With the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861, Southern schools could no longer depend on receiving textbooks from the North. For educators and school administrators in the Confederacy, this development presented them with a unique opportunity to compile schoolbooks that reflected Southern attitudes and values. Typical arithmetic assignments included problems involving "servants" or "slaves," as: "If 5 white men can do as much work as 7 negroes, how many days of 10 hours each will be required for 25 negroes to do a piece of work which 30 white men can do. in 10 days of 9 hours each?" M. B. Moore's The First Dixie Reader (1864) contained comparisons between the life of the black slave laborer in the South and the white wage laborer in the North. The slaves were supposedly so well fed that "many poor white people would be glad of what they [the slaves] leave for...