Schooling for salvation

Abstract

Historians have frequently noted yet rarely explained the educational deficiencies of the nineteenth-century American South. Antebellum southerners responded to a variety of cultural realities that made schooling different from other regions. Though the great spokesman for the diffusion of knowledge, Thomas Jefferson failed to motivate his southern neighbors into action. This dissertation asserts that such difference should not be dismissed as intellectual backwardness, willful ignorance, or the result of sparse population density. The boundaries of learning emerged from a variety of forces that governed the South, its culture, and its peculiar institutions. Poised to exert their leadership over a southern culture increasingly refashioned according to their liking, southern evangelicals stood to benefit from a society that could read, write, and ponder its eternal salvation. Pursuit of the common good, while captivating many in other regions, never persuaded southern evangelicals to pursue a common education for all. This study seeks to elucidate the religious and cultural forces of the antebellum period that propelled southern educational difference.