Foster, Sarah Jane: Teacher of the Freedmen
- Author: Wayne E. Reilly
- SKU: 2006
- ISBN: 0897254457
- Our Price:
$23.95
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Description:
Sarah Jane Foster: Teacher of the Freedmen. The Diary and Letters of a Maine Woman in the South After the Civil War, foreword by Jacqueline Jones, 264 pages, soft cover, photos, index, many footnotes, 2006 (2001)
"Students and scholars in the fields of women's studies, African-American studies, and social history owe a debt of gratitude to Wayne Reilly for rescuing Sarah Jane Foster from the obscurity which she so mightily feared; at long last she will receive the attention - and yes, appreciation - that she deserves." -- from the Foreword by Jacqueline Jones
"...the Sarah Jane Foster that emerges from her own writings and Reilly's thorough introduction is a complex and convincing historical personality." -- David D. Platt, Maine Times
Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of the hundreds of northerners who went South to teach the freedmen after the Civil War. Armed with missionary zeal and formidable courage, they set forth to attend to the souls as well as the minds of the former slaves. Like Foster, they often face privation and occasionally danger from local whites in the politically charged atmosphere of the Reconstruction-era South.
Here is Sarah Jane Foster's account of her teaching experiences in Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. There, her devotion to the principle of living according to her belief in the equality of the races led to her public disgrace and the loss of her teaching position with the Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society. Her determination to teach the freedmen yielded another commission with the American Missionary Association a year later. Exiled to a black-operated farm in a rural corner of Charleston, South Carolina, she contracted yellow fever at the end of the school year and died upon returning to her home in Maine at the age of twenty-eight. In addition to seven months of her 1866 diary, the volume includes twenty-three letters she wrote to a Portland, Maine, newspaper during 1865-68 from West Virginia and South Carolina and some samples of her published fiction and poetry.
