Edisto Island must have seemed like an exotic place to Mary Ames. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Ames had arrived in this community in the Sea Islands, located just off the shore of South Carolina, in May 1865. Mary believed that slavery (the practice of forcing human beings to work for no wages and without the prospect of freedom) was wrong. She had come to Edisto Island to give its black residents—most of them former slaves freed after the Union victory in the Civil War (1861–65)—something they had long been denied. She was here to give them an education, to teach them.

The Civil War may have ended, but great challenges lay ahead. Black and white Southerners sought to remake a society that had been shaken by four years of bloody conflict between the Northern Union (federal government) and the Confederacy, the...