The school he opened in Beaufort was the personal expression of this understanding. The constitutional provision for public education was the systemic expression. One man could open one school in one building in one town. A constitution could create the framework for schools everywhere in the state, for children who would never hear of Robert Smalls and whose access to literacy should not depend on whether they happened to live near someone who had accumulated enough resources to open a private school.
The practical implementation of the 1868 constitution’s educational provisions was uneven and contested from the beginning. The state government that was trying to build a public school system was operating with limited resources in a state whose economy had been disrupted by the war and whose wealthiest white residents were actively hostile to taxation that would support schools serving Black children. The Reconstruction-era public school system in South Carolina was real but fragile, and its fragility was not accidental.
When the Democratic Redeemer governments took control of the state government in the late 1870s, the public school system was one of the institutions they underfunded and in some cases dismantled. The commitment to equal education that the 1868 constitution embodied did not survive the Redemption period intact. What survived was the framework — the legal assertion that public education was a right — which provided the basis for subsequent organizing and legal challenges in the decades that followed.
## The Reconstruction Governments and What They Actually Did
One of the most important corrections that historians of the last several decades have made to the popular understanding of Reconstruction is the demolition of the Dunning School narrative about corruption and incompetence.