ABSTRACT
Exploring whiteness, citizenship, and learning as dimensions of a settler colonial republic, this chapter shows that the racialization of learning and the education for the poorer classes continued after the American Revolution. Factions within the Lower South drew on British-era precedents and defended older institutions. However, in settler colonial society of the Lower South, whites never considered republican citizenship to include anyone but themselves as equals. The earliest statewide schools for poorer whites (1811) gained political viability from a metonymic interchangeability between “white” and “citizen.” Leaders based political support and private funding for the education of poorer whites on the perceived needs of a colonizing and racial republic—security, growth, and respectability most of all. Initiatives therefore promoted benevolent training in the skills of “civilization” for poor whites, such as reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. New institutions cultivated an attitude of respectable white unity—or at least a minimum of white civilization—and knowing the limits of newly won rights. It reflected the completion of a process of racializing discourses on learning and education that would endure beyond slavery.
