wRIGHTing Reconstruction

Local Perspective

Despite recent media treatment of the era of Reconstruction, which followed the American Civil War, history told from local contexts reveals new truths and enables new narratives.

wRIGHTing Reconstruction, a digital project created with start-up funding from the Council of Independent Colleges, seeks to tell the story of transition to a more democratic society as it took place in nineteenth-century Marshall County, Miss. on the campus of Rust College in Holly Springs.

On this site, you will find accessible essays by project participants, both students and professors, working to synthesize and interpret relevant historical materials from the college’s archive housed at the Leontyne Price Library.

Our project podcast–The Blue Circle Podcast–provides yet another medium for discovering and examining history as a way of localizing understanding of America’s past.

Rich images are presented courtesy of the Price Library, the Digital Public Library of America, and the Amistad Research Center.

Providing learning to the newly emancipated

Rust College was founded in 1866 by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The institution then known as Shaw University began in the facilities of Asbury Church under the leadership of freedmen Rev. Moses Adams and Rev. Albert Collier McDonald.

From the institution’s beginning, its leaders included African American freedmen, for example, James Wells, a trustee of the college and father of famous journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who attended Rust.

While Rust’s founding should be viewed as a collaborative effort of radical reconstructors, most, if not all of them, affiliated with church-related bodies, the early college very much began within a challenging context, a postbellum town whose order depended upon federal protection.

“…all who are unable to pay are welcomed to our schools and taught gratuitously.”

R.S. Rust to Professor Ogden, January 26, 1866. Source–American Missionary Association Papers, Amistad Research Center.

Rust was not founded in a vacuum. While political conditions in the county played their part, a circle of friends–agents of the Western Freedmen’s Aid Society, of which R.S. Rust was Corresponding Secretary–developed institutions in Mississippi and in nearby states. Education as a linchpin of Reconstruction in fact began during the war in temporary communities known as “contraband camps.”

Others in the circle included Ogden, associated with Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and J.M. Walden, associated with Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. Involvement as well of Levi Coffin, President of the Underground Railroad, suggest the passionate resolve of these reformers.

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