Chapter 3
Northern Temperance Targets Southern Blacks, 1877–1890
An essential condition of permanent prosperity and success for Republican Government in America, on the part of both its colored and white constituents, is sobriety as well as freedom.
In the summer of 1877 Reverend J. L. Smith, pastor of Atlanta’s Shiloh AME church, began receiving free year-long subscriptions to the New York Weekly Witness and the National Temperance Advocate. Smith was one of hundreds of Southern black clergy who received free and unsolicited subscriptions to Northern temperance publications beginning in the late 1870s. Times were changing. As the Reconstruction era ended and political opportunities for blacks decreased, Southern black leaders turned increasingly to self-help and moral uplift measures, once common among antebellum Northern blacks, to build their community. These efforts included building institutions like churches, schools, and fraternal societies and embracing many of the social and moral norms of middle-class America. As Northern evangelicals learned of these uplift efforts from their missionaries, they began to underwrite newspaper subscriptions to reinforce the temperance component of that effort. These free subscriptions signaled a new period of intensified efforts by Northerners to disseminate the temperance message. Atlanta’s missionary-sponsored schools became the vibrant center of temperance education in Black Atlanta and throughout much of Georgia. These schools adopted cutting-edge Scientific Temperance Instruction (STI) with the assistance of the National Temperance Society and the even more recently organized Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But temperance instruction involved far more than coursework; it became the topic of chapel speakers, the goal of extracurricular activities, and the focus of summer proselytizing. The decade-long trickle had become a flood by 1880.
This new emphasis was part of a national surge in temperance activism occurring at this time. The reenergized national movement included more activity, new forms of activity, and new leadership. Although finding ways to end the liquor traffic (prohibition) became the dominant new focus of the movement, preexisting groups like the NTS, the AMA, and the ABHMS retained the old emphasis on moral suasion, believing it to be complementary to legal suasion tactics. They believed that molding public opinion was a necessary precondition for successful prohibition at every level. Social change needed to precede political change. This education-then-politics approach blended old and new temperance tactics into an increasingly vocal and influential movement in many localities, including Atlanta.
The first indicator of the revitalized national movement was the increased frequency of national gatherings by the critical community of reformers. While only four national temperance conventions were held in the 30 years before the Civil War, five were held in the first 16 years following it. Conventions were opportunities for reformers to network, hear motivational speeches, assess various strategies, and pass resolutions refining and articulating their definition of the “problem” of alcohol in America. Delegates from local and state temperance organizations learned about temperance activities in other places and were inspired to adapt them for their area.
In 1867 some temperance newspapers began calling for a political party committed to national prohibition. The new national tax on alcoholic beverages imposed during the war, and subsequent related developments, had effectively turned liquor regulation into a national issue. Because reformers increasingly viewed the end of slavery as a result of the Republican Party’s efforts, some became convinced that reforms on that magnitude were best handled politically. It soon became evident, however, that the Republican Party was unwilling to back the temperance/prohibition movement fully, so a new reform party had to be created. The International Order of Good Templars and the Sons of Temperance took the lead in calling a convention in Chicago in 1869. At least two of the leading organizers of the Chicago convention and the Prohibition Party were also founders of the NTS and active Templars, publishing agent J. N. Stearns and James Black, a Methodist lawyer and delegate to the first Republican national convention. But the Prohibition Party did not begin as the one-issue group its name suggests, for its initial platform also contained such progressive planks as a call for the direct election of senators and woman’s suffrage, among other issues. Although the party openly proclaimed its Christian character, its focus on ending the liquor traffic largely precluded the necessity of appropriating pre-revival theological language, which was more conducive to individual moral suasion efforts designed to produce teetotalers. In 1872 the party nominated James Black as its first presidential nominee, but it was not until the eighties that the party won enough votes to gain the attention (and occasional concern) of Republicans and Democrats.1
Despite the existence of a national Prohibition Party, the most politically effective activities of the seventies and eighties were grassroots efforts to create state-level prohibition by constitutional amendment. The previous movements for statewide restrictions on the sale of alcohol, attempted in the 1850s, had been only statutory, so they were easily subverted by legislatures and state courts. This time, reformers sought more permanent prohibition by amending state constitutions. Although procedures varied by state, all amendments required significant support from the will of the people and were more difficult to overturn than statutory laws. At this point the movement still required the persuasion of a majority of voters as opposed to a majority of elected officials, which became the case in the twentieth century. In the years leading up to the passage of Georgia’s 1885 General Local Option Law, a national groundswell produced prohibition campaigns in more than 20 states, many of them successful. Temperance once again became a leading news story in the American press.
While the political arm of the movement was revising its tactics, the social arm, as represented by the evangelical reform nexus missionary groups, experienced its own renewal. In the wake of the war, Baptist women began forming missionary societies, and in November 1877 New Englanders organized the second such society, called the Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society (WABHMS). One of the WABHMS founders was educator Sophia Packard, who became the organization’s first treasurer and then its corresponding secretary. A trip through the South in 1880 inspired her to found a school for black girls. After returning to Massachusetts, she and longtime friend and colleague Harriet E. Giles made arrangements to open a school in Atlanta.2 In April 1881 Packard and Giles established the Atlanta Female Baptist Seminary in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church, Black Atlanta’s oldest Baptist church. Although it was almost 20 years after emancipation, they approached their work as Frederick and Elizabeth Ayer had done in the sixties. In addition to regular teaching, they each conducted weekly prayer meetings and Bible studies, did home visitation, and distributed Bibles and other literature, just as AMA missionaries had been doing. Partly inspired by the bourgeois cult of domesticity, Packard and Giles viewed the woman’s role in the home as particularly crucial for uplifting the black race, but their worldview continued to be expressed in the discourse of Christian republicanism; Giles confided to her diary, “Surely something must be done for them and to prevent whiskey drinking if we would save our country.” In 1883 the school’s three hundred students relocated to a tract of land containing the former Union army barracks on the west side of town, adjacent to the Atlanta Baptist Seminary. John D. Rockefeller Sr. helped pay off the mortgage on the property in 1884, and the school changed its name to Spelman Seminary in honor of his abolitionist in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Buel Spelman. The Spelmans, Rockefellers, Packard, and Giles were all teetotalers, and abstinence became a “cardinal virtue” of the school.3
The WABHMS schools worked closely with those of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which came under new leadership around this time. In 1879 Henry L. Morehouse became the new corresponding secretary of the ABHMS, and for the next 38 years under his leadership (as corresponding secretary, 1879–1892 and 1902–1917, and field secretary, 1892–1902) the ABHMS greatly expanded its work with former slaves and their children. In 1896 Morehouse articulated what had all along been the guiding principle of schools run by Northern missionaries when he declared his intention to create a “talented tenth” of freed people who could educate the masses of their own people. This phrase, later popularized by W. E. B. DuBois, came to be used synonymously with the phrase the “better classes” of blacks.4 The same year that Morehouse became corresponding secretary, the ABHMS’s Augusta Institute relocated to Atlanta, becoming Atlanta Baptist Seminary, and in 1912 it was renamed Morehouse College. By the early 1880s, four missionary-sponsored schools were clustered in Atlanta—Atlanta University (1869), Clark University (1877), Atlanta Baptist Seminary (1879), and Spelman Seminary (1881)—and two more organized later in the decade.5
Fig. 8—Friendship Baptist Church, E. R. Carter, pastor. The first home of Spelman Seminary. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
In 1873 a group of Ohio women began praying in front of and inside saloons and used other face-to-face tactics to pressure saloon owners to close up shop. Their successful “Women’s Crusade” quickly spread to other Northern states, with Lucy Spelman, John Rockefeller’s mother-in-law, participating in one in Brooklyn, New York. In 1874 veterans of these crusades organized the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The NTS initially printed its literature. In 1879 the charismatic Frances Willard rose to the presidency, launching the organization’s most influential years. Although she embraced various spiritual traditions during her life, Willard was a product of the same evangelical reform nexus as other reformers, being born in upstate New York, growing up in Oberlin, Ohio, and experiencing conversion under holiness preachers. In the 1870s she participated in the temperance meetings Dwight L. Moody sponsored during his revivals. In 1880 the WCTU created the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, headed by Mary H. Hunt until her death in 1906. Hunt directed successful campaigns in virtually every state for legislatively mandated STI in public schools. In addition, she persuaded physiology textbook publishers to increase their coverage of alcohol and other drugs to 25 percent of each book. The first temperance textbook adopted by Spelman Seminary with support from the National Temperance Society was written upon the urging of Mary Hunt. The WCTU did as much as any postbellum organization to bring temperance and prohibition to the forefront of the nation’s collective consciousness.
In 1881 President Willard made a much touted tour of more than 50 Southern cities, including Atlanta, where she addressed students at Atlanta and Clark Universities. Her trip reenergized the temperance movement throughout the South and was viewed by many as a major step in reunifying the nation in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Willard proclaimed a “Do Everything” motto that encouraged local union chapters to engage in whatever reforms they desired, and this decentralized approach effectively activated the WCTU for several years. This localism meant that, although black women were welcome to attend and participate in national conventions, the organization did not force local chapters to admit them. Although some Northern chapters were integrated, in Georgia and most of the South black women formed their own separate local and state unions called the “Colored WCTU,” or “WCTU No. 2.” Under Willard’s leadership more than half of all U.S. counties created a local chapter, making the WCTU the first truly national voluntary organization since the end of the Civil War.6
While each of the above postbellum temperance developments has attracted its share of recent scholarly attention, none has been given to the Northern temperance work done with freed people during this period. This chapter examines these aspects of the temperance reform insofar as they relate to Black Atlanta. Free newspaper subscriptions were only one of the rivulets that fed the flood of temperance propaganda reaching the freed people beginning in the late 1870s. As one might expect, this flood most deeply affected those closely associated with the Northern missionary institutions. Although the temperance message was not promoted in Black Atlanta solely by Northern whites, to a large extent it was, and their efforts are the focus of this chapter.
“The Best Paper That Has Ever Passed through the South”: John Dougall and the New York Weekly Witness
One of the pioneers in providing Southern black preachers with a “continual supply of Gospel and Temperance matter, and thus to elevate them” was John Dougall, founding publisher and editor of the New York Weekly Witness.7 From Scotland via Montreal, Canada, Dougall was part of an influential Montreal community of Scots-Canadians who were successful merchants, devout Presbyterians, and committed temperance reformers. In his 30s he came under the influence of the abolitionist revivalist E. N. Kirk, and that experience launched him into a life of rigorous piety and enthusiastic reform without regard to his personal well-being or that of his family. He switched to the more evangelical Congregational Church and eventually embraced holiness teachings. Among Dougall’s favorite reforms was abolitionism. Before the Civil War he assisted fugitive slaves and helped lead a mass public meeting memorializing John Brown. Although one scholar has likened Dougall to William Lloyd Garrison, Dougall invested most of his reform energies in temperance. Dubbed the “prophet” of the movement, Dougall was a founding member of the Montreal Temperance Society, editor of its newspaper, and delegate at a few national temperance conventions, including the one in 1865 where his call that special attention be paid to the newly freed slaves went largely unheeded in the short run. Dougall’s commitment to teetotalism was an outgrowth of his perfectionism and post-millennialism, and he sincerely believed that widespread societal transformation would result from prohibition. In 1845 he founded the Montreal Witness, and he successively aligned his reform agenda with the following U.S. political parties: Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Republicans. Dougall was also one of the first vice presidents of the National Temperance Society.8
Seeking a new challenge, in 1871 Dougall moved to New York City, where he established the New York Weekly Witness, which by the mid-eighties had a circulation ten times that of the Montreal Witness. He attended Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, pastored by fellow NTS founder and future president Theodore L. Cuyler. Dougall proudly described the Witness as aligning with the National Temperance Society on temperance and the American Missionary Association in regard to the “oppressed races.” The paper quickly garnered praise from the editor of the AME Church’s Christian Recorder.9
Dougall proved particularly committed to African Americans and the issues that concerned them. He regularly reported the injustices endured by Southern blacks, editorialized in their favor, and railed against Southern racism. Dougall reported extensively on the “Exoduster” migration to Kansas in 1879, not needing to await the findings of the congressional investigation to reach his conclusions. He forthrightly asserted that blacks had created “all the wealth” of the South and thus deserved all the aid they could get in their effort to “flee from oppression.” Dougall preached a version of self-help by admonishing blacks to “trust in God and in themselves, and not in the President or Congress.” On another occasion he sympathetically reported a declaration of complaints issued by Orangeburg, South Carolina, sharecroppers. Dougall chastised Southern whites for “persecuting” blacks and blamed deceitful landlords for the fact that blacks had been able to save so little since emancipation. He castigated one South Carolina newspaper editorial by saying that it did not even sound like a citizen of a republic had written it. Dougall’s sympathies clearly lay with the radical wing of the Republican Party.10
In addition to being sympathetic toward the plight of the freed people, the New York Weekly Witness also offered a strong temperance message. Dougall was a moral suasionist who primarily concerned himself with molding a public sentiment that would eventually demand prohibition from political leaders and then support its enforcement. The front page and editorials regularly included news and letters to the editor pertaining to liquor legislation, law enforcement, and temperance activities. In one front-page article Dougall argued that it would be cheaper for society to educate children about the dangers of alcohol than to try to cure drunkards and punish criminals later. One issue featured as many as four front-page temperance stories. Dougall spoke glowingly of state prohibition in Kansas and Iowa and on more than one occasion directed readers to the resources of the National Temperance Society. Occasionally there appeared a column titled “Temperance Sermons,” which included one or more stories about individuals whose death was the direct or indirect result of inebriation. Dougall’s regular “Temperance Column” included short temperance stories, anecdotes, and facts relating to alcohol use and abuse from such well-known temperance activists as John B. Gough, Julia Coleman, and Neal Dow.11
John Dougall believed the message and sympathies of the Witness were especially suited to educate and uplift African Americans. Within weeks of issuing the paper he asked Southern missionary subscribers to share their copies with the freed people. Apparently too few did—or he had no way of knowing—so he finally took matters into his own hands with an editorial titled “How are the Freedmen to be Educated?” Here Dougall argued that education was the key to black uplift. While he believed schools and seminaries were necessary, Dougall also argued that reading the Weekly Witness would benefit black preachers in their “ministrations and intercourse with their people.” In a list of seven reasons why he thought the Witness was so appropriate for the freed people Dougall included the fact that the paper was “thoroughly in sympathy with the negro race” and “very strong on the temperance question and inserts the most convincing extracts, articles and stories bearing upon it.” He then asked his readers to donate toward a fund to send the Witness gratis to every black minister. Total annual subscription and postage costs per subscriber were $1.50, so for every dollar donated, the Witness contributed 50 cents. To obtain clergy names Dougall requested lists from the black denominations and asked readers to send in names and addresses of black clergy they knew. The Witness regularly listed donors, their gifts, and the names and addresses of the receiving clergy.12
By November 1877 Dougall had received about $2,200 and sent out the same number of free subscriptions. Of Atlanta’s 17 black clergy recipients, 4 were Baptist, 8 were AME, and 5 could not be identified. Included were the pastors of Macedonia, Mt. Pleasant (Wheat Street after 1884), and Pleasant Grove Baptist churches, and Big Bethel, Wood’s Chapel, Shiloh, and Union AME churches. Apparently concerned about ongoing costs and to assess the degree of interest, in April 1878 Dougall announced to black clergy readers that unless they specifically requested their subscriptions to continue, they would end. He also reissued an appeal for donations to the “colored preacher’s fund.” While some readers complained that the clergy should have been able to purchase their own subscriptions by now, Dougall argued that they were still too poor to be able to afford even the $1.50 annual price. While many fewer donors responded in the second year, so also did many fewer clergy. In 1878–1879 only 800 free subscriptions went out, 5 of which went to Atlanta clergy. Only the Reverends Charles O. Jones (pastor, Pleasant Grove Baptist) and W. H. Tillman (pastor, Third Baptist and Mt. Pleasant Baptist), and B. Scott received the Witness for a second year. This outreach continued into the 1880s, when the number dropped to about four hundred. At the same time Dougall also supplied black schools such as Spelman Seminary and the AMA’s Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, with free subscriptions. The AME clergy were so grateful for the free subscriptions that at their 1880 General Conference they passed a resolution offering Dougall and his donors “sincere thanks for the past, and prayers for their future continuance.”13
Letters published in the Weekly Witness indicate that some black clergy genuinely appreciated the editorial slant of the paper and valued its temperance message. Several clergy reported reading excerpts from the paper in their sermons and expressed great appreciation for its support of the “colored race.” More specifically, one minister from Kentucky praised it for having “just such matter as is needed in the southern States, especially temperance.” Another minister reported one of the paper’s “success stories” when he reported on a fellow clergy recipient who had ceased being a braggadocio drinker and instead “joined a temperance council, and is [now] doing all in his power to elevate his people.” A New Orleans pastor appreciated its usefulness for combating both intemperance and Catholicism. Some clergy were so excited about the paper that they took it upon themselves to sell subscriptions. Although it was praised by many as the best paper they read, the minister who perhaps most eloquently captured the clergy’s positive sentiment called it a “grand way to diffuse Christian intelligence among a down-trodden race.” No records exist of the responses of Atlanta’s pastors, but it is likely that at least some of them shared these positive sentiments.14
Such accolades lead one to question the declining subscription list. Dougall suggested some plausible reasons. He thought that perhaps some pastors who initially received it were illiterate, while others might not have understood that it was free. Also, some who did understand that it was free might have been too proud to receive a free paper, which Dougall recognized as a good thing, except that it was harmful if it prevented clergy from receiving a valuable resource. He also knew that some Southern postmasters intercepted the Witness. Combined, these factors account for the declining distribution of the Weekly Witness.15
The “Balance-Wheel” of the Temperance Movement: The National Temperance Society and Publication House
Although Witness distribution was declining, receptivity to its temperance message and evangelical efforts to spread it were not necessarily in decline. In the spring of 1881, the National Temperance Society and Publication House (NTS)16 decided to focus its resources on the freed people, and it coordinated its efforts with the ABHMS and AMA. While this refocusing should be understood within the context of the national surge of the temperance movement, it also reflected changes internal to the NTS and the evolving sentiments of missionaries and Southern black leaders. As a result, the NTS transformed itself into an organization that, for the next 20 years, would claim that its “great work” was among the “colored population of the South.”17 At the same time, its leaders and agents perpetuated the discourses of the evangelical reform nexus, romantic racialism, and culturalism, closely aligning it with the spirit of the older AMA and ABHMS.
Through the 1880s, William E. Dodge and J. N. Stearns were the two most influential leaders of the NTS. Both men were involved from the beginning and shared a similar outlook as transplanted New England Congregationalists. Stearns was also active in the Sons of Temperance and the Good Templars and a founder of the Prohibition Party. At the NTS he edited both NTS monthlies, the 16-page National Temperance Advocate, and the 4-page Youth’s Temperance Banner. As the movement’s standard bearer, the Advocate not only included national and international stories about temperance activities and related legislative and judicial actions but also articles drawing on a potpourri of moral, religious, social, medical, and economic arguments promoting teetotalism and opposing the liquor traffic. By 1871 Stearns had also assumed the positions of recording and corresponding secretaries, making him the “face” of the organization until his death in 1895. He kept such a grueling schedule that on a few occasions the NTS board gave him several weeks’ leave with pay to regain his health. Stearns began touring the South during the winter of 1875, slowly developing an interest in intemperance among the freed people by visiting schools like Atlanta University and the Storrs School and speaking with citizens in communities that held local option votes. After hearing stories of black opposition to prohibition, he brought his concerns to the board of managers but remained optimistic, arguing that with just “half the [temperance] instruction” given to whites, blacks would be “far ahead of them in practice and example.”18
William E. Dodge, president from 1865 till his death in early 1883, was a well-respected New York City businessman and philanthropist. He was probably the single largest NTS benefactor during his lifetime, donating even more through his will and indirectly through his sons and widow. Although never an abolitionist, during the Civil War Dodge developed an interest in black education, and in 1862 he became a trustee of the Ashmun Institute near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first school opened in the United States for the higher education of blacks (renamed Lincoln University in the spring of 1866). Among his many reform and philanthropic interests, Dodge endowed Lincoln’s chair of Sacred Rhetoric and partially endowed another chair, and he also made substantial contributions to Zion Wesley Institute (established 1882), an AME Zion school in Salisbury, North Carolina (the name was changed to Livingstone College in 1887). Dodge became such a respected philanthropist of black higher education that John Slater sought his advice before establishing his famed Slater Fund, one of the main late nineteenth-century philanthropies focused on Southern black education.
Dodge personified the experiences and values of the evangelical reform nexus. He was converted under the preaching of the New England revivalist Asahel Nettleton, and he financially backed the New York City revivals of Charles G. Finney and Dwight L. Moody. He even made a hobby of reading about revivals. Involved with organized temperance and other groups in the Benevolent Empire since the 1830s, Dodge staunchly embraced the old temperance teaching that the surest way for a drunkard to reform was through “repentance towards God, and faith in Jesus Christ.”
Following the war, Dodge purchased timber rights in Southern Georgia and arranged for the creation of a county bearing his name in the area. While on trips to inspect his business interests, Dodge visited and often addressed audiences at Atlanta University and various black and white Atlanta congregations. Dodge also made a point of identifying and sponsoring needy AU students. These visits continued into the eighties, and he did not miss an opportunity to admonish students about abstinence. During these visits Dodge also befriended the Georgia businessman and politician Alfred Colquitt. Colquitt was a member of the famed Bourbon Triumvirate—a group of politicians who, from the 1870s through the 1890s, rotated between Georgia’s governor’s mansion and the U.S. Senate seats as though they were in a game of musical chairs. Although they all actively promoted Georgia’s industrialization in the postbellum era, unlike other members of the group Colquitt was a Methodist who was also a committed prohibitionist and was actively involved in Atlanta’s 1885 and 1887 votes. Partly as a result of Dodge’s increased consciousness of Southern issues, in 1872 the NTS published six small tracts for the freed people using only monosyllabic words. In the same year the board of managers voted to raise a special fund of $5,000 just for Southern literature distribution, but the fund-raising apparently never occurred. The NTS’s commitment to provide vast amounts of inexpensive temperance literature, combined with its anemic fund-raising efforts, kept the organization’s balance sheets in the red most months, and in the seventies its publications budget averaged an annual $5,000 deficit. Dodge repeatedly launched matching donation drives but failed to establish any meaningful “permanent working capital” throughout the 1870s.19
While Dodge and Stearns were developing their interest in the cause of temperance among the freed people, some other NTS members had similar and even stronger African American connections. We have already discussed the abolitionist John Dougall, but Peter Carter, who chaired the important publications committee for 30 years, was also an immigrant from Scotland, and he taught in a New York City African American Sunday school for more than 30 years. Then two new people joined the NTS in the mid-1870s. In 1876 Reverend Theodore L. Cuyler nominated Joshua L. Baily, a Quaker, for the board of managers. A successful merchant from Philadelphia, Baily had a long history of involvement with temperance causes and African American philanthropy. Baily harbored sympathies for the plight of African Americans almost on a par with Dougall’s radical views. In 1880 he told a friend that the “future of the negro” was as much a concern to him then as it was before the war, since the federal government refused to “afford them adequate protection.” This was a truly radical view for a Northern white man to hold in 1880, when most Northerners were tired of hearing about Southern blacks. Then, in 1877, longtime abolitionist and John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s father-in-law, Harvey B. Spelman, joined the board of managers, and from 1879 to 1881 he was the treasurer. Before the war, Spelman had been an Underground Railroad “conductor,” and his home a “station.” Spelman’s daughter Laura, John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s wife, said her household was so pious when she was growing up that she was only allowed to violate the Sabbath if it was to prepare food for fugitive slaves. Spelman used his family ties to enlist financial support from Rockefeller, and after Dodge died Rockefeller became the organization’s largest single donor for the next 20 years. Spelman, Baily, Carter, Dodge, Stearns, and Dougall together steered the organization to focus its efforts on the freed people, but they were not the only influence.20
Fig. 9—William E. Dodge statue in Bryant Park, New York City. Founding president of the National Temperance Society. Financier of revivalists Charles Finney and D. L. Moody. Photo by Sasithon Pooviriyakul
By the end of Reconstruction the growing cohort of missionary-educated freed people was just beginning to emerge from the masses of African Americans in terms of their lifestyle and values. Attitudes toward alcohol use were becoming one of the social markers of the better class of blacks. Just as much as missionary-educated individuals increasingly shunned alcohol, it is likely that those more distant from the influence of Northern evangelical culture who were experiencing dwindling opportunities for upward mobility were increasingly embracing its use. It did not take long for missionaries and blacks associated with them to spot this growing divide. In 1875 AMA secretary Michael Strieby warned that although the freed people initially demonstrated a “marvelous enthusiasm” for learning, inadequate educational efforts were causing them to degenerate and “sink into idleness and intemperance.” It is telling that the nascent class formation he observed included a distinction in regard to temperance:
I have thus far called your attention only to the foreground of the picture—a foreground made bright by the little homes of the people, their cultivated land, their growing intelligence and virtue. But there is that dark and deep background which it is my duty to point out, and yours to examine. The one is a narrow strip, the other the broad area; the one contains a few thousands of the people, the other millions; the one is occupied by the industrious and intelligent . . . the other by the comparatively idle, who are not drawn to the schools, and who . . . are more or less a prey to their vices—indolence, intemperance, licentiousness and theft.21
Strieby likely overstated the contrast to motivate the AMA’s donor base, but in any case, his description reveals that practicing or not practicing abstinence was emerging as one among several ways to demarcate class boundaries within the black community.
But Strieby’s concern was not just an expression of Northern culturalism; Southern black clergy began making similar observations at about the same time. In 1875 the North Georgia conference of the AME Church called intemperance a “growing evil,” and in 1882 the People’s Advisor, a black newspaper from Jackson, Mississippi, declared whiskey to be the “greatest curse to our people . . . worse than poverty, worse than ignorance.” In 1875 and 1876 the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia complained that the “evil of intemperance” had reached “alarming proportions” and called for pastors to organize temperance societies in their churches. In 1877 the Ebenezer Baptist Association, containing several Atlanta congregations, lamented that intemperance was not only found among unbelievers but had “also found its way into Christian families, and many of our useful members have been brought to disgrace and poverty.” Although Ebenezer’s previous temperance reports had called on ministers to preach and practice temperance, the 1877 report had a mournful and urgent tone, which distinguished it from previous reports. Ebenezer’s report was part of a broader trend among Southern black clergy. That same year the Louisiana Baptist Convention refused to consider a resolution requiring ministers to be teetotalers, but when proposed again in 1879, the same resolution was not only entertained but passed. What makes these black Baptist observations so significant is that of all local black leaders, they likely had the least amount of contact with, and obligation to, Northern institutions rooted in the antebellum evangelical reform nexus. Unlike AME pastors, Southern black Baptists had no national church hierarchy or polity to which they were accountable but, rather, were subject to the whims of their church members’ votes, and even they began to notice alarming changes in the use of alcohol among blacks. While the practice of, or failure to practice, abstinence served various socioeconomic functions, just as in antebellum times, it was evangelicals who formed the critical community that shaped the discourse defining the problem.22
The “Great Work” of the NTS among the Freed People
Beginning in late 1880, the National Temperance Society reported receiving “constant and pressing” requests from both whites and blacks to distribute literature among the freed people. Barely breaking even each month, for years the NTS had not been in a position to launch a special campaign. By March 1881, however, fund-raising efforts had begun to yield the desired results, and the organization’s financial health had never been better. Wasting no time, the NTS called for a special meeting on April 13, 1881, to discuss intemperance among the freed people. About 20 people attended, including several NTS members and officials of the WCTU, ABHMS (Henry Morehouse), and AMA (Michael Strieby). Peter Carter presided, J. N. Stearns reported on his recent trip to the South, and Henry L. Morehouse announced that the ABHMS had concluded that its mission work among the freed people would be useless if they did not become teetotalers. Stearns reported that although there was a tremendous revival of temperance in the South, blacks generally voted against prohibition in the increasingly common local option elections. But Stearns’s observations had convinced him of the influence of the clergy on the freed people, so he called for a mass distribution of literature to Southern black clergy. Attendees discussed various ideas before passing a resolution calling on the NTS to raise $5,000 for literature distribution among the freed people.23
The NTS board of managers resolved immediately to flood the South “knee deep” in temperance literature by appealing for donations to “reach the freedmen” and by creating a Missionary Committee to coordinate its efforts. The committee held its first official meeting in September, and during its first year it made more than 500 literature donations and mailed 3,250 copies of Gospel Temperance to theological seminaries. Stearns, having added secretary of the Missionary Committee to his portfolio, continued his Southern winter travels, and after four weeks in 1882 that included visits to Atlanta and Clark Universities accompanied by President Dodge, recommended to the board of managers a 3-part plan of action: (1) create and disseminate to every black minister in the Southern states a “pamphlet containing temperance fact, argument, and appeal”; (2) send textbooks and literature to every black school for study and free distribution; and (3) hire agents to travel throughout the South to address black audiences, distribute literature, and organize temperance activities and organizations. Fund-raising challenges made the board initially reluctant to approve formally any more than the first item, but two years later it finally agreed on the following 6-point program:
1. Sending missionaries or lecturers to visit churches, conferences, educational institutions, schools, etc., delivering addresses, introducing temperance text-books into schools, and endeavoring to enlist ministers and teachers to help carry on the work among this people.
2. To organize societies for colored people wherever practicable in all parts of the country.
3. To circulate a literature with the view of reaching every cabin-home in the South.
4. To introduce temperance text-books into schools and educational institutions wherever possible.
5. To continue the work of supplying the ministers of colored churches with documents covering every phase of the temperance question.
6. To issue an appeal or address on temperance to the colored people of the South, to be circulated as widely as possible.24
The delay of the managers in formally adopting an outreach agenda did not hinder Stearns or the Missionary Committee, however. From the beginning the Missionary Committee worked toward its fund-raising goals and spent the money as they received it, and then some. It sent its first missionary, a YMCA worker, to the South in the summer of 1882. He went to South Carolina, where he gave speeches and sold 50 subscriptions to the National Temperance Advocate, which so pleased the committee that it extended his stay by a month and hired him back the following summer, fall, and winter. Beginning in January 1883 the committee sponsored the travels of NTS vice president Edward Carswell in Virginia and North Carolina and of the Reverend Charles H. Mead in Georgia and Alabama. Mead, a Prohibition Party member since 1872, was a former Methodist pastor and former president of New York City’s Bowery Mission.
Of the two, Mead was a particularly frequent speaker in Black Atlanta. Between January and March 1883 Mead delivered more than 70 speeches, and he claimed that he spoke before 25,000 black church members. While in Atlanta, he addressed the students of Atlanta and Clark Universities. During Stearns’s annual trip he joined Mead to speak at schools in Atlanta and elsewhere. In 1884 Mead and Stearns visited Atlanta and Clark Universities again and also spoke at the Storrs School and Spelman Seminary. In addition, they spoke at Big Bethel AME and Friendship Baptist churches to standing-room-only crowds. School visits entailed getting students to renew their abstinence pledges (Atlanta’s schools already required them for attendance), encouraging them to get others to take the pledge, and meeting with administrators and faculty to discuss incorporating Scientific Temperance Instruction into the curriculum and supplying their needs for textbooks and literature. The committee was so pleased with Mead’s work that in June 1884 it issued him an open-ended invitation to travel for the society as long as funds were available and as long as he had an open door into the freed people’s schools, churches, and ministerial conferences. During his winter 1884–1885 trip Mead spoke at Clark and Atlanta Universities again, and by his own account, he held about 12 nonchurch, nonschool meetings a week, addressing a total of about 150,000 Southern blacks. In 1885 Mead estimated that he spoke before 1,700 black clergy in various church conventions. In 1886 Mead and Stearns spoke at Spelman again. Unfortunately there is no record of individual student responses to these addresses. Most students would have been enrolled in either the primary or secondary grades and therefore would not have been in a position to voice any meaningful opposition, but we do know students at these schools actively campaigned in Atlanta’s 1885 and 1887 local option votes. Although Mead continued his travels until 1888 and Stearns continued his annual trips until he died in the mid-1890s, in 1886 the missionary committee altered its approach.25
“The whole matter of the work among the colored people of the South came up for discussion and it was finally resolved to recommend” the employment of “colored men” to work as temperance missionaries among their own people. So read the minutes of the September 1886 Missionary Committee meeting. This decision had been long in coming and the minutes do not record discussions, so we are left to speculate about why it took so long to “finally resolve” this matter. Undoubtedly the committee held long conversations about the pros and cons of such a policy, taking into consideration such matters as the organization’s image among Northern donors and Southern whites and blacks. Perhaps committee members questioned the logistics of travel for black men or even their relative effectiveness compared with that of whites. A strong dose of culturalism surely pervaded their discussions, for in one annual report they patronizingly announced that it was the North that “gave the negro his freedom and the ballot” and that it was now its responsibility to make him a “sober citizen.” In any case, the change was wholesale, for after 1886 the society rarely employed white missionaries.26
As one would expect, the society sought out educated black men with good reputations. The first two approved African American missionaries were L. A. Rutherford, M.D., of North Carolina, and Baptist minister and editor Reverend James J. Spelman, a New Englander who had relocated to Mississippi during Reconstruction and become politically active. Among those hired in the next two years were E. E. Smith, principal of North Carolina’s State Colored Normal School, Reverend A. Barry of Kentucky, and George Wassom of North Carolina. Recent Atlanta University alumnus Antoine Graves represented the NTS from early 1888 to the spring of 1889 in parts of Georgia. One of the ways men came to the attention of the committee was by personal application, but it is not clear how blacks learned of the opportunity. Its tight budget forced the committee to reject several missionary applicants.27
By far the most celebrated black NTS temperance missionary, however, was the Reverend Joseph C. Price. President Dodge had a special relationship with Price because he had paid Price’s way through Lincoln University. Beginning with his valedictory speech in 1881, Price’s oratorical skills quickly distinguished him as one of the outstanding speakers of his day. Following Price’s graduation, Dodge paid for him to go on a speaking tour through North Carolina in support of its upcoming prohibition amendment vote. An AME Zion minister, Price was such a committed educator that he turned down three federal patronage offers and three opportunities to join his church’s bishopric. In 1882 he reopened the Zion Wesley College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Professor Price visited Atlanta in January 1887 and spoke at Friendship Baptist Church and the Zion Presbyterian Church (colored), all of the missionary schools, and a conference of over 150 ministers of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The Conflict, a short-lived Atlanta temperance newspaper, was quoted in the National Temperance Advocate calling the NTS’s employment of black missionaries to work with the freed people “a fine stroke of diplomacy.” NTS leaders were so enamored with Price that they scheduled a ten-day Northern tour with several speaking engagements between Philadelphia and Boston in January 1887. The highlight of the tour was a special reception held in his honor at the Broadway Tabernacle with major donors such as John D. Rockefeller Sr. present. Price’s Northern appearances certainly allayed any apprehensions that NTS leaders would have had about the elocutionary abilities of black missionaries.28
Fig. 10—Antoine Graves (second from right) while a student of Atlanta University in the early 1880s. In 1888–89 he served as a missionary for the National Temperance Society. Kenan Research Center of the Atlanta History Center
Whether using white or black temperance missionaries, however, the NTS’s primary mission remained “scattering” temperance literature, and its missionaries were simply one means of accomplishing this larger goal. In addition to lecturing at churches and schools, missionaries distributed large numbers of free tracts and sold periodical subscriptions. To encourage subscription sales, missionaries’ salaries were partly commission-based. S. C. Kennedy’s original remuneration agreement was $100 per month plus expenses, but when the committee learned he sold fifty dollars’ worth of Advocate subscriptions, they decided to let him keep the money and reduced his pay to $50. From then on he was paid $100 “provided that he take one half in literature.” Other missionaries were also funded on the same commission system. When C. H. Mead traveled in December 1883 the missionary committee promised him literature “according to his discretion,” and in the next meeting Stearns reported that most donated literature in the last month had gone to Mead. For his winter 1884–1885 trip, Mead took five hundred dollars’ worth of NTS publications. In December 1885 Mead received another five hundred dollars’ worth of literature to distribute at a special exposition in New Orleans. Reverend J. J. Spelman requested supplies of specific books and tracts because of their perceived effectiveness. Another missionary specifically requested thirty thousand copies of one-page tracts so he could print his own comments on the back. Within two years black NTS missionaries sold seven hundred subscriptions of the National Temperance Advocate to black families and introduced the NTS publication Water Lily into many Sunday schools. Just as black pastors shared their denominational publications with their parishioners, black lay subscribers to the Advocate undoubtedly shared it with their friends, multiplying its impact.29
Fig. 11—Announcement of J. C. Price speech being given in the North to showcase his speaking talents on behalf of temperance. Price was president of Livingston College and a missionary for the National Temperance Society. The Library Company of Philadelphia
Another way the missionary committee disbursed literature was through unsolicited direct mailings to individuals and schools. During the 1880s, the NTS annually donated millions of pages of literature worth thousands of dollars. In September 1883 a Dr. Ellis donated $1,300 toward the cost of mailing copies of that month’s National Temperance Advocate to every preacher (65,000) in America. Beginning in 1886, funded by donations made by Advocate readers, about four hundred black clergy began receiving free subscriptions to the Advocate, and this continued until at least 1897. A special booklet for black pastors that was proposed in 1881 was financed by Dodge’s widow in 1883. At least two different versions were produced: a 336-page book in 1883 and a 226-page book in 1884. They were mailed shortly before the year-end holidays to about 5,000 Southern black clergy. Ministers from throughout the South expressed their appreciation, and some requested a package of tracts to distribute in their community. In 1886 the committee agreed to raise money to print and mail another 5,000 copies. In May 1885 the Reverend J. M. Van Buren donated enough money to mail 10,000 copies of his NTS-published Gospel Temperance to clergy of both races. In 1887 he financed another 5,500 copies for seminaries and churches. The NTS also gave thousands of pages of literature to missionary groups such as the AMA and the WABHMS for their missionaries to distribute.30
Although the NTS mailed unsolicited literature, much literature was also solicited. In 1885 the Atlanta Baptist Seminary (Morehouse College) requested abstinence pledge cards, a “roll of honor” (a poster designed for recording the names of pledge signers), and tracts for its students to distribute. In 1889 the Gammon Theological Seminary, newly independent from Clark University, requested and received one hundred books that its library housed in a special “National Temperance Society Alcove.” Two NTS donors underwrote Gammon’s request. On several occasions Atlanta University’s students raised money for the NTS, receiving in one instance more than 77,000 pages of literature in return. As with missionary applications, however, limited finances prevented the committee from filling many requests.31
In the early 1880s Spelman Seminary’s administration sought to form a Band of Hope for its youngest students but had no temperance literature. After Stearns’s and Mead’s 1884 visit, and partly because the school’s namesake was the late NTS treasurer Harvey B. Spelman, the NTS donated five hundred Primary Temperance Catechisms and forty Alcohol and Hygiene textbooks. In addition, Spelman received a subscription to the National Temperance Advocate, several Band of Hope Manuals, and other books for its library. The total value of the donation was more than $150. As new schoolbooks came off the NTS press, the missionary committee provided Spelman’s library with free copies.32
The outreach to Southern black clergy reflected the culture of the antebellum evangelical reform nexus. Some tracts mailed south, like the “Physiological Action of Alcohol,” were long, detailed, scientific works while others were the chintzy short stories that had made up much of temperance literature for years, such as “A Bank for Losings,” written by Theodore L. Cuyler, the NTS’s third president. Another piece mailed to clergy was President Dodge’s “The Church and Temperance,” a paper he read at the 1880 Pan-Presbyterian Council in Philadelphia. Freemen, or Slaves, the first tract written by the NTS specifically for freed people (1868), was also included. This literature contained the same timeworn temperance discourse used since antebellum times because NTS officials believed the black man’s reason could be appealed to in the same manner, and with the same effect, as the white man’s. Dodge’s speech warns about intemperance preventing salvation and draws on the old emphasis of being useful in his self-assertion that he was “actuated” by Christ’s principle of “self-sacrifice for the good of others.” In Freemen, or Slaves, the author draws heavily on the parallels between slavery and intemperance, urging the freed people not to become enslaved to liquor now that they are free from their old masters. He warns that alcohol will prevent them from being influenced by the “spirit of piety” and that “temperance is the handmaid of virtue.”
In J. N. Stearns’s editorials and in communications from NTS temperance missionaries one finds Christian republican language (“every hindrance to virtue must be suppressed”), romantic racialist language (“The negroes are naturally amiable and affectionate”), condescending attitudes (“It is a tremendous work to lift a whole race, but it has got to be done”), and yet optimism (“The colored people take more strongly to temperance as they understand it than do the white people”). Much of the NTS outreach was financed from solicitations made at revival meetings. Between 1881 and 1887 the NTS annually sponsored or participated in four to fourteen revivals or camp meetings in popular New York and New Jersey venues. Fund-raising for the freed people remained strong through the 1880s, for by the middle of the decade the NTS was seeking to raise $10,000 annually, although they most likely never reached that goal.33
The National Temperance Society was clearly passionate about its mission. A conservative group, it operated within the framework of the evangelical reform nexus, kept religion central to its work, and sought to disseminate the values of the critical community of temperance reformers, believing that Americans, one locality at a time, would eventually demand prohibition on their own if properly educated. Like other Northern missionary groups, they accepted the incremental and long-term nature of the reform and were content to work on shaping public sentiment rather than organizing political activity. Its relative singleness of purpose prevented the NTS from experiencing the types of divisive internal struggles that plagued the WCTU and Prohibition Party during the 1880s and 1890s. The biggest problem the NTS faced was its lackluster fund-raising and liberal literature distribution policy, but even with its financial struggles the organization remained the nation’s single greatest distributor of temperance literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, and perhaps the single greatest source of temperance indoctrination among Southern blacks.
“The Colleges They Founded Were Social Settlements”: Northern Missionary Schools and Temperance
The full impact of the NTS can only be appreciated when one considers the integration of its efforts with those of Atlanta’s missionary schools.34 The first organization to offer elementary-level instruction to Black Atlanta was the AMA, and when it opened its Storrs School in late 1866 it sold its first building to the Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society, which then operated its Summer Hill School in that location. Clark University evolved from that school. The opening of Atlanta’s public school system in the early 1870s allowed the AMA and Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society to shift their efforts to secondary and teacher and preacher training programs, since Atlanta refused to open a high school for blacks. Along with other missionary schools throughout the South, Atlanta and Clark Universities—and in the 1880s the newer Spelman and Atlanta Baptist Seminaries—became institutions focused on the training of “competent, consecrated Christian leaders for the uplift of the race,” the so-called talented tenth. As culturalists who believed in the assimilative ability of black people, the schools stressed “character” creation rather than “making better servants for the white race.” The schools sought to inculcate the sentiments and behaviors of middle-class Northerners in black ministers, teachers, mothers, and wives.35
As mentioned earlier, Spelman Seminary’s founders embraced the cult of domesticity, which asserted that since the woman’s “proper sphere” was the home, she was responsible for maintaining its moral purity, training the children, and providing a refuge for her husband from the “contaminating” influences of the outside world. (Teaching was equally appropriate, but only for the unmarried woman.) Such thinking meant that training for the roles of mother and wife was no less important for racial uplift than training teachers and preachers. In 1884 the annual ABHMS report declared that the atmosphere of the home was more important than that of the school in character development, and it asserted, “it is not to be lost sight of that knowledge . . . of family and household duties, is an important factor in all schemes that are designed to improve the condition and to elevate . . . those who are to be influential in giving direction . . . especially who are to be the mothers of the coming generation” (emphasis in original). This nineteenth-century philosophy crossed racial lines, for Northern black divine Alexander Crummell commended the WABHMS educational efforts by declaring “the greatness of all peoples come from the home and . . . there can be no home . . . if a people have no true, plain, practical, pious and enlightened women.” Such a value system provided a powerful impetus to educating black women about temperance.36
During the 1880s the AMA, ABHMS, WABHMS, and Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society each enforced strong temperance positions for their schools. A few months after the NTS-sponsored meeting in April 1881, the AMA bragged that its schools were “citadels of drill and equipment” in the temperance battle. To further fortify these “citadels” the AMA executive committee ordered all of its schools to incorporate temperance textbooks into their curriculum. Also that same year, Atlanta University’s abstinence pledge, which had existed since at least 1872, for the first time was placed at the top of the list of items in the catalog required for school “membership.” In 1883 the Congregationalists claimed their churches were “practically temperance societies” because total abstinence was an “article of their faith.” In 1883 the ABHMS declared its schools an important “ally” of the temperance movement, and one of the movement’s biggest weapons was the large number of totally abstinent future preachers being trained in institutions like Atlanta Baptist Seminary. The schools happily used NTS resources for Scientific Temperance Instruction and for their students’ summer missionary work. Wilbur Thirkield, founding dean of Clark University’s Gammon School of Theology, arrived in Atlanta in 1883 and immediately became an active campaigner for prohibition in Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia. In 1886 the local conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, issued a strong temperance resolution calling for total abstinence and government prohibition and advocating that ministers strictly enforce the church’s discipline and teach their parishioners to uphold prohibitory laws. Black students at all of Atlanta’s missionary schools, regardless of their faith traditions, were bombarded with the temperance message that was increasingly uniting all American evangelicals.37
Missionary School Students and Temperance Societies
Advanced students in Atlanta’s missionary schools spent their summer vacations teaching in rural schools to raise tuition money.38 In addition to teaching from Monday through Saturday morning, the students also taught in Sunday schools, organized temperance societies or Bands of Hope, and made home visitations. Over the years these students taught thousands of children not only literacy but also Bible stories and Christian virtues such as abstinence. NTS literature was a key part of these efforts. By the late 1870s more than one hundred or more Atlanta University students annually used their summers to teach in rural Georgia. Missionary educators shamelessly touted the cultural and political benefits of this tuition-raising process, believing in the effectiveness of their students’ temperance work. “We must have no such defeat as was seen in North Carolina,” claimed one teacher while soliciting more NTS literature. She was referencing the recent defeat of a prohibition law in North Carolina that was widely attributed to black voters. Annual shipments of NTS literature to AU for summer distribution began in 1878. In 1883 the NTS shipped 35,000 tracts in 200 packages for AU students to distribute. NTS shipments probably continued into the 1890s. The AMA candidly dubbed its students “temperance propagandists.” Among the literature they distributed was “Appeal to the Colored Race,” a one-page NTS leaflet written by an AME minister from Texas. In his short appeal he begged his fellow freed people to avoid whiskey because it put so many in state prisons and made so many orphans. He argued that whiskey will make us “slaves to death and destruction,” but that “as a race” we can “advance our Redeemer’s Kingdom” by abstaining. He argued that another source of inspiration should be the “better class of white citizens,” who are teetotalers and who vote against whiskey. Although this black minister had imbibed the language of the antebellum evangelical reform nexus, he obviously remained grounded in contemporary racial reality.39
Predictably, students’ experiences in promoting abstinence varied. Many happily reported their successes. One AU student who had taught in the same community for two consecutive years proudly reported that of the sixty who pledged the previous year, only three had broken their vow. A Spelman student teaching in Tennessee organized a society and asked one of her teachers for literature: “I have formed a temperance society of one hundred men, women, and children; and now I ask you to assist me a little by sending me some pledges and regulations to go by. This is a very bad place; it seems that the people’s study is alcohol and beer. I am trying to do all I can to destroy king alcohol and his followers.” Others were discouraged by the difficulty of the work. While one young woman was saddened to learn that her students’ own parents gave them whiskey, another student said he did not bother with pledges because he knew they would be broken at Christmas. Then some students were more cautiously optimistic, such as Spelman’s Sarah Lay, who happily reported organizing a Band of Hope but prayed, “May the seed sown bring forth good fruit.”40
But Spelman students did not just form Bands of Hope during their summer breaks; their entire student body became a temperance society. Spelman’s Band of Hope, established during the 1883–1884 school year, was one of the first clubs organized on campus and included nearly every student. The NTS and Atlanta’s white WCTU donated literature. Meetings included local WCTU speakers, programs by the students or teachers, or sometimes simply a discussion about how to conduct summer temperance work. In addition, in 1885 a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) chapter was established on campus, and it had a temperance “department” that held monthly meetings. All of these groups were active during the 1885 and 1887 local option campaigns. The Atlanta Baptist Seminary formed a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) during the 1884–1885 school year, and while nothing is known of its activities, the national organization supported total abstinence. Atlanta Baptist’s Ciceronian Lyceum, an extemporaneous speech club whose members practiced the rules of parliamentary procedure, made the idea of national prohibition the topic of one of its meetings.41
The Storrs School and Atlanta University also sponsored extracurricular temperance organizations. Founded in the spring of 1880, the Storrs School’s Young Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was the first Colored WCTU in the South. The Storrs School’s Band of Hope met every Wednesday and in 1888 had 125 members, with an average of 75 attending weekly meetings. Atlanta University’s YWCTU members were young women in the Higher Normal department, that is, teachers-in-training. They had a very active union, made up of a committee to visit the poor, a press superintendent, a social purity superintendent, and a literature superintendent. At meetings, the social purity superintendent gave a reading, and the literature superintendent reported how much the various members read during the week from their circulating library. The two YWCTUs met quarterly with the West and East Side Colored WCTUs in citywide mass meetings. The Young Woman’s Christian Temperance Unions circulated the NTS’s Youth’s Temperance Banner among their members.42
Classroom Temperance Instruction
But students in Atlanta’s missionary colleges received even more exposure to temperance than club membership offered because they enrolled in cutting-edge Scientific Temperance Instruction (STI) courses decades before Georgia mandated them for all students.43 Although the AMA did not mandate temperance instruction for its schools until 1881, Atlanta University adopted the NTS’s Temperance Lesson Book as soon as it came off the press in 1878. This text was the first major scientific temperance textbook published in the United States, and AU was the first school in the nation—white or black—to adopt it. Since the early 1870s, AU and Storrs School students had studied Alex M. Gow’s Good Morals and Gentle Manners for Schools and Families, which included a strong biblical abstinence message. Spelman’s administration instituted STI for its students by requiring younger students to use Julia Colman’s Primary Temperance Catechism and older students to use her Alcohol and Hygiene text, which was also used by some AU students. By the late eighties, AU students had switched to Jerome Walker’s Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene. A brief look at these texts and their authors reveals the nature of STI at Atlanta University, Spelman Seminary, and the Storrs School during the 1880s.
The first textbook used in the AMA’s Atlanta schools that directly addressed abstinence was Alexander M. Gow’s Good Morals and Gentle Manners. This text taught that all good manners are based on good morals, which in turn were based on the Bible. Good Morals perpetuated the republican notion that governmental stability is rooted in the virtue of the citizenry, and it defined the “good society” as one made up of moral people. Its chapters addressed such topics as courage, chastity, dress, the poor, amusements, hatred, property rights, and temperance. The “Temperance” chapter is essentially a Bible study divided into sections on “Wild oats,” “Temptation,” “Put it out of sight,” “Touch not, taste not, handle not,” and “Moral courage.” AU students studied this text in the first year of either the college preparatory or normal course, roughly equivalent to today’s ninth grade. It was probably taught to students in their seventh or eighth year at the Storrs School. AU used the text from 1872 to 1899. Spelman teachers also used the book in the 1890–1891 school year.44
With only one chapter on temperance, Gow’s book had its obvious limitations, so in 1878 AU teacher Mary Chase persuaded the school to adopt Benjamin Richardson’s newly published Temperance Lesson Book. Chase believed a more thorough understanding of alcohol’s dangers would deepen the abstinence commitment of AU students. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Richardson was a British doctor whose research into the effects of alcohol persuaded him to become a teetotaler. Schools in the United States, England, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, and Holland adopted his highly regarded text. AU students studied Richardson in either the last year (third) of the college preparatory or in the third year (of four) of the normal course. The Temperance Lesson Book’s many three-page chapters covered the latest science on alcohol in various types of beverages and its effects on the body.45
Beginning in 1882 and continuing through 1897, students in Atlanta University’s eighth and final year of grammar school studied Julia Colman’s Alcohol and Hygiene: An Elementary Lesson Book for Schools, another NTS publication. Her own study of health and diet led her into the temperance movement, and Colman built a career as a temperance teacher, lecturer, and writer. In addition to being an NTS-endorsed lecturer who once spoke at Spelman, she published more than five hundred juvenile temperance tracts, books, pamphlets, and lessons and was superintendent of the WCTU’s Department of Temperance Literature from 1880 to 1891. Colman published extensively in the National Temperance Advocate, Youth’s Temperance Banner, the WCTU’s Our Union, and the Methodist Sunday School Advocate. At the suggestion of the WCTU’s Mary Hunt, in 1880 Colman wrote Alcohol and Hygiene: An Elementary Lesson Book for Schools. While it explained the nature of alcohol, as did Richardson’s book, it did so in less technical terms and with many suggested experiments. Colman takes her readers through the steps necessary to create alcohol, starting as simply as suggesting that students watch a sealed jar of apple juice and stewed apples decay in 70º heat. She notes the contradiction of saying that the decay of apples makes them sour and unfit to eat while the decay of the juice makes it fit to drink. Colman explains the various sources of alcohol and the processes of fermentation and distillation in simplified terms. She then discusses alcohol’s effects on the various parts of the body. Several chapters are overtly preachy, with titles such as “Crimes Caused by Alcohol,” “Would you like a Clear Head?” and “Achievements of Abstainers.”46
A few years later Colman wrote a text for even younger children called The Primary Temperance Catechism, also published by the NTS. Its lessons followed a simple format: a statement, a question-and-answer sequence, a picture, an explanation of a few lines, and a short mnemonic poem. Spelman’s grammar school students used the Catechism.47
The 1880s, then, witnessed the most intense period of STI in Atlanta’s missionary schools. By the end of the decade more than three hundred Spelman students had signed the school’s temperance pledge book, which was stored with official student records. All of Atlanta’s black schools required students to sign abstinence pledges, including the AME Church’s Morris Brown College, which opened its doors in 1885 and modeled its program after Wilberforce University. Expulsion for violating the pledge at these schools was not unheard of. James Weldon Johnson had four friends who were expelled for drinking and smoking at Atlanta University. AU students who attended from elementary through one of the secondary or collegiate programs would first encounter Gow, then Colman, and finally Richardson. At Spelman they began with Colman’s Catechism and later studied Alcohol and Hygiene. In addition to several pro-temperance Baptist periodicals, students also had library access to the New York Weekly Witness, National Temperance Advocate, and Youth’s Temperance Banner. An important part of graduation at Spelman was four days of public examinations, and one of those days was devoted to recitations on temperance. During mandatory chapel services college students heard the leading temperance and prohibition speakers of the day, such as J. N. Stearns, Julia Colman, John B. Finch, Frances Willard, William E. Dodge, and Frances E. W. Harper, and for their extracurricular activities most belonged to the Band of Hope or YWCTU. Members of the YMCA and YWCA also received constant abstinence messages. When the school year ended they were expected to travel to some rural community and, when not teaching, to set up temperance societies. The NTS stocked school libraries with literature and partially or wholly funded the purchase of textbooks as well as literature for summer distribution. The intensity of Atlanta’s missionary schools’ teetotal message could not be greater.48
The temperance message was apparently quite compelling. For one young student the temperance message was even more compelling than efforts to convert her. She announced that even though she was not a Christian she had promised “the Lord” that she would never drink any rum. When Gammon’s first class of ministers graduated in 1886, at least two class speakers called for respect from whites to be based on the personal moral purity of blacks. The line calling for every preacher to “blaze with eloquent and earnest appeals to his race for the casting of their ballots for the speedy and complete destruction of the liquor traffic” met with hearty applause. Even after the defeat of prohibition in Fulton County in 1887, Spelman students optimistically continued to establish Bands of Hope in city churches in anticipation of electing dry candidates in upcoming municipal elections.49
Although the free distribution of the New York Weekly Witness was short-lived, the flood of NTS literature and the temperance programs of the missionary schools reflected a “relatively coherent, unified discourse” on temperance, and Thomas Rochon argues such is required of any reform movement trying to influence culture. The evangelical reform nexus organizations created that discourse, transported it to Black Atlanta, and funneled it through their schools toward the freed people.50
Fig. 12—Atlanta University Chapel (in Stone Hall) where William E. Dodge, J. N. Stearns, Frances Willard, and others addressed the student body on the subject of temperance. From undated, Atlanta University Photos, Buildings/Grounds, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library
It is well established that the missionary schools created controlled environments to instill evangelical culture into their students. Teachers gladly reported the number of Christian converts each year and the percentage of the graduating class who were professing Christians. Spelman’s motto was “Our whole school for Christ,” and Sophia Packard was so intent on conversions that she called a week with none the “saddest failure.”51 But Northern missionaries understood evangelical Christianity to be as much about one’s behavior following conversion as it was about conversion itself, so all students were made subject to the right rules, the best teachers, and extensive interaction with their (white) teachers. Having as many students as possible live on campus was designed to maximize contact with, and the influence of, the primarily Northern faculty. AU had dorms from the early 1870s, and Spelman opened its first ones within two years of its founding, but Atlanta Baptist Seminary did not have any until 1890, which greatly disturbed Baptist leaders. They complained that off-campus boarding exposed students to the “distractions and temptations of the city” and was therefore a “great hindrance to our work.” Obviously they meant the “work” of character building, and those “temptations” most certainly included the city’s various watering holes. Without dorms, the enforcement of abstinence pledges must have been more difficult at Atlanta Baptist than at Spelman or Atlanta University. When AU students lived off campus they were required to live in a “home-like environment.” To maximize the influence of the teachers, AU’s first president decided to have teachers and students sit together at mealtime, and it apparently had the desired effect, at least for some, because one alumnus recalled “that intimate association three times a day exercised an influence over manners, speech, personal appearance and attitude that could not be exerted so effectively in any other way.” Observers reported that faculty influence outside of class created a more rapid rate of spiritual and academic growth among boarders than nonboarding students. AU’s president believed the matron in the men’s dorm re-created the “refining, elevating, and restraining influence” of family life. Parent-like, teachers worried each spring when the students left the campus cocoon for summer vacation. Giles and Packard took some comfort from the fact that the students had signed total abstinence and social purity pledges, but they still solicited prayers from their donors.52 In sum, these Christian schools were “combinations of Christian forces . . . to mold character.”53
Discipline, discipline, discipline summed up life for Atlanta University’s students. First Congregational pastor and AU professor Cyrus W. Francis described his school as a closed system: “The course pursued in this school consists essentially in separating the pupils by means of a family school from all old associations and habits, and subjecting them for months and years to a strong and watchful discipline, in surrounding them with the most earnest and aggressive religious influences.” W. E. B. Du Bois, a product of the AMA-founded Fisk University and professor at Atlanta University for many years, described the missionary schools as “social settlements”:
The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light.54
In the eyes of the missionaries, the depths of the moral and spiritual destitution slavery created justified such extreme measures. Students choosing to attend these schools arrived knowing and accepting the fact that they were to going to be literally “trained” in a mode of behavior that was quite foreign to them.55
An education at Atlanta University, Spelman Seminary, Clark University, and Atlanta Baptist differed from an education at other Christian secondary and post-secondary schools. Atlanta’s missionary schools were much more than just schools. DuBois said AU embraced a fourfold cultural mission: higher education, racial equality, academic freedom, and increased democratic and social power. Students at these schools knew they were a select minority within a minority, Morehouse’s “talented tenth.” They were being made into “race leaders” to uplift and transform their race. Because Northern teachers could never educate all the freed people, the preachers, teachers, and mothers they trained were expected to impart the ostensibly superior cultural values of Northern evangelicals to the masses of their people. The ABHMS unashamedly called its schools “assimilating apparatuses” designed to make black students “thoroughly homogenous” with middle-class culture. Atlanta University clearly conveyed the talented tenth cultural transmission model to its students. James Weldon Johnson said he had not been in school long before he realized his education was designed to prepare him for his “peculiar responsibilities due to my own racial group.” According to historical sociologist Joseph O. Jewell, the AMA’s Atlanta schools were central to the creation of Black Atlanta’s middle class. Evidence suggests that the early graduates from these schools largely accepted the mission to uplift their race.56
Temperance indoctrination in Atlanta’s missionary schools affected blacks differently than similar practices in white schools. Because of WCTU pressures, increasing numbers of white children were receiving mandated Scientific Temperance Instruction in America’s public schools throughout the 1880s, but many of the teachers were ill-prepared to teach it, opposed teaching it, or both. Public school teachers and administrators bristled at lay people telling them as professionals how to do their job. By contrast, in the missionary schools, teachers and administrators thoroughly embraced and personally modeled abstinence. The schools aligned both their curricular and extracurricular programs to push the temperance message. During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was a per capita increase in alcohol consumption in America, suggesting the general failure of years of STI efforts, but the closed system approach of the missionary school guaranteed a more complete reception of the temperance message by the emerging black middle class. Scholar Ivan Light argues that in order for voluntary associations and institutions to impose ethical discipline they need to achieve as nearly as possible “total rather than segmental control over members’ motives, beliefs, associations, and conduct,” and this accounts for the degree of success the schools achieved.57
Missionary school alumni largely accepted the values of the antebellum reform nexus, which were fast becoming the core of bourgeois middle-class values, but this was a relatively small number of blacks. These values, including abstinence, increasingly separated missionary school alumni from other blacks. By the mid-1880s the inchoate “better class” of blacks who pastored, taught in the public schools, and led fraternities was just beginning to coalesce around these values. As the years passed, their numbers and solidarity grew—they intermarried, created their own residential neighborhoods, and eventually their own social clubs. But in the 1880s, these processes were just beginning, and only the most prescient contemporary observers perceived them.58
Temperance in 1880s Black Atlanta had long, tangled roots in culture, religion, and education and manifested increasingly important ramifications for race and class relations. Northern missionaries did their best to drive home the temperance message, but after graduation it was up to the alumni to spread the message through the black-controlled institutions of Black Atlanta—churches, mutual aid, and fraternal societies. It is to their temperance efforts in these institutions that we now turn our attention.
Let us help the colored people,
Help the colored people,
Let us help the colored people,
Along the temp’rance way.
—“Let Us Help the Colored People,” chorus