A New Field.

The North's victory in the Civil War opened up a vast new field for the application of educational reform. Laws prohibiting the education of slaves had been inscribed into the legal apparatus in every southern state for more than three decades, and the rejection of educational reform had left a large population of white Southerners with little experience of formal schooling; in fact, many of them were illiterate. In his address before the National Teachers' Association in 1865, Illinois Normal (later Illinois State) University president Richard Edwards summoned educators to "finish what the soldier had so well begun." In the view of like-minded northern educators, the extension of the common-schools ideal to the conquered South was an essential element in the democratic reconstruction of the region. Public education, Edwards declared, would be "the chief unifying process on which we can rely for...