of support for education, much less taxation. In fact, there were no ballots printed against the tax, so that when the polls opened no one could vote the proposition down. It was only about mid-day when a "wealthy time merchant," a creditor whose livelihood depended on keeping a large supply of tenant farmers, preferably illiterate, on hand in the county, came to the polls that the fact was discovered. When the merchant demanded to cast a ballot against the school tax, he was informed that no such ballot had been printed and therefore it was impossible to do so. In fact, it was Daniels himself who had printed the ballots for the Graded School executive committee, and now he explained to the merchant that no one had paid him to perform the same service for opponents of the tax. In the end, the merchant managed to get ballots printed later in the day, presumably at the town's other newspaper printing office, and a small number of votes against the tax were recorded. The tax, however, had been approved, probably against the wishes of most voters in the district. In August, the county commissioners levied the maximum tax allowed by the new graded schools law - thirty-three cents on $100 of personal and real property and one dollar per poll.(39)

In September, the Graded School for white children reopened its doors with 280 children in attendance, about the same number as in September the previous year but considerably less than the high in attendance of 449 recorded in March 1883. As a school census taken during the summer revealed, the 280 who enrolled in the fall of 1883 encompassed only about half of the 511 white school-aged children in the graded school district. That same fall the Wilson Graded School for black children opened with a principal and two teachers - two men and a woman, all African Americans from eastern North Carolina. The trustees of the black Graded School, nine African American men who were all locally prominent artisans and businessmen, apparently hoped that the school would draw children from the countryside as well from the town of Wilson because they asked the local newspaper to publish tuition rates for "children living outside the district." In short, both schools were open and publicly financed, but both were still searching for students in a community that was not yet fully convinced of the value of "higher culture" for most students.(40)

At this point, educational reformers in Wilson might have begun to consolidate their hold over the school system. With public funding assured, Tomlinson and James Murray ought to have directed an educational renaissance. And for a time, things worked in their favor. Sylvester Hassell's Institute went into a steep decline. In the fall of 1883, he transformed his school into the Wilson Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies so as to take advantage of the white Graded School's lack of courses in art and music. Meanwhile, the Graded School for white children flourished. A debating society was organized to complement the new college preparatory course, and an "entertainment" was organized in December to show off the accomplishments of its students. But things did not work out exactly as planned. Political dominance of the state by Democrats had become increasingly tenuous after the triumphs of the early 1880s. "Independents" continued to defect to the Republican Party, or increasingly to appeal to poor white farmers who would later vote the Populist ticket in North Carolina. And the revolution in public education that Democrats had engineered came under increasingly harsh criticism from Republican politicians who hoped to flail their opponents with the inequitable division of funds connected with the new graded schools. This was an especially effective tactic in the Wilson graded schools district because, of course, the district's boundaries had been drawn specifically to exclude poor whites and to include blacks. Should black voters turn against the graded schools, the tax could conceivably be repealed. In the end, however, it was not local politics that forced the closure of the town's graded schools. By September 1884, the North Carolina Supreme Court in two separate cases had found virtually all of the graded school laws in North Carolina to be unconstitutional on the grounds that a division of tax moneys by race violated the state constitution.(41)

Shortly thereafter, the Wilson graded schools, both black and white, were closed, thus ending an era of dramatic innovation in Wilson. From 1884 through 1891 Wilson County had no public schools except those in the countryside that met for a few weeks in the summer. Meanwhile, the leaders of the graded school movement abandoned the town as quickly as possible. Tomlinson went to Winston where he headed the graded school there for a few years until his untimely death in 1892; Bruton left the school for a life as a lawyer in the country courts; Eugene C. Branson, Tomlinson's successor as principal of the graded school for white children, went to Georgia where he headed a graded school before moving on to a career in the education department at the University of North Carolina; and Josephus Daniels headed for Raleigh where he parlayed the editorship of the Raleigh State Chronicle and later the News and Observer into several plum positions in the state and national Democratic Party and where he strenuously advocated expanded public schooling. Wilson, in fact, did not have a public graded school again until 1891 when legislation was approved by the General Assembly which included "a special school tax to be divided without discrimination as to race" and to be used to "open schools for both races, but in separate buildings as required by the Constitution." But Daniels and Branson especially, as well as several men who participated in the Wilson Normal schools in 1881 and 1882, would go on to play key roles in reorganizing all North Carolina's public schools after the Democratic Party took control of the state at the turn of the century - along with their friend Charles B. Aycock, later dubbed the "education governor" who had been a classmate of Daniels' at the Wilson Collegiate Institute in the late 1870s. In short, a cadre for Progressive reform in education had been forged in the failed experiments with graded schools in eastern North Carolina.(42)

An equally important consequence of the short-lived establishment of graded schools in Wilson lay in an ideological legacy that would prove useful to advocates of Progressive education in North Carolina after the turn of the century. The story of education in Wilson was first told by Josephus Daniels himself after he paid a visit to the 1886 Wilson Normal School. At the heart of his account of the rise and fall of the Wilson graded schools lay a tale of progress denied. "Until the Normal and Graded Schools were established in North Carolina," he argued, "the idea that it was the duty of a community to educate all its children, if indeed it existed at all, had only a feeble lodgment in a few minds." But with the founding of graded schools "communities dead to the responsibilities resting upon them were quickened, and new life was breathed upon the languishing academies and schools." Most importantly, "every child regardless of birth or fortune" received "equal advantages" in their schooling. He concluded that in Wilson's graded schools there was, in fact, "no tendency to class or caste distinctions."(43)

But Daniels' claim to having noticed mainly poor children listed on the roll of honor is nonsense. In every year, the roll of honor was dominated consistently by the sons and daughters of commercial farmers, merchants, and professionals. Moreover, Daniels' assertion that no distinctions of caste had been made in the graded schools is simply false. The Wilson graded schools law not only distinguished between black and white students, teachers, schools, and tax moneys, but also provided that white men must control all school property used by black children. How then could Daniels make such claims, and why would anyone find them persuasive? Josephus Daniels in his useful fiction had found the key to producing a political constituency for the Democratic Party in a society bedeviled by newly emerging economic and racial differences - an identity between democracy and schooling and an antithesis between schooling and oligarchies. After the North Carolina Supreme Court had invalidated the state's graded schools laws, "there were," Daniels continued, "in all these towns a few - in some quite a number - wealthy citizens who opposed continuing the Graded Schools and openly advocated establishing schools of the kind that were conducted ten years ago. Some of them, after defeating the school by taxation, refused to contribute towards a school that could be open to all." "What," he asked the readers of the State Chronicle, "was the result of their opposition? The great majority of the people were against them and the Graded Schools will be maintained by private subscription, supplemented by the common school fund." Here was a means of creating a political constituency among both the middle class and the poor, both black and white - attack the wealthy. This strategy would anchor Progressive reform in North Carolina after the defeat of the Populists in 1898, and Daniels' argument would form the basic story line for educators who wrote tendentious histories of schooling in the South for the next two generations.(44)

Schooling in late nineteenth century Wilson, North Carolina, helped constitute a transformation in which a small modernizing elite sought to alter the social relations of a rising generation, and to replace a patriarchal, hierarchical authority structure with one that organized strangers within new bureaucratic institutions. It was also a site of intense ideological struggle over what to value in the New South just then emerging. Reformers offered individualism in place of community, lauded competitiveness over cooperation, and enforced by means of constant surveillance a rigorous discipline over a new self, the autonomous individual, appropriate to a society fully structured by market values. They also altered the very basis of knowledge by shifting the means of inquiry from an inductive to a deductive method, and from local production and control to new centers of intellectual work in Raleigh and Chapel Hill and beyond, thereby moving ideological and cultural power from farmers in the countryside to a town-dwelling middle class. Finally, the new graded schools drew in children of all kinds, ostensibly offering each an equal opportunity to develop themselves. Yet, graded schools privileged high culture, the very culture that well-to-do children in Wilson had absorbed at home, over the vernacular culture of the countryside. Hence, the honor roll became "naturalized," and distinction appeared to be a mark of merit rather than inheritance, although in fact it was never any such thing. What was at issue in the political battles that accompanied the founding of the graded schools then was not merely control over schools, but rather, the means to social and cultural reproduction, an issue in turn that was crucial in the larger transformation of the South.

All of this change, however, did not occur in a vacuum or without opposition. In 1880, there was already a system of education in operation. The common schools, feeble and erratic as they were, had served the interests of small farmers in the countryside since before the Civil War. They provided the basic skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic - needed to bring a crop to market and profit by it. And the schools did so without disrupting the existing face-to-face social relations of the neighborhood through which land, labor, and credit circulated. Cheap common schools also imposed no new taxes that would draw small farmers and landless tenants too deeply into the market economy and ultimately into debt. It should not be surprising then that some farmers in the countryside opposed almost all changes in schooling advocated by Wilson's reformers. It also should not be surprising that Wilson's reformers failed to secure adequate financial backing for their schools, except once, and then succeeded only through chicanery. Similarly, African Americans in Wilson raised serious objections, not to schooling, but to schools that had embedded in their very structure a profound contempt for black people. Graded schools that separated blacks from whites, yet remained under the financial control of a white board of education could never be operated wholly in the interests of black children. There would always be limits imposed on what kinds of knowledge black children could receive, thus restricting their preparation for opportunities in a newly formed regional labor market. Wilson's academies, however, presented a harder nut to crack, mainly because they were the creatures of men who already held political and economic power in the county. Here it was necessary to persuade from within, and the local normal schools and the graded school itself provided living demonstrations viewed by thousands that were effective vehicles for doing so. The county's academies subsequently were not so much attacked as left to wither and die of their own accord which, in the end, they did.

By the mid-1880s, however, Wilson, like the rest of the South, had not yet fully made the transition to a market society. Local society, divided as it was, muddled all efforts to create a unified constituency for change, producing instead some extraordinary political contortions. African Americans in Wilson, on the one hand, desperately wanted good schooling for their children, so much so that at least some were willing to vote for a graded school tax rooted deeply in segregation. And middle-class whites wanted graded schools so badly that they were willing not only to disfranchise their fellow white men, but also to exclude poor white children from those schools. This was a house of cards bound to collapse, both in Wilson and at the state and regional levels, as of course it did in the 1890s throughout the South. Wilson County failed, during the 1880s, to reach a broad-based agreement in favor of progressive education, and hence support for graded schools remained weak even after funding had been assured and before the state Supreme Court invalidated Wilson's graded schools law. All of this had not occurred in vain, however. From this muddled experiment, a cadre for educational reform had emerged, and Josephus Daniels drew some conclusions that would provide an ideological underpinning for "progressivism" in North Carolina education during the early twentieth century. Progressive schooling in the New South then did not begin in 1900, as an older historiography argued, with the efforts of a few zealous reformers dedicated to the good of all. Rather, it had its origins in local efforts in the 1880s, as more recent authors have briefly indicated, to shape a new social order consistent with an expanding market economy. Just as the editor of Wilson Advance had predicted in 1888, the future not only of Wilson but of all the Southern states, or at least capitalist development in those places, did indeed depend to "an alarming extent" on educational reform and did indeed lead not to "mere pretension, but larger actualities."

Department of History Cincinnati, OH 45221-0373

ENDNOTES

Many thanks to Edward Ayers, Bruce Levine, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Linda Przybyszewski for their close, critical readings of this article.

1. Wilson Advance, January 27, 1882, May 10, 1888.

2. For the older historiography on schooling in the New South see, M. C. S. Noble, A History of the Public Schools of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1930), hereafter Noble, A History of the Public Schools; Edgar W. Knight, Public School Education in North Carolina (New York, 1916), hereafter Knight, Public School; Charles William Dabney, Universal Education in the South (Chapel Hill, 1936), pp. 164-219. For the most important accounts of the New South that stick strictly to the politics of education see, Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1992), especially pp. 417-20, hereafter Ayers, Promise of the New South; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951). A notable early exception to this rule is the work of Horace Mann Bond which directly connects economic development and the spread of modern schools in the New South. See Horace Mann Bond, Social and Economic Influences on the Public Education of Negroes in Alabama, 1865-1930 (Washington, D.C., 1939) and The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York, 1934, 1966), especially chapter 5; see also James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988). For two recent works that make a broader connection between the politics of education and pedagogy using Anthony Gidden's theory of structuration see David Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia, 1985); William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grass-Roots Movements During the Progressive Era (Boston, 1986); and Christopher J. Anstead and Ivor F. Goodson, "Structure and Mediation: Glimpses of Everyday Life at the London Technical and Commercial High School, 1920-1940," American Journal of Education 102 (1993): 55-79. For recent studies of schooling in the New South which make such connections at the state level see William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1986) and James Leloudis, Schooling in the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996) hereafter Leloudis, Schooling in the New South. The emphasis here on modern public schools as crucial sites for the creation of new kinds of social relations and ideas appropriate to capitalism are drawn mainly from Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (1968; trans. London, 1975); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970; trans. London, 1977, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (1964; trans. Chicago, 1979); Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3, Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (London, 1977); and Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London, 1979).

3. Population in Wilson County increased from 12,258 in 1870 to 16,064 in 1880, and the town of Wilson increased in population during that period by about fifty percent, from 1,036 to 1,475. Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (June I, 1880) (Washington, 1883), pp. 74, 284. On the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad after the Civil War see Howard D. Dozier, A History of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (Boston, 1920), pp. 110-27.

4. Leloudis, Schooling in the New South, pp. 3-17; Wilson Advance, December 9, 1881. On the election of district committeemen see for example Wilson Board of Commissioners Minutes, vol. 1, p. 31, July 5, 1869, North Carolina Archives, Raleigh, hereafter Commissioners Minutes; on their appointment after 1870 see for example Commissioners Minutes, vol. 1, p. 116, August 7, 1870, vol. 1, p. 228; on the failed school tax see Commissioners Minutes, vol. 1, p. 186, May 3, 1873. On the election and later appointment of district committeemen statewide in the 1870s see Richard Barry Westin, "The State and Segregated Schools: Negro Public Education in North Carolina, 1863-1923," Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1966, pp. 44-53, hereafter Westin, "The State and Segregated Schools." On country schools as the means for property owners to dominate a rural neighborhood, see Paul Theobald, "Country School Curriculum and Governance: The One-Room School Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest," American Journal of Education 101 (1993): 116-39.

5. For fragments on the conduct of common schools in Wilson County see Josephus Daniels, Tar Heel Editor (Chapel Hill, 1939), pp. 55-56, hereafter Daniels, Tar Heel Editor.

6. "Sylvester Hassell," Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill, 1988), William S. Powell, ed., vol. 3, p. 69, hereafter DNCB; "Sylvester Hassell," Biographical History of North Carolina from Colonial Times to the Present (Greensboro, N.C., 1905), Samuel A. Ashe, ed., vol. 5, 129-34; Clark Gerow Shreve, "The Development of Education to 1900 in Wilson, North Carolina," M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1941, pp. 34-38, hereafter Shreve, "The Development of Education to 1900 in Wilson"; Charles Lee Raper, The Church and Private Schools of North Carolina: A Historical Study (Greensboro, N.C., 1898), pp. 130-31; John G. Thomas, "The History of Education in Wilson County," North Carolina Education (Nov. 1944): 158-59; Daisy Hendley Gold, "A Town Named Wilson," pp. 109-12, typescript, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill; Daniels, Tar Heel Editor, pp. 59-61.

7. Daniels, Tar Heel Editor, pp. 62-66. Of the boys and their society in Wilson, we know a good deal because Josephus Daniels, a student at the Institute in the 1870s who later became an important figure in the Democratic Party at both the state and national levels, wrote a detailed memoir of his early days in Wilson. Daniels, who will be a key figure in this story, was son of a widowed dressmaker and postmistress and attended the Wilson Collegiate Institute from 1877 to 1880. While a student in the Institute, he worked as "events editor" for the Wilson Advance, and at the age of 18 became editor of the newspaper. Archibald Henderson, North Carolina: The Old North State and the New (Chicago, 1941), vol. 3, pp. 20-21, hereafter Henderson, North Carolina.

8. Diary, May 5, 15, October 5, 1874; May 20, 21, 1880; May 19, 28, August 12, 1886, Sylvester Hassell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, hereafter, Hassell Papers; see also September 6, 1880 and September 26, 1883. On Hassell's opposition to circuses see Wilson Institute Quarterly 1 (February 8, 1873): 6.

9. Third Annual Catalogue of the Wilson Collegiate Institute, for both Sexes, at Wilson, Wilson County, North Carolina (Wilson, N.C., 1874), p 14; Diary, March 9, June 10, 1874, Hassell Papers. On Hassell's conception of character see a lecture he gave to his students entitled "Formation of Character" in the Wilson Institute Quarterly 3 (July 1879): 6. For specific disciplinary rules in force at the Institute see Wilson Institute Quarterly (February 8, 1873): 8.

10. Third Annual Catalogue of the Wilson Collegiate Institute, for both Sexes, at Wilson, Wilson County, North Carolina (Wilson, N.C., 1874), pp. 13-14; William T. Harris, Andrew J. Rickoff, and Mark Bailey, Appletons School Readers: The Fifth Reader (New York, 1880), p. 1. Hassell recommends the Appletons' Readers in his Diary, February 24, 1880, Hassell Papers. Also see, Wilson Collegiate Institute Catalog (1872). For references to books used in the Wilson Collegiate Institute see scattered charges for books in Student Accounts, 1873, Wilson Collegiate Institute; and Diary, February 24, 1880; November 17, 1882, Hassell Papers.

11. Samuel McCutchen, The New American Arithmetic, part 2 (Philadelphia, 1877), see for example page 23. For other texts that Hassell assigned using an inductive method see William W. Goodwin, An Elementary Greek Grammar (Boston, 1873), George F. Holmes, An Elementary Grammar of the English Language (New York, 1870), Albert Harkness, A New Latin Reader with Exercises in Latin Composition (New York, 1865, 1885). For a methodology for reading textbooks see Chris Stray "Paradigms Regained: Towards a Historical Sociology of the Textbook," Journal of Curriculum Studies 26 (1994): 1-29.

12. Wilson Advance, June 17, 1881. The author went on to argue that schools in the South were wretched in the extreme because of this system of two classes which produced some great men, but "no literary class," that is "no community of interest" which would support schools and cultural activity. The result was a static, impoverished society that lacked the intellectual means to improve itself, a state of affairs, he implied, that would change significantly with the growth of a middle class and its ascension to power.

13. Wilson Advance, July 18, 1880, January 7, 1881; Report on the Productions of Agriculture as Returned at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Washington, 1883), p. 237. On the exodus from Wilson County by African Americans and opposition to it see Wilson Advance, January 2, 1880. On the connection between schooling and attempts to stem the flow of black emigrants see Knight, Public Schools, p. 300, quoting North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance. On the dramatic changes underway in small towns throughout the South see Ayers, The Promise of the New South, chapters 3 and 4; Phillip J. Wood, Southern Capitalism: The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880-1980 (Durham, N.C., 1986), chapter 1; Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1985), chapter 7; David Carlton, "The Revolution from Above: The National Market and the Beginnings of Industrialization in North Carolina," Journal of American History 77 (1990): 445-75; Lacy K. Ford, "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900," Journal of American History 71 (1984): 294-318; John J. Beck, "Building the New South: A Revolution from Above in a Piedmont County," Journal of Southern History 53 (1987): 441-70; Wayne K. Durrill, "Producing Poverty: Local Government and Economic Development in a New South County, 1874-1884," Journal of American History 71 (1985): 764-81.

14. For similar social changes involving the middle class elsewhere see, Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York, 1989); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1982); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago, 1990); and Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (Chapel Hill, 1990).

15. Wilson Advance, July 21, 1880. The editor of the Wilson Advance, Josephus Daniels actually began the graded school campaign with a short article in his newspaper on February 27, 1880, that reported on the founding of graded schools in Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro. On Merrimon see Samuel A. Ashe, Cyclopedia of Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas of the Nineteenth Century (Madison, Wis., 1892), vol. 2, pp. 79-86; DNCB, vol. 4, pp. 258-59.

16. On bookkeeping and physical training at the Wilson Collegiate Institute see, Diary, June 22, 1880; June 7, 1882; Wilson Collegiate Institute Catalog, 1879-1880 (Wilson, N.C., 1879): 7.

17. Wilson Advance, July 14, 1880; April 22, 1881; Proceedings of the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly (Raleigh, N.C., 1884): 27. On the impact of the 1881 law statewide see A.D. Mayo, "The Final Establishment of the American Common School System in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, 1863-1900," U.S. Bureau of Education Report (1904), p. 1008, hereafter Mayo, "The Final Establishment"; and Knight, Public Education, pp. 307-13. On Jarvis see Cyclopedia, vol. 2, pp. 109-112; DNCB vol. 3, pp. 273-74.

18. Board of Commissioners, vol. 2, p. 32, June 6, 1881; Wilson Advance, June 17, July 1, 1881. For a model of how county superintendents like Murray were expected to examine common school teachers see a speech by W. S. Long entitled "The Examination of Teachers - Its Method, Scope and Purpose" in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the State Association of County Superintendents of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1883): 3-7.

19. Wilson Advance, June 10, 17, 1881; Diary, June 28, 30, 1882, Hassell Papers. On the Peabody Fund in North Carolina see Knight, Public Education, pp. 270-93.

20. Alfred Holbrook, The Normal: Or Methods of Teaching the Common Branches (New York, 1859), pp. 9-21;Wilson Advance, June 17, 1881. On Hassell's endorsement of Holbrook's methods see Wilson Institute Quarterly, vol. 1 (July 8, 1873): 4, 7. On Holbrook and his teaching method see also Alfred Holbrook, School Management (Lebanon, Ohio, 1871); Alfred Holbrook, An English Grammar Conformed to Present Usage: With an Objective Method of Teaching the Elements of the English Language (Cincinnati, 1873); Alfred Holbrook, Reminiscences of the Happy Life of a Teacher (Cincinnati, 1885); and Karl J. Kay, History of the National Normal University of Lebanon, Ohio (Wilmington, Ohio, 1929).

21. Wilson Advance, July 8, 1881.

22. Wilson Advance, July 1, 8, 22, 29, 1881. On Bronson and his connection with the Institute see, Diary, April 7, 8, 9, 1882, Hassell Papers. On the organization of graded schools in the larger towns in North Carolina see William Eskridge King, "The Era of Progressive Reform in Southern Education: The Growth of Public Schools in North Carolina, 1885-1910," Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1969, pp. 47-66, hereafter King, "The Era of Progressive Reform." On the career of Alexander Graham see, Cyclopedia, vol. 2, pp. 443-44.

23. Wilson Advance, August 8, 19, September 2, 23, 1881. Bruton was a recent graduate of the prestigious Bingham School in Orange County, and the three "lady teachers," as they were called, were Mrs. E. W. Adams, Mary to her friends in Wilson where she and her husband had taught for years; Mrs. W. F. Mercer, the young wife of a middle-aged merchant in town; and Miss M. A. Hearne, a young women living with her sister and her husband, a prosperous molder. On Tomlinson see newspaper clippings in the Stephen B. Weeks Scrapbooks, vol. 4, pp. 229-30, 248, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill; and The North Carolina Teacher 1 (June 1883): 460-64. On the Tomlinson family in Wilson County see Henderson, North Carolina, vol. 3, pp. 259-60. On Bruton see DNCB, vol. 1, p. 253. On the teachers Adams, Mercer, and Hearne see J. Robert Boykin, Wilson, County, North Carolina 1880 Census (Wilson, N.C., 1984). On the consolidation of the common school districts around Wilson into a single district see Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, p. 37, August 1, 1881.

In 1881, the Graded School Executive Committee all lived in or near Wilson and included T. J. Hadley, a 39-year-old "dealer in general merchandise"; R. J. Taylor who at the age of 46 owned a steam mill in town; H. C. Moss the 48-year-old Clerk of the Wilson County Superior Court who had a son working as a clerk in local store; James Murray, the county Superintendent of Schools and a 67-year-old former school teacher, also the father of Hugh E Murray, the lawyer and local politician; Henry Groves Connor, a 27-year-old lawyer who would go on to serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court and the federal bench; and M. T. Moye, a 52-year-old druggist. When the Wilson Graded School law was enacted it altered the composition of the Committee, now called the Board of Trustees, dropping Murray and adding Warren Woodard, a 52-year-old farmer; George D. Green, a 32-year-old hardware merchant; George W. Blount, a 43-year-old lawyer; and Moses Rountree, a 57-year-old merchant. (Wilson Advance, September 2, 1881, March 23, 1883; Boykin, Wilson County.) On Connor's subsequent career see Henderson, North Carolina, p. 34; DNCB, vol. 1, pp. 416-18.

There is no record of who attended the Graded School, except lists printed in the local newspaper of students who made the honor roll. (See, for example, Wilson Advance, April 21, 1882.)

24. George F. Holmes, An Elementary Grammar of the English Language (New York, 1870); Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York, 1886); Wilson Advance, September 15, 1882. For an assessment of Reed and Kellogg's innovation see the introduction by Charlotte Downey to a facsimile reprint of Higher Lessons in English (Delmar, NY, 1987), pp. 5-13. For a list of texts used in the Wilson Graded School see Wilson Advance, September 2, 1881. For a detailed example of how history was taught by Eugene C. Branson and geography was taught by Collier Cobb at the Wilson Graded School through a deductive method in 1884 see Proceedings of the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly (Raleigh, N.C., 1884): 33-37, 52-53.

25. The North Carolina Educational Journal 2 (April 15, 1882): 1; Wilson Advance, September 30, 1881; January 6, 1882. Hassell had attempted to introduce military discipline to his Institute in 1880 but had failed, the new discipline conflicting seriously with the premises of the older discipline he espoused. (Diary, May 28, 31, June 8, September 7, 11, 13, 14, November 18, 1880, Hassell Papers.)

26. Wilson Advance, December 2, 1881; April 13, 1883; Daniels, Tar Heel Editor, p. 72. In April 1882, the honor roll at the Wilson Graded School for white children included 79 names out of 390 enrolled; of the 48 who could be located in the 1880 census ten were children of merchants, eight of professionals, seven of farmers, and two of wage earners. On the connection between capitalist development and new forms of discipline in schools during the nineteenth century see David Hogan, "The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System," History of Education Quarterly 29 (1989): 381-417; David Hogan, "Modes of Discipline: Affective Individualism and Pedagogical Reform in New England, 1820-1850," American Journal of Education 99 (1990): 1-56; and David Hamilton, "Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System," Journal of Curriculum Studies 12 (1980): 281-98.

27. Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, p. 78, August 7, 1882, vol. 2, p. 101, February 5, 1883, vol. 2. p. 102-103, February 5, 1883, vol. 2, p. 137, August 2, 1883, vol. 2, p. 138, September 3, 1883, vol. 2, p. 152, December 3, 1883, vol. 2, p. 160, February 4, 1884, vol. 2, p. 167, April 7, 1884; Wilson Advance, June 10, July 14, August 25, 1882.

28. Proceedings of the Trustees of the Peabody Education Fund, 1881-1887, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1888), pp. 65-67, hereafter Proceedings of the Trustees; Wilson Advance, September 15, October 20, November 17, 1882; The North Carolina Teacher 1 (June 1883): 413. For more on visitors to the graded school see Wilson Advance, January 27, February 3, 10, April 21, 1882. On Mayo's earlier journey to Wilson see A.D. Mayo, The Educational Situation in the South (n.p., 1880). Mayo's report was also reprinted in The North Carolina Educational Journal 2 (May 20, 1882): 30.

29. Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, p. 112, April 2, 1883; Wilson Advance, April 8, August 25, 1882.

30. Wilson Advance, May 4, 1883. R.W.E. may have been R. W. Edmundson, a 62-year-old farmer who lived in the countryside just north of Wilson. For an account of the culture of poor whites in rural nineteenth century North Carolina see Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington, Ky., 1992).

31. Wilson Advance, May 4, 1883. On the difference between "practical" knowledge produced within pre-literate societies and "specialized" knowledge characteristic of capitalist societies see F. Niyi Akinnaso, "Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 68-109.

32. Noble, A History of the Public Schools, pp. 406-407; King, "The Era of Progressive Reform," pp. 62-68. There was a substantial black middle class in and about Wilson in 1880. Of the 678 black children of school age (6-20) listed in the census for Wilson township in 1880, 259 had parents who did not depend on wages for their living, mostly farmers and artisans, but also several merchants and small manufacturers. (Boykin, Wilson County.) On the efforts of black communities in North Carolina and the South to establish schools for their children in the midst of a segregation campaign see Frenise A. Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 1876-1894 (Chapel Hill, 1964), pp. 154-63; and Howard N. Rabinowitz, "Half a Loaf: The Shift from White to Black Teachers in the Negro Schools of the Urban South, 1865-1890," Journal of Southern History 40 (1974): 565-94.

33. Wilson Advance, January 3, February 16, 23, 1883.

34. Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, pp. 115-16, April 9, 1883; Wilson Advance, March 23, 1883. On similar developments throughout North Carolina see Frenise A. Logan, "The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877-1894," North Carolina Historical Review 32 (1955): 346-57. On the impact of racially inequitable school laws in North Carolina see J. Morgan Kousser, "Progressivism - For Middle Class Whites Only: North Carolina Education, 1880-1910," Journal of Southern History 46 (1980): 169-94.

35. Wilson Advance, April 27, 1883.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Wilson Advance, April 13, 27, 1883; Daniels, Tar Heel Editor, pp. 70-71.

39. Ibid.

40. Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, p. 122, May 7, 1883, vol. 2, p. 134, August 5, 1883; Wilson Advance, May 11, September 14, 28, 1883. The teachers in the Wilson Graded School for black children were E. E. Green, the school's principal who had come to Wilson from Wilmington; Edward D. Simms, a 23-year-old who had been teaching school in the countryside near Wilson and who also served as a trustee for the school; and Mrs. Lucy Robinson. The school's trustees, all of whom lived in or near Wilson included, in addition to Simms, G. A. Farmer who possibly was Gray Farmer, a 27-year-old house carpenter; Peter Rountree, a 56-year-old merchant; Charles Battle, a 35-year-old blacksmith; Jerry Washington, a 52-year-old blacksmith; C. M. Jones; Daniel Vick, a 38-year-old grist mill worker with three out of four of his children in school, plus a 20-year-old boarder in school; Samuel Williams, a 38-year-old grocer; and C. H. Darden, a 26-year-old wheelwright. (Boykin, Wilson County.)

41. Wilson Advance, April 27, May 11, June 1, 29, July 6, 13, August 10, 17, October 19, December 21, 1883; Commissioners Minutes, vol. 2, p. 122, May 7, 1883; Proceedings of the Trustees, p. 133; Diary, September 3, 4, 10, 1883, Hassell Papers. On the widespread reputation of the Wilson Graded School for white children under Branson see The North Carolina Teacher 3 (1885): p. 83. On Branson's career see DNCB, vol. 1, pp. 212-13. On the Supreme Court's decision and it consequences in North Carolina see J. C. Puitt, Eli Pasour and Others v. Commissioners of Gaston County, 94 N.C. 709; A. M. Riggsbee v. Town of Durham, 94 N.C. 800; Westin, "The State and Segregated Schools," pp. 65-66; Charles L. Coon, "School Support and Our North Carolina Courts, 1868-1926," North Carolina Historical Review 3 (1926): 416-18; Knight, Public Schools, pp. 318-19; Diary, March 26, May 5, 1886, Hassell Papers. On the position of the North Carolina Republican Party on public education during the 1880s see Daniel J. Whitener, "The Republican Party and Public Education in North Carolina, 1867-1900," North Carolina Historical Review 37 (1960): 382-96.

42. The North Carolina Teacher 4 (1886): 26; Diary, January 17, 1883, December 31, 1884, April 11, May 1, 7, August 6, 1885, March 2, April 2, May 4, 16, June 20, 21, July 14, 17, August 3, September 13, 1886, Hassell Papers. On the role of the Wilson Graded School for white children in undermining the Wilson Collegiate Institute see The North Carolina Teacher 6 (Sept. 1888): 185. Legislation quoted in Shreve, "The Development of Education to 1900 in Wilson," p. 96. On Aycock see Oliver H. Orr, Charles Brantley Aycock (Chapel Hill, 1961) and R. D. W. Connor, The Life and Speeches of Charles Brantley Aycock (Garden City, N.Y., 1912). By the turn of the century, the cadre formed in Wilson and Goldsboro had added members from Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston, and Charlotte and had become formalized as the Watauga Club in Raleigh whose members, all Democrats, exerted enormous influence over the state government and progressive reforms in North Carolina. (Richard G. Walser, The Watauga Club [Raleigh, N.C., 1980]).

43. Wilson Advance, July 22, 1886.

44. Daniels repeated this analysis in his autobiography fifty-three years later. See Daniels, Tar Heel Editor, pp. 70-71. For an example of later uses of this strategy see Mayo, "The Final Establishment," p. 1004. On the tortured politics of this period in North Carolina see Andrew James Carlson, "The White Man's Revolution: North Carolina and the American Way of Race Politics, 1896-1901," Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1993, especially chapter 3 which deals with Daniels.