Chapter 13: Legislation

Marjorie Purcell had a habit of planning for the school herself and then opening the issues up to the other teachers. Sometimes, that changed her plans drastically, but having thought things through meant that she didn’t agree to something that had been decided in the group and then have a better idea after a night’s sleep.

“Look,” she said at dinner on the second Monday of picking season, “I think this was the first time we went all the way through the year without making any structural changes.”

“Knock on wood,” said Jane while rapping the tabletop. “The year isn’t over, yet.”

“Well, no, and sickness or other change in our situation might shake us up to any extent. Still, I don’t see any reason to plan a change before Christmas, do you?” Both the others shook their heads. “Really, the change for the children is obvious. Diane already has -- or had -- the most crowded room.”

“I’ll send you the oldest ones,” Diane said, “and notes on where I think that they fit in. Really, though, almost all of them have had more than a year of schooling and most of those have made more than a year of progress.”

“And I’ll do the same for Jane,” Marjorie said. “I agree; the children are easy.” A regular (northern) common school had children of all ages in the one-room schoolhouse. True, few common schools had even half as many children as any one of them had at once. True, in those schools, there was some agreement between age and progress. Still, their children were organized by age, and they would keep them organized by age.

“The AMA are never going to send us anyone else, are they?” asked Jane. “Do you want us to go back to six-day weeks?”

They only taught night school on Mondays through Fridays. For most of their night-school students, each student came two nights a week, in a group from one of three geographic areas. For each geographic area, there was a beginning and an “advanced” -- really less beginning -- class. Those took 12 of the 15 instructional periods that the teachers had for those days. Then, there was a class originally for veterans who had learned to read in the army taught by Diane one night a week, and a course for those who had been literate before secession taught by Jane on a single night. Jane’s class, with a lot of experience reading the King James Bible, started off far ahead of Diane’s.

“That would be one way to get three more class times, and I don’t need my extra night off,” Marjorie said, “but we would really need six slots unless we changed the geographical structure.”

“Are there going to be any more actual beginners?” Diane asked.

“Well, Mr. MacGregor tells me that there aren’t 150 unassigned grants out of the Montgomery office. I don’t know what that office covers, but it goes north of the river. We can’t have 30 of those. We keep urging, though, the husbands who attend without their wives to send them. If you asked the AMA, they would tell you that the new ones were less important.”

“Marjorie!” Jane was shocked. They were giving their lives to educate these people.

“She, or the AMA, has a point,” Diane said. “We all know that we are never going to educate any significant fraction of this generation. The only hope is that those we do educate will spread their education. Well, spreading it across a distance is hard. Marjorie’s Ab, for instance lives where?”

“Between us and the store,” answered Jane. She had seen Ab point things out on the map. Marjorie didn’t respond at all to the words, “Marjorie’s Ab.”

“Well, how likely is he to teach anyone who lives outside our attendance area. If his wife doesn’t attend school, however, he’ll teach her or -- at least -- their children.”

“I think we’ll still accept new students in the night school,” said Marjorie, “but Diane is right. If we merely teach the students we now have -- the adults -- we will have established a society in this region in which literacy is normative. Now, if we are going to keep the same classes,” she looked at her companions to see whether either would object to that, “then the issue is -- you might say -- promotion. Could some of Diane’s Thursday students go into Jane’s class?”

“Quite probably,” Jane said. “These men can read, and I’ve been teaching them other things; most recently, I’ve been dealing with biblical geography. Most of them are preachers, and that interests them. Sometimes, it shocks them.”

Diane said, “If you could take a third, then I could go back and teach some of what most of them didn’t get.”

“And,” Marjorie said, “each of us could consider our top students in the advanced course. We’ll have to take the beginning students of that sector who have learned the most. We can send a few of the students who are comfortable with what we have covered to Diane.”

“You have to remember, though, that we have been telling parents to attend different nights,” Diane said. “You can’t get mommy in the advanced class until daddy is ready for me.”

“And,” Marjorie said, “we can put only so many in your Thursday-night class.”

“Yes,” Jane said, “1870 may be the last year we can keep that geographic structure. We shall have them all over the place in terms of how well they read.”

“And not only that,” Marjorie said, “how well they reckon. I have a student in my class who can multiply two-digit numbers in his head; can you? How well they can read a map, tell time. Then there is Jane’s Old-Testament geography.”

“So far, while attendance might be spotty, they all seem to think that they are still in school,” Jane said. “We have no idea -- they have no idea -- how long that will last.”

Sam Warren collected the debts from his customers as Mike Green bought cotton. He’d left Juliet at the store, and the was the first time it had been open during picking season.

Cotton was selling for a good price, and everyone was happy. Even Green was happy because his competitors, most of them in the north, were paying the same prices he was. His customers could afford to pay more for cloth.

Farmer after farmer paid Sam what his family owed in one or two instalments. Many of them made deposits on next year’s purchases. If that number was down from the previous year, a lot more seemed to be doing their savings at the Freedman’s Savings Bank. As long as they had money to spend, Warren’s General Store would get its share.

As Green paid him, Sam mailed each few day’s checks to his account in the Chemical Bank. A week after those had been mailed, he started to pay his suppliers by check. When both processes were finished, he had a large balance in the bank. Some of this was offset by the deposits of customers which was still a debt of his; some of it was transitory, as he built up inventory by cash orders. A good deal was honest profit.

He remembered the customers who had bought plows the preceding year. This had previously been a signal of greater spending for consumer articles in the next year. He would probably do even better in 1870.

Happy at his prospects, he set out to Montgomery for the new session of the legislature.

He submitted the bills he would introduce to the clerk of the senate and scheduled a Roads and Railroads committee meeting.

Before his bills came up, a bill for the support of common schools came before the Education committee. An old mossback complained of “all these innovations.” He thought the old way that they had handled education had worked just fine. Sam silently blessed the man, though he couldn’t say so. The four senators from the northeastern counties were doubtful, but they would choose anything over this.

“If the educational process that the state had used prior to secession had worked for the white citizens,” he said, “then we would need no change except to add some wording like, ‘for both races.’ But it didn’t work for the white citizens. With Congress providing land to support the public schools, there were few public schools. More than 15% of the white men in Alabama were unable to read.

“Today,” he continued, “the rental price for land has nearly disappeared. Something must establish the schools, and -- low as the income of state government is -- this is the only level of government which has any income at all. This bill calls for the state to establish schools and recruit teachers in an orderly fashion. I would prefer to establish them all at once, but I see the limits of our power. We have well-wishers from the north who are doing something to educate the masses of our citizens; let us not leave it all to them.”

“You can’t educate niggers any more than you can fly to the moon.” That was a shout out of order, but Sam responded to it.

“The legislature of the pre-war government had a law against educating Negroes. It did not have a law against flying to the moon. Now, I’m not pleading for you to believe in the wisdom of that legislature, but they weren’t stupid enough to punish the impossible. I have scores of customers who have begun to read and write. They are making progress that my wife and other trained teachers think is acceptable for the amount of time they spend in class. This bill merely proposes giving them equal access to learning as white students get.”

There was an amendment introduced to have state support only for segregated schools. Sam looked across the hall to Russel, who shrugged. Sam took that as a sign that he couldn’t depend on the senators from the northeast on that one.

Sam rose to offer an amendment to the amendment. “Now, I spent the youth before I was old enough to vote as a Douglas Democrat. Let’s have a little local option on this issue. When it comes time for the state to offer support to the township to build its school, the offer will be for a fixed amount of money. The township may use that money to build and staff one, integrated school or to build and staff two schools -- one for each race.”

“Isn’t putting one hell of a lot of expense on the township?” That was from a senator recognized for a question.

“Well, setting up two separate schools is one hell of a lot of expense. All that this amendment says is that the expense is on the group that makes that decision, not on the state. And we, I might point out, should represent the state.”

“How are we representing the state’s interest by spending the money in the first place?”

“We are spending this money to buy an educated citizenry, and it will be cheap at the price.”

The debate made the amendment look in doubt. A compromise succeeds because it pleases two sides sufficiently. This amendment seemed to displease both sides. The white Democrats thought it gave them too little. What they wanted was no education for Negroes, and they would easily accept no public education at all as the price; what some of them -- perhaps not all -- would have accepted as a compromise would be totally segregated education. The Negro Republicans wanted integrated education; they would have accepted integration in publicly funded education with the understanding that most white children would go to private schools.

Finally, Russell rose to speak, “I support the gentleman from Lowndes’s substitute amendment. With it, some of us will support the motion. Without it, we will regretfully oppose the motion.”

Republican whips darted around the room whispering that they didn’t have enough votes without the amendment. Three votes in quick succession put Sam’s wording as the amendment, passed the amendment, and then passed the bill out of committee.

There was a raucous Republican caucus of both houses before the amended bill was considered in the House.

Russell addressed the Negro Republicans. “I know that you have elected some white spokesmen who you feel have betrayed you. I am not one of them I rode for Union, and I never claimed to ride for emancipation. There aren’t a hundred Negro voters in my county. There weren’t all that many before they were offered grants down here. What the bill as passed in the senate says is that in any township with school age Negroes, they get their own school. I don’t think there is a township with a dozen, maybe not half a dozen. You have to decide whether you want me in the Republican Party the way I am or in the Democratic Party the way I am. I’m never going to be in the Republican Party the way you want.”

A representative from somewhat south of where Sam lived asked the obvious question: “Massa Russel, you don’t like me; you don’t like most of us. Why are you with us? Why are you at this caucus?”

“It’s not that I don’t like you. You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. I’m at this caucus because the planters wouldn’t leave us alone.”

“Look,” Sam said, “you voted me, or some of you voted me, party chairman. I’m working for a Republican Party which holds a majority in both houses. A Republican senate takes four counties in the northeast. You might not like how they live their lives. If you let them live their lives, however, they’ll let you live yours how you want. Isn’t that what we stand for, individual liberty? It isn’t as if huge numbers of Negroes wanted to move to those mountains.”

The final decision was to pass the senate version of the bill in the house. The governor signed it immediately.

Sam feared that the resistance that had developed to that amendment might spill over onto the bills he had written. The first bill that came up, however, was the Violent-Combination bill. It was so clearly along the needs of the race that nobody brought resentment from the last debate to this one.

That didn’t mean that resistance was absent. “Violent Combinations,” asked a senator from one of those counties which had seen an influx of freedmen but not a senate election. “Does that mean the Union League?”

“If they commit violence, this would apply,” Sam answered. “The only exceptions are bodies organized by government officials for government purposes, like sheriff’s posses or militias.”

“Well, just by meeting, they threaten violence.”

“The law speaks of what the group does, not how you feel.”

The bill had come out of committee without amendment, and it passed on a straight party line vote.

Before his other bill came before the legislature, Sam called a meeting of the Roads and Railroads committee.

“We can’t have a budget for this year,” he said.

“The budget committee is a House committee, “one of the minority members said. “Are we going to let them tell us what to do?”

“The gentleman from Lawrence County is quite correct. The budget was set by a House committee,” Sam said. “We, however, should keep two things in mind. In order to spend money, we need the concurrence of the House, and the House Budget committee set our budget after looking at reality. The state is going to borrow even the pittance that the committee put in that budget -- and borrow it on ruinous terms.”

“The Education Committee is spending money.”

Sam let that go. His caucus wanted the Education Committee to spend money. “I thought we might, in the absence of immediate possibilities, look at what we want the road system of the state to look like in a decade or so.”

“What’s wrong with the way it looks now?”

“An excellent question. Who has one answer? Don’t try to be complete.”

“What system of roads? It’s a system of ruts.” That was from a former Union officer who had stayed in Alabama. He had persuaded his Negro neighbors to vote for him.

“It doesn’t seem to reach the places that most of the population lives today.” The gentleman from Bullock county was not only Gabe Lincoln’s senator the way Sam was, say, Boot Franklin’s; he owed his seat to Lincoln, and he knew it.

Sam let the argument run on until the Democratic position settled into the old road map being fine, needing only scraping of those roads into smooth surfaces; the Republican position was that they needed a new set of roads to serve all the new grants which had been made.

“Let’s all think about this some more,” Sam summed up. “I’ll bring into the next meeting a map of what I think we should end up with in ten years. Why doesn’t anyone else with a plan do likewise?”

Which neatly assumed that a new plan was needed.

Marjorie thought that she had shot herself in the foot. She had proposed that each teacher send the most advanced -- who were really the most nearly advanced -- students in their “advanced” evening class to Diane’s Thursday-night class.

She couldn’t take the proposal back; it was obviously correct. She couldn’t simply ignore it herself; that class would be crowded, and Diane would notice that she hadn’t received any new students from the northern and eastern quadrants.

But Ab was clearly the most advanced of her students. He was bright. He had by far the best attendance record; she would hope that hearing her in class would teach him something. She gave him extra help with the wording of hymns.

Finally, she decided to leave it up to him. He would go farther in Diane’s class, and it wouldn’t be fair to deny him that opportunity. She often spoke with him on Sundays, and she took that occasion instead of calling him into a private conference after class.

“I have a different question,” she said while handing him the words to a hymn that would be in the next week’s service. “It’s about class.”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“We are rearranging the classes. The students from your class who have made the most progress are going to be in Miss Rawlings’ class. You would certainly be one of those.”

“Oh, no, Teacher.”

“You don’t want to make the change? You would certainly learn more, there.”

“Please, no, Teacher.”

“Well, if you don’t want to make the change, you don’t have to.”

And, now, she kept Ab in her class at the cost of both confessing that they had an interest beyond the lessons.

At her suggestion, all three teaches wrote a note to each adult student who was being changed to a different class. They could all read that much now, and the students who were moving could read a good deal more.

Considering how short the Alabama winter was, the legislature took a generous Christmas vacation. Shortly before that began, Sam’s militia bill came before the senate Committee on Law and Order. Sam was a witness without a vote.

“Now, Senator, your bill proposes to limit officers to those who served in the Union Army in the late War.”

Technically, that was not a question, but Sam was not there to argue procedures. “Yes. I served in the Colored Cavalry. All the officers were white veterans. Whatever the reasons for making that rule, many of us thought that having veteran officers was a real benefit to green troops. Of course, the militia might not always be green troops, but most of them would start out that way.”

“The same benefit would come from having Confederate veterans as officers, and there are many more Confederate veterans in the state.”

“That benefit, perhaps. The militia of the state is available to the nation on the call of the president. The federal forces might hesitate to use troops officered by men who had borne arms against the United States. The question is moot, though. Former Confederate soldiers and some other former Confederates are barred from officering the militia by the state constitution.”