An Ohio Teacher Behind Confederate Lines

A little over a decade ago, when visiting my parents for the holidays, my mother casually introduced me to something which has come to loom large in my life ever since. “Paul,” she said, “you’re a historian…” Apparently, there was a box of old letters from the Civil War that had been passed down through my family, and would I like to have a look at them after dinner?

Little did I know that she was seriously underselling it. That “box of letters” did have letters—hundreds of them. But not just that. It was, actually, several boxes of letters, photographs, journals, wills, calling cards, sheet music, wedding invitations, stock certificates from defunct businesses, report cards, religious tracts, plate glass photo negatives, and a single pressed flower. And it was not just from the Civil War, but a record of an extraordinary family from rural Kirtland, Ohio, stretching from 1810 until, well, me.

I had the privilege of sharing one of the stories on the peripheries of the archive in Belt a few months ago. It was the story of Hattie Martindale, “My Aunt, the Ghost of Kirtland Ohio,” who suffered from a disability that briefly made her a figure of fun for yellow journalists the world over. But Hattie’s is only one of the stories the archive reveals. Another is that of her beloved sister, Lucy Martindale, who was one of the first to participate in what W.E.B. DuBois famously praised as the “crusade of the New England school-ma’am.”

To my shame, even being—yes mom—an historian, I’d never heard of this. The story takes place in Virginia. I grew up in Virginia. I never learned any of this in my history classes.

That’s because this story is about Black history. It is set at the beginning of Emancipation, and it is about some of the ways in which enslaved people freed themselves and began forging a new life. It shouldn’t have taken having a family connection to learn this story. But today, it is clearer than ever just how much some white politicians want to keep children from learning Black History—and just how far they will go to whitewash the past. They seek to erase histories which do not center or uplift white people, or which pull apart white-supremacist fantasies about slavery, the Confederacy, and emancipation.

Lucy’s is not a white savior story. It’s a complex story about Black emancipation and white allyship, and how, in the fight for justice and equity the best of intentions is absolutely necessary. But it’s often not enough. It’s about how history calls us to follow in their footsteps, but also to find ways to do better.

—

On Christmas Day, 1862, Lucy Martindale made a choice. The Civil War was raging, and over the past year, she had become more and more unhappy at home in rural Kirtland, Ohio. When war broke out between the Union and the rebellious Confederate states in April of the previous year, several of her cousins enlisted quickly. So too had many of the other men in her community, including Thomas Milton Morley, a man that she loved—though she had not yet said the words. She kept herself busy teaching Sunday school, helping care for her sick mother and sister, and tending the family farm.

But that Christmas was a misery. “Santa Claus did not set foot within our house last night. We did not take the trouble to invite him, and he never goes where he isn’t wanted,” she wrote in her journal that day. She continued: “The rain has been falling almost constantly and the roads are almost impassable. Somehow, I have not felt exceedingly merry today. Suppose the fault is all with myself.”

Then, for the first time, she writes about a decision that would change her life:

“I have been thinking lately of offering myself as a teacher to the Am. Missionary Society for the contrabands. There are multitudes of them flocking to our lines; and they need to be taught and I don’t know but that I may be useful in that way.”

She is driven do this out of a desire to do good—though that desire is hounded by fear and insecurity:

“I would like to do good, if I could, if I were only good myself, but I am not.”

The previous year, on May 24, 1861, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend also made a choice. They had lived their whole lives under enslavement as field workers near Hampton, Virginia. When the war began, however, their community too was upended. Hampton lies on a thin peninsula between two bodies of water. To the West, the James River flows towards what then was the newly branded Capital of the Confederacy in Richmond. To the North, the Chesapeake Bay leads to the Potomac River, and from there, to Washington, D.C. At the tip of that peninsula rose Fort Monroe. Suddenly, finding itself at the gateway to both opposing capitals, it was one of the most strategically important places in the entire war.

The Confederates were determined to take it. And so, the Confederate Army took Baker, Mallory, Townsend, and dozens of other enslaved men and forced them to do the heavy lifting needed to build the artillery emplacements across the water, which the Confederates hoped could force Fort Monroe’s surrender. Worse, these three men heard that once that work was done, they would be transferred south to North Carolina. So, together, they made a plan.

In the dead of night, they gathered their courage and freed themselves by rowing across the water to Fort Monroe.

This was a riskier move than it may have first seemed. The Union had not officially recognized the legitimacy of the Confederacy’s secession. That meant the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1850 were in effect. The Union commander was legally obliged to send them all back to the Confederacy.

Instead, that commander declared them “contraband of war.” This granted them freedom, though that freedom was very provisional (until it was later affirmed by the Emancipation Proclamation and then guaranteed by the 13^th Amendment). It wasn’t long before word of this “contraband” policy spread to other enslaved people in the area. Within weeks, thousands of people freed themselves and fled to Fort Monroe. Together, they formed the “Grand Contraband Camp.” This camp first housed refugees outside the walls of the fortress, but as it grew it moved into the burnt husk of the city of Hampton—which the Confederates had torched out of spite after hearing the Union plans to house the freedpeople there.

This was a refugee crisis, with thousands of people stuck living between a Union redoubt and a deeply hostile Confederate landscape.

Several organizations in the North responded to this crisis. One was the American Missionary Association. Contrary to what the word “missionary” might imply, the AMA was not centrally about converting others. The AMA was a religious organization, but at its core it was an abolitionist organization. It was founded in the wake of the famous 1841 Supreme Court case United States v. Schooner Amistad. In that case, a group of 35 men successfully sued for their freedom after rebelling and taking over the slave ship on which they were being transported. The case was a coup for the abolitionist movement in the United States.

Many of the abolitionists who supported the men fighting for their freedom in that case were Congregationalist and Presbyterian Christians from New England, who went on to found the AMA in 1846 with—extraordinary for its time—both Black and white people in its leadership. The AMA dedicated itself to destroying slavery by founding anti-slavery churches across the North (especially in the Rust Belt) and supporting education and relief efforts for the people who escaped slavery. This included organizing relief efforts for the “contraband” camps that sprang up across the South during the Civil War in the pockets of Union-controlled territory. A key part of this effort was in organizing schools both for the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of refugee children and adults.

This was a radical act. When Lucy volunteered with the AMA, educating enslaved people was a crime. In 1819, Virginia passed statutes that criminalized educating enslaved people, in the hopes that this might quash rebellion. This prohibition turned to panic in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton, Virginia in 1831. The Virginia legislature cracked down even harder, criminalizing any gathering while Black. As Heather Andrea Williams writes in her book Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom:

“In addition to forbidding any person to teach any free person of color or any slave to spell, read, or write, it forbade slaves to associate with free blacks without permission of their owners, made it unlawful for five or more male slaves to assemble outside of their plantation, and made it unlawful for any person of color to ‘preach to, exhort, or harangue any slave or slaves, or free persons of color, unless in the presence of five respectable slaveholders.’”

But many brave people defied that law. People like Mary Smith Kelsey. Mary was born in 1823 in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of an aristocratic Englishman and a free Black woman. But though Mary was born supposedly free, in many ways the law made clear that, for her and all other Virginians of color, “free” did not mean “equal.” In response, when she was six years old her family sent her away to be educated—just beyond the reach of Virginia law, over the border in the District of Columbia. And it was good that they did, because in 1831, when Mary was 9 years old, the Virginia crackdown on education and gatherings of Black people was passed into law.

So, when Mary was 16, she also made a choice. She could have stayed in the District, or even moved North. But instead, she returned to Norfolk, where she met and married a freedman named Thomas Peake, and moved to Hampton. There, she opened an underground school in her home—educating enslaved and free people of color in secret defiance of Virginia law.

When the Confederate army burned Hampton during the Civil War in August of 1861, Mary’s home was lost. But she kept teaching—now openly—larger and larger classes of adults and children in the rapidly-growing Grand Contraband Camp. When the AMA sent a representative to Hampton, they found Mary there already doing what they set out to accomplish. To their credit, they put her on their payroll immediately, making her the first paid teacher in their educational efforts. She taught first under a large Live Oak tree (which still stands as the famous Emancipation Oak), then in a cottage given to her as Hampton was rebuilt by its growing Black population.

Sadly, Mrs. Peake had been suffering from Tuberculosis since before the war, and in February of 1862, she died. But her legacy and the educational effort that she began in Hampton would not end with her—the AMA quickly set out to recruit other teachers to continue the work she began.

Ten months later, back in Ohio, Lucy made her decision to sign up to teach on Christmas day. She submitted her formal application the next month. The AMA worked fast; on March 25^th, she left home, riding all day and night to catch the train to New York City, from there, the Jersey Ferry to a train to Baltimore, and then the boat to Fort Monroe.

But despite her independent journey across the country, she did not really believe in her own independence. When she is treated with cold indifference by one of the AMA members organizing her travel, she writes: “My heart sunk within me. I am not self-reliant and my feelings are generally a reflection of the treatment of those who are around me.” Her self-doubt is perhaps unsurprising; Lucy was doing something radically contrary to cultural norms set for women in the 19^th Century that historians Barbara Welter and Aileen Kraditor evocatively coined as the “Cult of True Womanhood” and the “Cult of Domesticity.” Women—particularly middle- and upper-class white women—had a wide range of stifling expectations leveled upon them. Teaching Sunday school at home certainly fit within the Cult’s demands. But traveling across the country, on her own, to teach in a war zone? Certainly not.

By April 30^th, she arrived and began teaching at Tyler House—the former home of disgraced former President Tyler (the single U.S. President to dishonor himself by pledging allegiance to the Confederacy). She starts optimistically, even if the work was hard—she is first made an assistant teacher to the principal, Mr. Charles Day (who tried to fill the void left by Mary Peake). But before long, Day leaves on travel, leaving Lucy in charge of four classes—sometimes with two different levels in the room at the same time, as well as adult classes in the evening.

As the weeks ground on, Lucy regularly lamented the chaos she was contending with—not least because of truly epic class sizes:

“This week, have had the charge of ninety scholars in the room below. They have done pretty much as they wanted to for the last two or three weeks…”

And then in a letter, only a few weeks later:

“…There are over one hundred and thirty scholars in my room now…”

But creating order out of chaos is a process that takes time, and thankfully: “They did better in the afternoon and still better since, so that I am not without hope that they will, with patience, become quite orderly.” She admired Mr. Day for his ability to maintain discipline in the classroom and strove to emulate him.

But “order” and “discipline” in schools can be complex and problematic. At this time, corporal punishment was more widespread, which is particularly disturbing in the context of a classroom of children who had escaped slavery. The “discipline” of a schoolmaster could easily evoke the violent “discipline” of the overseer. It’s difficult to know whether the AMA school was run on fear—Lucy never describes the methods of discipline meted out. Additionally, just prior to the Civil War, a sea change was occurring in the field of education around exactly this subject. Prior to the Civil War, educational reformers, particularly in the North, led by people like Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann proposed significant reforms to the way education was conducted in the United States. Schools did away with corporal punishment, and instituted training programs for teachers. They promoted universal education in publicly funded “common schools.” But like all progressive reforms, the idea that children should not be beaten or restrained by their teachers found resistance (that continues to this day).

We don’t know to what degree any of these reforms influenced the schools in Hampton. Lucy lamented having to be a strict disciplinarian in her letters to her beloved, Thomas. But his advice was colored by his time as an officer in the Union army, where he had been expected to mete out harsh punishments to the soldiers under his command. He wrote:

“There is no government in this whole world without fear of punishment.  The ideas of men being good without it has entirely vanished, since the war broke out.”

For the best, Lucy continued to struggle with instilling his version of “government.” She tried a few techniques to help—like instituting a system of class “monitors”—older children recruited to help her manage the other students. But in the end, the monitors didn’t improve things much. In her private journal, Lucy despaired at her inability to be the sort of stern disciplinarian she thought she should be, and how even Mr. Day undermined her confidence.

“Mr. Day has many a laugh at my expense. He warrants… I was never cut out for a schoolma’am. I’ll do the best I can, and not fret myself to death because I cannot do well.”

As the weeks ground into months, her morale plummeted as her estimation of herself as a teacher sank. This wasn’t helped by a hostile work environment that had grown at the Tyler House, where another of the AMA missionaries, Mrs. Coan, had taken to openly mocking her colleagues’ flaws. And more, even Thomas showed in his letters to her that he was not wholly supportive of her teaching. Lucy called him out for it in a letter on May 30^th, 1863:

“I am afraid that you do not entirely approve of me being here. It seemed to me that it was best for me to come. I felt the need of doing more than I was doing in Kirtland. I was feeling rather dissatisfied with my life. It was a different place after you went away. … now I have got work enough to do to fill my heart and hands. I believe that I do feel better than I did before.”

He apologized profusely. And he proposed.

They had not seen each other for nearly two years, and when the war began, they decided not to get engaged in case the worst happened. But the war had worn them down; Thomas said his abolitionist principles had kept him from being promoted, and felt his role required that he become a harsh, unpopular taskmaster. For Lucy, burnout was setting in, and her reluctance to be a harsh taskmaster was inviting criticism from many corners. It seems they both needed something positive in their lives.

She accepted.

After a grueling summer term, Lucy was given a month off in Massachusetts. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it did her a world of good. Though she dreaded returning to Virginia where “I have to watch my every word and not do anything that could be wrongly interpreted,” by her coworkers. When she did return on September 12^th, the atmosphere changed immediately. The Tyler House had been renovated, she had been given an assistant teacher named Nellie Benton, and best of all, Mrs. Coan was gone! School was still hard, but she seemed better able to handle the challenges.

And more importantly, she seemed to finally appreciate the challenges the children faced:

“I think they are very orderly and are making good progress considering the condition of the schoolrooms, the inexperiences of the teachers and their own inexperiences in school life.  I give them the credit of doing very well.  I would not undertake the management of such a school of white children.”

As the months go by in her fall term, her attitude changes, even if the challenges do not: “An average of 160 scholars. I enjoy teaching very much even taking into account the dust, and unpleasant surroundings. The weeks actually fly.” And her work pays dividends for her students. The September 1863 edition of The American Missionary magazine recounts a visit paid by the AMA’s Secretary to the schools in Hampton:

“The School at Hampton is also under the charge of Mr. Day and Miss Martindale… about 200 scholars were present when the Secretary visited it. It is the most advanced school in that region, and the exercises were very satisfactory.”

As winter descended, the tenor of her writing changes. In the first week of November, Lucy falls headlong down the stairs of Tyler House and lands so badly she is briefly knocked unconscious. Both Mr. Day and the new head of the house (and wife of the head missionary) Mrs. Stone catch Diptheria—which can be deadly.

But as the New Year turned, things begin to look up again. Yes, a conflict was brewing with Mrs. Stone, but Lucy was looking forward to teaching a new group of students—and had some new friendly competition for top teacher with Mrs. Day, who recently joined her husband in Hampton.

Thomas, on the other hand, was miserable. His battery helped to take Little Rock, Arkansas, and he had been garrisoned there afterwards. The bleak weather there was taking its toll; men were dying of camp diseases, and he was deeply lonely. At the close of his letter on December 31^st, he asks:

“Could I prevail upon you to close up your services in your school & come to Ohio with me should I come down there?”

We don’t have Lucy’s reply. That was her last letter from Virginia.

Without letters, some of the details of what happened next are unclear. We do know that Thomas was given a furlough in March of 1864, and he and Lucy traveled home to Kirtland. They were married in Thomas’ family home on March 9^th, 1864. When Thomas was called back to the field later that month, Lucy stayed in Ohio.

The rest of Lucy’s letters to her now-husband take on a different tone. She misses her teaching in Virginia (and especially her students and co-teachers). But she wouldn’t go back while Mrs. Stone is in charge. She has a new job teaching Sunday school, but it’s just not the same. Thomas was stationed once again in Arkansas—so she proposes that perhaps they could move there and teach at a school for formerly enslaved students after the war? Thomas was not exactly receptive. She drops the subject.

As 1864 wore on, Thomas’ health took a turn for the worse—he was hospitalized with typhoid and fever, and eventually discharged home September 21^st, 1864.

Thomas was never the same. His wartime bouts with illness left him unable to work the family’s farm for the rest of his life. Thankfully they were well-off enough to hire what help they needed; they lived in Ohio for the remainder of their lives and raised seven children there.

The Hampton AMA schools continued and grew—attracting more and more students and teachers as the war drew to a close. In 1868, the AMA founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which is now Hampton University, one of the country’s oldest HBCUs. Mary S. Peake’s Emancipation Oak still stands there.

The AMA also expanded their educational efforts for freedpeople, founding over five hundred schools across the South and spending more money on education for Black Americans than the federally funded Freedman’s Bureau. They hired both Black and white teachers and were instrumental in educating the first generation of Black Americans to enjoy freedom.

—

Lucy’s story can be read in a simple way—but we should resist that urge. On the one hand, we can and should be inspired by Lucy’s work as one of the first of the AMA’s teachers. It took bravery as a young unmarried woman in this era to make this move, and it sounds like she touched many lives. On January 2^nd, 1864, Mr. Day wrote a report to the AMA, which provides us a sense of the scope of his and Lucy’s work:

“There have been, within the last six months, more than eight hundred children received into the school, and all have learned their letters ere they left us… We had an examination of the children on Thursday, and the degree of advancement they exhibited speaks well for their teachers, Miss Benton and Miss Martindale…”

On the other hand, it’s also important not to overstate her contribution. It might be easy to class this as yet another facile “white savior” story, where a white woman “heroically” “rescues” people of color. A Civil-War era The Blind Side or Freedom Writers. There is more nuance and complexity than this. Lucy taught for only eight months. When her new husband asked that she come home and stay there, she did. And despite seeming to want to return, she did not. Now a wife, she probably felt even more pressure from the Cult of Domesticity to stay home, tend the farm, and wait for her husband to return from the war. In the same breath, it’s hard not to think of her in the same vein as someone who spent one gap year doing community service projects and is then hailed as a great philanthropist.

There is also a racial context to consider. In a tour de force analysis of what we know about the teachers in this era, Eminent historian Ronald E. Butchart reveals in his book Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876, that contrary to previous belief (summed up by DuBois’ coining it the “crusade of the New England school ma’am”), teachers at these emancipation- and reconstruction-era schools were just as likely to be Black as they were to be white. Many were Black women, but some were also men. Many were free Black people from the North, and during and after the war some moved across the South to teach where they were needed. And on average, Black teachers taught for longer than their white counterparts. Surely, they risked far more than their white counterparts–who had the privilege to walk away. And more, their contribution has been, historically, downplayed in favor of white women. This is typical of how white supremacy shapes our understanding of American history–Black people are written out of their own histories, and when that is not possible, their histories are banned.

These stories are important because they are complicated. And more of these stories should be taught in our schools. It is important for those of us dedicated to racial equity, justice, and Black liberation, to celebrate those who choose to give of themselves to the cause. The example of our historical ancestors—whether you have a personal connection through a dusty box in your basement or not—invites us to be inspired by them. Their example can stand as an invitation into this work. But in the same breath, it is important to recognize that not all choices are the same. We can and must respect and celebrate the stories of our ancestors who stepped up. And at the same time, we must also recognize the ways in which we are called to do more, and do better, than they could.

 

Dr. Paul B. Sturtevant is an historian and author. He recently moved to Portugal, where he is starting up an educational tour company called Stories Abroad Tours.  He was also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Public Medievalist, and is the author of two books: The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past(with Amy S. Kaufman), and The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination.

The Martindale-Morley-Nutting Archive is a collection of letters, photographs and other materials that chronicle the lives of an extraordinary family from rural Ohio over the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2022, it has been housed in the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.