In the last two posts, we talked about the first public school in the U.S. and what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635. Today, we’re going to jump ahead 125 years and talk about a truly unique school in the American colonies: The Bray School.
The Bray School, now restored; image in the public domain.
On September 29, 1760, a school opened in an unassuming cape-cod style house in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was, like many schools at the time, a “dame” school — a school run by a woman that was intended for children who needed the rudiments of reading and writing and some instruction in useful skills. A few dame schools taught addition and subtraction but most did not. What students learned was limited by what their teacher knew. Girls, if they were educated outside the home at all, were often sent to dame schools because they could attend for a couple of years until they could read and write, possibly learn a skill like knitting, and then quit. The most compelling reason to send children to a dame school was that it was cheap. While a petty school cost 2 shillings per month, a child could attend a dame school for 3 shillings per year. What was unique about this little dame school in Williamsburg — the Bray School — is that it was intended from its inception for enslaved and free Black children.
To say this was a departure from the norm is to engage in serious understatement. It was so uncommon for enslaved Black people to be taught to read and write that when Phyllis Wheatley, who had been taught to read and write in English, Greek, and Latin by her enslavers, published a poem in 1770, the general public refused to believe it was hers. She had to defend her authorship in court. In the first half of the 18th century the Quakers had established schools for Black children in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, but they struggled to maintain financial and community support. Laws like Massachusetts’ Compulsory Attendance Law and the Old Deluder Satan Act required all children, servants and apprentices be taught to read, but historians have concluded that it was probably not intended to be enforced in the case of enslaved people.^
The Bray School was established by an English philanthropic society and its first and only teacher was a widow named Ann Wager. By all accounts she was kind to the children. It’s estimated that she ultimately taught 400 students over the course of her tenure, ranging in age from 3 to 10. The Colonial Williamsburg website estimates that just 7% of the students who passed through the Bray school were free; the rest were enslaved.
How Education Had Changed Since 1635
Excerpt from The English Instructor; image in the public domain.
Like virtually all schools at the time, the Bray school’s curriculum was inextricably linked to religious instruction. The school had its roots in the Anglican church and a requirement of religious conversion was that they must learn to read the Anglican catechism. What had changed, however, were some of the materials now available to the students which had not been extant in 1635. The hornbook was still in use and students also learned from a primer (pronounced ‘primmer’) called The Child’s First Book, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. It contained such gems as: “Pray to God,” “Tell no lyes,” “Do not that by yourself which you would blush to have known,” and “Be not a dunce.” Students who completed the primer went on to a “speller” newly published that year called The English Instructor, by Henry Dixon.* This handy book taught reading and pronunciation by breaking down prayers and scripture passages into syllables. They also had copies of the Book of Common Prayer and portions of the King James Bible. Where 125 years earlier wealthier students in the more expensive petty schools had only hornbook and a primer, enslaved students at the Bray School had access to at least 3 books.
Sampler circa 1766; note the emphasis on the ‘feminine’ quality of mildness. Image in the public domain.
Why Send Enslaved Children to the Bray School?
The Colonial Williamsburg website cites records indicating that many owners sent young enslaved children to the school to get them out from underfoot and perhaps teach them some useful skills, but notes that many children were pulled out of school just as they were beginning to read. Girls of all classes produced samplers — embroidery practice that also reinforced morality and literacy — and the students at the Bray School were no exception. Female students were taught “knitting, sewing and such other things as may be useful to their owners.”** The school’s religious instruction, however, was undeniably pro-slavery. The school’s regulations required that the teacher emphasize the “Parts of the Holy Scripture” in which “Christians are commanded to be faithful & obedient to their Masters,” and expressed the hope that education would make enslaved people more compliant and thus more valuable. Mrs. Wager was instructed to “discourage Idleness & suppress the Beginnings of Vice” among the students. She was also expected to teach them some etiquette.
There is some scant but tantalizing evidence that the general aim of the program — useful but tractable labor –did not work as the founders had hoped. Black Virginian oral tradition referred to some Bray School students as the “first black teachers in Virginia” and says their knowledge of writing to enabled them to forge travel documents so other enslaved people could escape. It seems likely that students armed with literacy and a marketable skill may have chosen to use those accomplishments for their own and their community’s benefit rather than for their enslaver’s.
When Mrs. Wager died in 1774, the Bray School closed for good. At the start of the Revolutionary War, historians estimate that about 5% of the Black population of Virginia was literate. Certainly some of that literacy was a result of the 14 years the Bray School was in operation. That the school was able to exist at all was because educating Black people, and specifically enslaved Black people, was not yet prohibited. After the Revolutionary War, this practice would become extremely difficult in Virginia and illegal in other places, yet literacy rates among enslaved Black people doubled during the antebellum period. It’s impossible to prove, but I like to think that the Bray School had a ripple effect long after its closure.***
______________________________________________
^ Here’s the rationale for this: For a long time, the enslavement of non-Christians was considered justified and was even codified in law in many places, to the extent that only non-Christians could be enslaved–their “heathen” state was what qualified them for enslavement. The Old Deluder Satan law was meant to ensure all people could read the Bible and be saved, but legally, spiritual salvation rendered a person no longer eligible to be enslaved. This was tested in the courts in 1656, when Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom in Virginia on the basis that she had been baptized and was a Christian and that she had inherited free status from her father. Key’s mother was enslaved but her father was white and free and had (crucially) acknowledged her as his daughter. She won her freedom, but within just a few years, Virginia changed the law and no longer recognized religious conversion as a challenge to enslavement. They also closed the inheritance loophole by making a child’s status inheritable only from the mother.
*I love a good long title and this one does not disappoint. The full title was ‘The English Instructor: or, the art of spelling improved. Being a more Plain, Easy, and Regular Method of Teaching Young Children, than any extant.’
**Indeed, Ann Wager was brought in specifically because she could teach girls these useful skills. She also had experience as a teacher, having been a governess for two years to a wealthy family.
***The Bray School Lab at William and Mary University in Williamsburg has a bittersweet list of children’s names — echoes of the real people who attended the Bray school. There are Aberdeen, Phoebe, Isaac Bee, and Mourning, all sent by their enslavers, and Harry, John and Mary Ashby, sent by their free parents. The Bray School Lab is working to trace what they can of these children, whose lives are mostly unrecorded anywhere else. We know a little about Isaac Bee, who attended Bray with his sisters in 1765. His enslaver, Lewis Burwell, placed a ‘Runaway Slave’ ad in the September 1774 Virginia Gazette seeking information about Bee’s whereabouts. The ad noted that Bee believed himself entitled to freedom because he was the son of a free man; it also noted that “he can read.” Isaac Bee was returned to his enslaver but emancipated himself again 28 years later and afterward disappears from the record.