Howard School, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in August 2015, is arguably Chattanooga’s most visible symbol of Reconstruction, a period described by historian James W. Loewen as “that period after the Civil War when African-Americans briefly enjoyed full civil and political rights.”
The school is named after U.S. Gen. Oliver O. Howard (1830-1909), who in June 1862 lost an arm at the Battle of Seven Pines-Fair Oaks in Virginia. After fighting at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, he was transferred to the Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga, where he took part in the Union assault that captured Missionary Ridge.
Appointed commander of the Army of the Tennessee, he fought in Atlanta and joined Sherman’s famous March to the Sea. Howard was known as the “Christian general” for making policy decisions based on his strong religious beliefs. From May 1865 to July 1874 he served as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau where his mission was to integrate freed slaves into society. In 1874 he went to Washington Territory, where he pursued and received the surrender of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.
At the war’s end, thousands of blacks poured into Chattanooga and other Southern cities.
By early 1865, several thousand freed people occupied Camp Contraband across the river from Chattanooga. Among groups responding to the crisis was the American Missionary Association. Ewing Ogden Tade, born in Illinois in 1828, became interested in the association while a student at Iowa College (later Grinnell) in Davenport, Iowa, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1858. He then studied at Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1862. By 1865 he was in Memphis preaching to slaves while his wife, Pennsylvania native Amanda Louise, and his brother, James A. Tade, taught in a Freedmen’s School.