Excerpts from Transcript
Interview with John Stealey
June 25, 1992

For the film “West Virginia”

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JS:  The canard in West Virginia is that Berkeley and Jefferson County were against being in West Virginia.  Certainly it is true in Jefferson County.  I have no reservations about it.  They were confederate.  I would assert that the majority of the people in Berkeley County were unionists.  The people who you would know in that day, the county leaders in Berkeley County were confederates, but the great number of people in Berkeley County were unionists.  I think the man in the street was a unionist.  Everybody that worked for the B&O Railroad was a unionist, which was the major employer, or they wouldn’t be working for the railroad.  See, everybody around here believes that this was a confederate county; but there’s nothing that they base that on .  ….We don’t have a Harris or a Gallup poll.

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JS:  The Free Will Baptists came to Harper’s Ferry because of one man: Nathan Cook Brackett.  Nathan Cook Brackett was a graduate of Dartmouth, was from Phillips, Maine.  He had come to the Shenandoah Valley before the Civil War was over.  During the Civil War he was a representative of the U.S. Christian Commission.  This Commission was to introduce the Christian life among soldiers to keep them from gambling, drinking, doing all the bad things that soldiers do.  When the American Missionary Association split up the south as mission fields in dealing with the blacks in a sense of refugees and in the sense of relief and in the sense of education, the lower Shenandoah Valley was assigned to the Free Will Baptist Church and Nathan Cook Bracket used his influence to get his church to take this field.

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And so the lower Shenandoah Valley became a part of the Free Will Baptist charge for dealing with Freedmen and refugees.  Later, when the Freedmen’s Bureau was created in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau selected Brackett as one of its agents or subagents in the Shenandoah Valley.  As they dealt with relief, as they dealt with the refugee situation, as they dealt with education, the Free Will Baptists soon realized that the problem was too large to deal with.  There were too many blacks, not enough white teachers to bring from Maine to teach blacks and so their solution was to create a normal school or teaching college to teach blacks to teach blacks. ….

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JS:  The Freedmen’s Bureau was instrumental in leading blacks and leading local school districts to establish Freedmen schools.  It must be understood that many of the localities in West Virginia opposed the establishment of education for blacks and of building buildings for blacks.  But blacks are very dedicated to self- help and to self-education.  Many blacks in the eastern panhandle and the Kanawha valley went to school in the evening after a day’s work to be educated.  When it came time that the state and Freedmen’s Bureau would force these localities to establish schools, blacks contributed money to help construct these schools, and many blacks were giving $5 and $10 to establish Freedmen’s Bureau schools.  That doesn’t sound like much money today, but within the context of the time, they were only making a hundred or a hundred fifty dollars a year, and they were willing to give $5 or $10 toward their own building for the education of themselves and perhaps their children.

Q:  What was the result of the impact of the establishment of the schools in West Virginia?

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JS:  It attracts to West Virginia in many cases blacks from other states who teach these schools.  For instance, many prominent black West Virginia families started in West Virginia as teachers in these schools.  Also, it’s the beginning of an instruction to blacks who usually achieve success, but blacks usually do it somewhere else, Booker T. Washington being an example of that.  He would leave West Virginia, go to Hampton Institute.  And of course go on from there.

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Another thing it did was establish a tradition of education in West Virginia with the establishment of Storer College at Harper’s Ferry and later as the population of Kanawha County grew, blacks would urge the establishment of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute at Farm?, which became West Virginia State College later.

Q:  Sort of summing up that who reconstruction time, what do you think the lessons are for us know about what happened following the war?  In many ways it seems like the war had been fought for naught?  To black education there was resistance to many of the economic development programs, Miss Debar’s struggle to try to get West Virginia moving.  ?  It seems like the story of the Ten Years’ ? of Wars ? ?

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JS:  The heritage of reconstruction of West Virginia is very difficult to assess, but definitely it sets up a territorial and political situation that West Virginia has been coping with and has been inhibiting West Virginia ever since.  West Virginia from the beginning was not a united state.  We had great, great political differences in the state.  These political differences have lasted up until the present.  West Virginia has never been a unified state in a political sense.  Even if it was united in one political party, that political party has had great differences in it.  So West Virginians tend to see things in a sectional sense.  This dates from the Civil War in the reconstruction period.