To Vie with One against Another: Race and Demand for Nonelite White Education in an Eighteenth-Century Colonial Society

Abstract

Based on an examination of a variety of published and manuscript resources, some of which have not previously been studied by professional historians, this essay identifies cultural factors constructing demand for formal education in the lower South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The lower South's racial demographics and rural setting were not merely a hindrance to educational development, as has long been posited by historians. Rather, the rural setting drove a regionally distinctive pattern of demand. Emerging in a frontier and colonial society, educational demand answered perceived imperatives to construct racial-cultural differences as much as likenesses and affinities. Prohibitions against reading by the enslaved, the South Carolina Regulators' educational demands, and early efforts to "civilize" Native Americans all appear in a newly causational relationship as examples of how an eighteenth-century colonial society strove to reconstruct its cultural landscape.