Wiley, Calvin Henderson (1819-1887)

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Calvin Henderson Wiley (1819-1887)

Southern educational reformer

Early Life. The life of Calvin Henderson Wiley, the most prominent antebellum Southern educational reformer, in many ways parallels that of his Northern counterpart, Henry Barnard. Born on a North Carolina farm to Scotch-Irish Presbyterian parents in 1819, Wiley prepared for college in one of David Caldwell’s “log-college” academies and later studied law at the University of North Carolina. Graduating in 1840, Wiley practiced law for several years and gained prominence as editor of the Oxford Mercury. Politically associated with the Whig Party in a state increasingly loyal to the Democrats, he was elected to the state legislature in 1850 and sponsored a bill creating an office of state superintendent of schools, a position that he himself was elected to three years later. He served as state superintendent until the position was abolished in 1866 and was almost single-handedly responsible for creating the best public school system in the South. “The history of education” in North Carolina throughout this period, as one study of his life has put it, “is almost the biography of Wiley”.

Obstacles to Reform. The fact that North Carolina was still without a superintendent of schools as late as 1850 revealed much about the state of public education in the South. In some ways the impediments to common-school reform in the region paralleled those found in the North: resistance to public taxation had been nearly as fierce in Rhode Island and Connecticut as it was below the Mason-Dixon line; the stigma attached to “pauper schools” turned poor white Southerners away just as it had Northern workers and their children; and the severe shortage of trained teachers, which the proliferation of normal schools and teacher training institutes had only recently begun to alter in the North, remained an important obstacle in both the South and the West. North Carolina enjoyed several important advantages over its southern neighbors. The state had been the recipient of over $1.5 million in federal aid in 1839, a grant that helped spur the passage of limited school legislation. By 1846 every county in North Carolina had taken strides toward establishing tax-supported schools. Additionally, public figures influenced by the educational revival under way in the North, including Trinity College founder Braxton Craven and University of North Carolina president David Caldwell, had urged the establishment of normal schools to overcome the state’s “educational backwardness.”

A Beacon for Change. From 1850 onward Wiley brought a new energy to the project of educational reform, traversing the state in the same manner as Barnard had done a decade earlier in Rhode Island, speaking before teachers, legislators, businessmen, and parents. He established a state-supported normal college in 1850, founded the State Teachers’ Association, and established the North Carolina Journal of Education, both in 1856. By 1858 North Carolina was widely recognized as having the best school system of any of the slaveholding states: its teachers were better paid than their counterparts elsewhere in the South; its students attended school for a longer annual term (an average of four months per year) and in better-maintained buildings than their peers in neighboring states. By 1860 some 160,000 North Carolinians were enrolled in four thousand primary schools. Not surprisingly, Wiley’s success made the state a beacon for educational reformers throughout the South. “Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia sought to copy” his example, and “Wiley was invited to appear before the legislature of Georgia for the purpose of aiding that State in improving its school system.”

The Civil War. Wiley’s career as state superintendent coincided, of course, with a sharp rise in sectional hostility between the North and the South leading, in 1861, to the outbreak of the Civil War. Inevitably, the rise of Southern nationalism influenced Wiley’s conception of the role of public schooling. Though acutely familiar with some of the more-reactionary features of Southern society, and impressed by the progress of educational reform in the North, Wiley was sympathetic to the increasingly strident expressions of Southern separatism during the 1850s. Echoing calls for “homegrown” education, Wiley warned in 1856 that educators would have an important role to play in the event of an outbreak of military hostilities. “Surely,” he wrote, “if the awful crisis that many dread should come, the South cannot… afford to spare any effort to unite the people… for cooperative, enlightened and manly action in the day of trial.” To his credit Wiley never left his post as superintendent during the difficult years of the conflict and resisted the efforts of Confederate officials to divert educational funds for war needs. The survival of North Carolina’s schools was largely the result of Wiley’s unflagging efforts, and when, at the war’s end in 1865, he was removed from his office, Wiley could report with satisfaction that “the common schools lived and discharged their useful mission through all the gloom and trials of the conflict, and when the last gun was fired… the doors were still kept open, and they numbered their pupils by the scores of thousands.” Wiley died in 1887.