Book Review: A Contested Terrain: Freedpeople’s Education in North Carolina During the Civil War and Reconstruction
A Contested Terrain: Freedpeople’s Education in North Carolina During the Civil War and Reconstruction. By AnneMarie Brosnan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025. Softcover, 224 pp. $30.00.
Reviewed by Sam Flowers
Recent scholarship about Reconstruction in North Carolina continues to provide a breath of fresh air that is in turn leading to broader examinations of the Tar Heel State’s complex experience during the era. For generations following the Civil War, like many other states, the Lost Cause and Dunning School interpretations dominated North Carolina’s teaching and understanding of the political, social, and cultural events during this extremely contentious time.
Challenging many traditional views and adding to the state’s expanding Reconstruction historiography is A Contested Terrain: Freedpeople’s Education in North Carolina During the Civil War and Reconstruction by AnneMarie Brosnan. A Contested Terrain examines the experiences of those involved in African-American education from 1861-1877 and provides a new perspective on how Black education in the Old North State was shaped and unfolded.
Brosnan’s study argues that the birth of what eventually became the state’s Freedmen’s Bureau schools and the modern Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) system stemmed largely from enslaved people escaping their enslavers and establishing schools in Union-occupied sections of North Carolina. Brosnan further contends that what developed from their self-emancipation efforts was a competition over the process of Black education. Examining this particular aspect allows readers to see how both white southerners and white northerners viewed their roles as educators and how they in turn perceived Black men, women, and children in the classroom.
A Contested Terrain is organized into six chapters. The first chapter focuses on life in North Carolina during the Civil War and the first few years of Reconstruction. The second chapter examines the initial mobilization of Black education in the years following the end of the war and Blacks’ advocacy for additional funding from northern organizations that were both religious and secular.
The next two chapters explore the demographics of teachers in North Carolina’s Black schools and the primary motivations of each group. Contrary to the traditional myth that all of the teachers in the state were young white women, Brosnan’s research evidence concludes that roughly half of the teachers were freed men and women from the South. In contrast, just over a quarter of the teachers were white and from the northern states. These figures speak loudly to the agency exercised by those who were recently in bondage in effort to educate themselves and their communities once emancipated. Brosnan points out that many of the first African-American educators were self-taught by either eavesdropping or watching their enslavers’ children complete their schoolwork.
A particularly interesting aspect of the book was Brosnan’s examination of white teachers’ motivations for working in Black education. She concludes that while some were there to primarily to obtain a paycheck in a region starved for educators, others were there under strong missionary impulses to reform or convert freedpeople to a particular religious denomination.
Elevating African Americans toward social and political equality through education was a mixed motivating factor among white teachers during Reconstruction, too. While a minority of teachers offered instruction on the ideologies of abolition and Black citizenship, others approached their pupils with a sense of racial superiority and taught the freedpeople from outmoded antebellum textbooks. Some schoolbooks were “explicit in their intention to influence readers and shape society” in this new era of the American South. (96) These early textbooks, used by both northern and southern teachers, downplayed slavery’s inhumanity and, to an extent, gave legitimacy to future books used in the Jim Crow South schools that advocated Lost Cause interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction era.
Overall, A Contested Terrain makes a significant contribution to the historiography on North Carolina’s Reconstruction experience. Brosnan’s solid research clearly shows that early efforts to educate recently freed Black men, women, and children was often a tug of war, pulling them in many different directions over religious, social, and political ideologies. This, according to Brosnan, shaped the future of Black education in North Carolina and the South for decades to follow and has had lasting effects to the current day.
Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches history at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the importance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is researching multiple topics, including the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned, perpetuating Confederate myth and memory. He is also in the process of collaborating with Gene Schmiel in the hopes of creating a revised version of his book, The Civil War in Statuary Hall.
