Education as a Vehicle of Racial Control

In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Nathanial Banks, the son of a Massachusetts factory mechanic, loosely aligned himself with the anti-slavery movement. Banks first entered national politics when he was elected to Congress in 1854 as Massachusett's lone Democratic member of the House of Representatives. However, he broke with his party when he opposed the Kansas Nebraska bill. He then courted the Free Soil movement and the nativists until finally in 1856 he joined the Republican party. In the same year he was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 1857 Banks left Congress and began a threeyear term as Republican Governor of Massachusetts. Throughout his term he quarrelled continually with abolitionists who accused him of being far too moderate on the slavery question.1 When war broke, President Lincoln commissioned Banks as a Major General of Volunteers. During the first two years of the war, General Banks spent his time organizing Washington's defenses and countering Stonewall Jackson's raids in the Shenandoah Valley. In December 1862 Lincoln appointed General Banks to replace radical General Benjamin Butler as Commander of the Department of the Gulf.2

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