The American Missionary Association (AMA) began as an abolitionist organization in 1846, with several black members on its executive board. While officially non-sectarian, Congregationalists dominated within its membership. In addition to advocating for the abolition of slavery in America and establishing anti-slavery churches in the western territories, they also sent missionaries to Africa, China, India, to educate and evangelize. The AMA published its own periodical, The American Missionary.

During the Civil War, the Association organized its own subsidiary organization, the Freedmen’s Aid Society, to facilitating sending teachers to contraband camps and the camps of United States Colored Troops. As the war ended, the AMA played a prominent role in the general effort of northern aid societies to bring both material relief and education to the freedpeople of the South. The AMA’s educational efforts were not limited to primary schools. The Association founded and supported colleges as well, including Hampton Institute in Virginia.

As the Civil War ended the spring of 1865, the various aid organizations scrambled to provide aid, build schools, and support teachers throughout a vast area. The AMA’s educational efforts expanded greatly during this period. Unfortunately, friction developed between the two largest groups: the evangelical AMA, and the secular American Freedmen’s Union Committee (AFUC) and its regional branches. The teachers of the AMA were expected to be Christian missionaries as much as teachers of reading, writing, and arithmetic. While teachers of the AFUC and its subsidiary branches could certainly be religious personally, they were reminded by their organization that they were not missionaries or preachers, and that they were “not to inculcate doctrinal opinions or take part in sectarian propagandism of any kind.”^[1] The resulting schism within the aid movement meant that the two groups began competing with each other in their fundraising campaigns in the North, rather than working together.

In Harford County, their efforts in Harford County were focused on a particular school, at Darlington. The first teacher sent to this location by the AMA was Edmonia Highgate, an African American woman from Syracuse, New York. She arrived in the spring of 1865, and, lacking a schoolhouse, taught her students within the Hosanna African Methodist Episcopal Church. After a single semester, she was sent to New Orleans where she raised funds for the AMA.

Highgate was soon replaced by another African American AMA teacher, Mary E. Watson. Watson, from Newport, Rhode Island, was reassigned to Darlington in the Fall of 1865 from her previous posting at Norfolk, Virginia. Watson proved herself an able educator at Darlington, working to bring the community together and campaigning for a dedicated school building at Darlington, which opened in January 1869. The AMA praised her efforts, and when they were unable to continue to adequately support her salary at Darlington, they managed to relocate her to the school at Port Deposit, in Cecil County, in the fall of 1869. In that county, local taxes helped support teacher salaries at colored schools.

In the early 1870s, more and more local governments began taking over the funding of public schools for African American children, lessening the need for the involvement of northern philanthropy. Accordingly, the AMA drew back their efforts in the field. But unlike the other aid societies, which were founded specifically to deal with the challenge of emancipation, the AMAs larger purpose as a missionary organization prevented their dissolution. They continued as an independent entity until 1999, when they were merged into the missionary arm of the United Church of Christ.

By James Schruefer

^[1] James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 401-2.