Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On Monday, March 4, 1833, the nation’s seventh president and Tennessee’s most famous son, Andrew Jackson, was sworn in for his second term. On that same day another Tennessean, Alphonso M. Sumner, clandestinely opened a school for black children in Nashville. It was a bold move: In the wake of Nat Turner’s uprising two years earlier, Southern whites had begun a particularly violent reign of terror against black efforts at organizing institutions like schools and churches – were critical to the black struggle for freedom, justice and civil rights. But Sumner, a free black barber, bet that the paternalistic sympathies of white Nashvillians would allow them to turn a blind-eye to a school for free black children, owned and operated by him.

Largely credited to Northern missionary ethos, most histories of black education in the South begin with the establishment of freedmen’s schools in the wake of the Civil War. But that story ignores the many efforts by Southern blacks, going back well before the war, to create their own educational institutions and traditions. And nowhere was that effort better evident than in Nashville.

Sumner’s school grew quickly from about 20 students at its founding to approximately 200 by 1836. Evidence suggests that there were at least a small number of slave children among Sumner’s earliest students. The school’s steady growth, in spite of forced closures for months at a time each year because of cholera and smallpox outbreaks, led Sumner, who still worked as a barber to an exclusively white male clientele, to hire Daniel Wadkins as a teacher.

His decision to hire Wadkins, a black preacher in the Disciples of Christ denomination, proved critical in the days ahead. That same year, Sumner was accused of writing and sending two letters aiding the efforts of runaway slaves. As punishment, white vigilantes nearly whipped him to death, forcing him to leave the state for Cincinnati, where he became an abolitionist and served as publisher of Disfranchised American, that city’s first black newspaper.

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In the wake of Sumner’s forced exile, his school remained closed until 1838. The previous year, Nashville’s mayor, Henry Hollingsworth, had unsuccessfully attempted to eliminate the city’s poll tax, and similarly, had failed to gain public support for a school for free black children. Instead, a petition by an energetic group of free blacks secured permission to open a school for free black children, on the condition they were taught by a white man. Soon after, a free black man hired and paid John Yandle, a white man from neighboring Wilson County, to be the teacher. Aided by Wadkins as well as Sarah Porter Player, another free black, Yandle taught an average of 30 students for two years.

Despite their assistance, Yandle eventually quit under threats of white violence. In turn, Player opened a school in her home in 1841. Hiring Wadkins as her assistant, she moved the school the following year to the home of a supporter. Wadkins similarly opened his own school in 1842 on Water Street, next to the city jail. In doing so, Wadkins assumed the mantle of leading the educational efforts of black Nashville over the course of the next decade. He kept his school in operation in spite of moving it six times during the next 14 years.

Describing him as a “typical ‘John Bull’ in appearance and an ‘Uncle Sam’ in vivacity,” the social reformer Ella Sheppard Moore, an original Fisk University Jubilee Singer, fondly remembered her childhood experiences as a student of Daniel Wadkins:

He used the old Webster blue back spelling book. Each class stood up against the wall, head erect, hands down, toes straight. I recall only three classes: the Eb, Ib, Ob class; the Baker, Maker, Taker class; and the Republication, Replication class. They spelled in unison in a musical intonation, swaying their bodies from side to side, with perfect rhythmical precision on each syllable, which we thought grand. Mr. [Wadkins] gave out each word with such an explosive jerk of the head and spring around the body, that it commanded our profound respect. His eyes seemed to see every one in the room, and woe be to the one who giggled or was inattentive, whether pupil or visitor, for such a one constantly felt a whack from his long rattan. We little visitors soon learned to spell many of the words of each class and sang them at our homes.

A visit from the city’s police captain in 1856, however, brought happy experiences like those to a grinding halt. Fearing black insurrection not only in Nashville but across the South, the City Council instituted a series of severe restrictions on black life, including the closure of Wadkins’s and Player’s schools. Additionally, the council’s ordinances included a $50 fine for whites found teaching blacks and ordered “there shall be no assemblage of Negroes after sundown for the purpose of preaching; and no colored man shall be allowed to preach colored people and no white man after night.”

Nashville’s black schools remained closed until after federal troops occupied the city in 1862, when Wadkins, assisted by J.M. Shelton and his wife, was able to restart his school in the First Colored Baptist Church. After operating there for 18 months, Wadkins moved to High Street, where, occasionally assisted by other free blacks, he taught about 150 students.

With an ex-slave population characterized as “a homeless, friendless, pitiable throng, suffering from cold, hunger, sickness, and death,” Nashville was home to approximately 8,000 to 10,000 freedmen by 1863. While they were eager to learn, Wadkins’s school and others like it charged tuition, which, however modest, most freedmen could not afford.

With missionary funding, white Presbyterian minister Joseph G. McKee opened Nashville’s first free colored school on October 11, 1863. His efforts extended educational opportunities to more free blacks and to the newly freedmen won him the support of Nelson G. Merry, pastor of the First Baptist Colored Church. He permitted McKee to operate his free school on the church’s ground floor until Wadkins, who had previously operated his school there, reportedly vehemently objected.

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Even with Wadkins’s long and impressive record of teaching, it must have been difficult to compete with McKee. Not only were McKee’s classes free, they were being offered in Nashville’s oldest and most distinguished black church. The matter led to “an unsightly brawl,” between Wadkins and Merry that was probably more accurately a struggle for influence over the future of black education.

Using his longstanding influence in the community, Wadkins was able to garner the support of enough church members to force the end of McKee’s classes in favor of black-owned institutions. But Wadkins’s success was short-lived. His school, as well as eight other Nashville black-owned and -operated schools, closed following the opening of the Fisk Free Colored School by Northerners in 1865. Wadkins and others like him were powerless to stop the trickle turned flood of missionary support – a boon for black educational opportunities, but also the end of the city’s tradition of education by and for black people.

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Sources: Crystal A. deGregory, “Raising a Nonviolent Army: Four Nashville Black College and the Century-long Struggle for Civil Rights, 1830s-1930s”; Bobby L. Lovett, “African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1830: Elites and Dilemma”s; Anita Shafer Goodstein, “Nashville 1780-1860: Frontier to City”; Ella Sheppard Moore, “Before Emancipation,”; James Thomas, “From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas”; Daniel Wadkins, “Origin and Progress Before Emancipation,” in “A History of Colored School of Nashville, Tennessee,” ed. G.W. Hubbard.

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Crystal A. deGregory is the executive editor HBCUstory, Inc., an advocacy initiative supporting the future of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities.