Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917

Abstract

At the end of her spring term in 1862, Martha Hale Clary bade farewell to her classmates at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary one year before she was to graduate. She was a 24 year-old teacher, the daughter of a farming family from Conway, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Westfield State Normal School five years earlier. By the autumn of 1862, she was living in an abandoned plantation house in Beaufort, South Carolina, organizing a school for the Gullah people not many miles from Confederate lines, one of the earliest participants in the Sea Islands’ “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” For the next eleven years she taught scores of the islands’ freed slaves in Beaufort and Hilton Head, one of the hundreds of teachers sponsored by the venerable American Missionary Association (AMA). By the early 1870s, young former slaves had themselves gained sufficient education to become their people's elementary teachers, so in 1873 Martha Clary accepted a position with the Presbyterian Committee on Missions to the Freedmen to teach in its academy for black students in North Carolina, Scotia Seminary. She would remain there for another fourteen years, finally retiring to her native state in 1887 after twenty-five years of service to southern African Americans.