The Ornament of Human Society": Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools

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Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects

2013

"The Ornament of Human Society": Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools

Zack Quaratella College of William and Mary

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Recommended Citation Quaratella, Zack, ""The Ornament of Human Society": Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 656. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/656

This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “The Ornament of Human Society”: Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelors of Arts in History from The College of William and Mary

Zack Quaratella

Accepted for (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors)

Carol Sheriff, Director

Scott Nelson

John Baltes

Williamsburg, VA April 12, 2013

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the curators at the Rhode Island and Massachusetts Historical Societies who always went above and beyond with their help, especially the kind woman who pointed me to Henry Barnard’s scrapbook. Additionally, the curators of Framingham State University’s Special Collections offered me essential advice in the embryonic stages of this paper.

Professor Carol Sheriff, thanks for trudging through those rough rough drafts. Thanks for pulling me aside one day and telling me I should write a thesis; this has been the best academic experience I have ever had.

Taylor Spence, thanks for teaching me how to speed-read and critically analyze the historiography of my field. I hope my (occasional) use of the passive voice doesn’t offend you too greatly.

Ben Reynolds, you were there when this thesis popped into my head and it was through conversation with you that this thesis developed into something meaningful. Thank you.

Jake Douglas, words cannot describe how helpful I found your thorough edits. I cannot thank you enough.

Sarah Barry, thank you for giving me constant encouragement through this whole process. I dream bigger when you are around.

Bob and Holly Quaratella, you both inspire me daily. I write from atop your shoulders.

Finally, this paper (and the year of work that went into it) is dedicated to Humphrey and Carol Amedeo without whom none of this would be possible.

Contents

Acknowledgments ...... ii

Introduction: Schools and Schisms ...... 4

Chapter I: Structural Changes and Advancing Pedagogy ...... 13

Chapter II: Evolving Ideologies and Rising Anti-Southernism ...... 50

Conclusion: From Schoolhouses to Battle Lines ...... 73

Epilogue: “As is the Teacher, so is the School” ...... 77

Bibliography ...... 79

iii

Introduction: Schools and Schisms

In 1831 journalist William Lloyd Garrison established The Liberator, a newspaper that advocated for immediate abolition of slavery. Despite its small circulation, the newspaper published notoriously controversial positions and featured a masthead depicting a gruesome slave auction, infuriating proslavery Southerners. By contrast, in

1832 Thomas Roderick Dew, president of The College of William and Mary, published his Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, in which he articulated a proslavery ideology that would resonate with Southerners.1 Dew opined that slaves benefitted from servitude, as did their masters. His position represented a shift from earlier Southern thinkers who treated slavery as a necessary evil. While most

Americans hovered between Garrison and Dew ideologically, the two men represented magnetic poles that attracted large numbers of adherents. Following Garrison’s rhetoric of the 1830s, many Northerners subscribed to a “free-labor” ideology, which demanded

“free soil, free labor, free men.” For these Northerners, slavery could not coexist alongside free laborers, and they began to agitate for its gradual end by banning the institution from the new Western territories. Meanwhile, Southerners dug in their heels and demanded that slavery extend to these territories. Citizens of both the North and

South felt their way of life threatened, exacerbating sectional differences. Consciously or not, Northern teachers and reformers felt the pull of free-labor’s cause, and their efforts in the classroom or statehouse betray an implicit allegiance with anti-southern mentality. In this essay, I will show how the changing paradigms of education in New England contributed to and intertwined with its rising sectional ideology.

1 Thomas Roderick Dew, Review of the debate [on the abolition of slavery] in the Virginia legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond: T.W. White, 1832).

Studies on New England’s educational reform highlight that the movement was entangled with moral suasion, a tactic used by influential reformers to correct social ills like intemperance and urban pauperism. However, no analyses address the ramifications of the movement’s spirit: its drive towards obedience, uniformity, temperance, industry and morality was designed, perhaps inadvertently, to create specific types of citizens.

These citizens, virtuous and learned, could approach their changing world with a sense of confidence that they had learned how to act “correctly” when they attended “common school.” The common school was a phrase coined by Horace Mann to describe his intention to bring a common education to all students. The United States’ children, however, did not receive their education equally. Southern white children were less likely to attend school or know how to read, and slaves in the South were legally barred from both school and literature. Yet Southern children’s experiences with parents and slaves forced them to confront the issue of human bondage and its moral implications. The

North drifted towards free labor ideology and challenged the institution of slavery partly because of their experience in school; Southerners saw this as an affront to their way of life.

Current scholarship notes the importance of morality in common school reform but ignores its possible social effects. The sentiments of parents and legislators are important, but the children who actually went through the schools are often overlooked.

The effects common school might have on students’ sectional beliefs go unnoticed.

Sectional systems of ideology cannot be studied in a vacuum; the lessons students learned in schools shaped the citizen they became. I will argue that the graduates who emerged from New England common schools were more likely to be morally and ideologically

opposed to slavery and the Southern way of life than students who went to school before the reform effort.

In order to understand fully the common school reform movement’s motivation, it is useful to reflect on its principles. Moral education did not emerge spontaneously but rather had deep roots, dating back at least to the Classical era. Plato wrote in his Republic that “we should probably take the utmost care to insure that the first stories [students] hear about virtue are the best ones for them to hear.” Since Plato, Western philosophers have urged using schools to breed morally superior citizens.2 Many nineteenth-century

New Englanders could not read Ancient Greek, but the works of John Locke were known to nearly every American household. In one of his most influential texts, Some Thoughts

Concerning Education (1693), Locke postulates that all children are born with a blank slate, neither good nor evil, without preconceived notions of morality, aside from an inherent rationality.3 Depending on its quality, education could produce men of great character or deviant weakness. It was imperative that parents labor to ensure their children received a proper education.

Countless Americans absorbed the arguments of the twenty-five printings of Some

Thoughts Concerning Education, including Benjamin Franklin, whose works betray his

Lockean ideology. In a short pamphlet written by Franklin in 1749, he advocated for the foundation of public schools in Philadelphia. Franklin noted that “Mr. Locke” wrote a

“well known, and much esteemed” piece on education and agrees that a teacher must “be a Man of good Understanding, good Morals, diligent and patient, learn'd in the

2 Plato, Complete Works of Plato ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 1017. “Insure” is here used by Plato as a synonym for “ensure.” 3 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909-14), section 217.

Languages and Sciences, and a correct pure Speaker and Writer of the English Tongue.”4

This description mirrored the desires of many parents who aimed to shape their children into effective citizens. In his Autobiography (1793), Franklin listed a set of thirteen virtues such as temperance, tranquility, industry, and justice that guided his actions.

Addressing this work primarily to his son, Franklin intended to will those principles to him.5 He was not the only parent who wished good morals upon his children.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, many writers noted the peculiar importance of education for the newly-formed republic. Moral citizens were no longer a luxury but a necessity, wrote famous lexicographer Noah Webster in 1788:

Every small district should be furnished with a school, at least four months in a year; when boys are not otherwise employed. This school should be kept by the most reputable and well informed man in the district. Here children should be taught the usual branches of learning; submission to superiors and to laws; the moral or social duties; the history and transactions of their own country; the principles of liberty and government. Here the rough manners of the wilderness should be softened, and the principles of virtue and good behavior inculcated. The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.6

Webster urged that all children receive a baseline education to provide them with the tools of active and productive citizens. Townspeople could trust only the most respected of men to perform such a vital task. To Webster, an educated man with poor morals posed an inexcusable threat to children. This man had to reflect Americans’ virtues foremost, and vigorously, even if it came at the expense of his knowledge of Cicero.

4 Benjamin Franklin, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania [sic]” (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1749). 5 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (London: J. Parsons, 1793). Franklin’s virtues have often been likened to those put forth by Aristotle, another Classical connection. 6 Noah Webster, A Collection of Essays and Fugitive Writings on Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977). Emphasis original.

Without a foundation in moral education, Webster believed the American experiment would fail.

Other Americans who perceived the dangers of neglecting moral education echoed Webster’s sense of urgency. Benjamin Rush practiced as a physician, worked as an educator, and was prominently positioned in American political society during the revolutionary period. Rush famously extolled the virtue of “republican mothers,” observing that “a principal share of the instruction of children naturally devolves upon the women. It becomes us therefore to prepare them, by a suitable education, for the discharge of this most important duty of mothers.”7 Questioning the shackles that bound women in most parts of the world, American education leaders understood that women were vital to the maintenance of the republic, entrusted with the responsibility of filling the role their working husbands could not.

Building on the words and deeds of eighteenth-century American educational philosophers, reformers of the nineteenth century keenly felt a duty to create moral, educated citizens. Teachers and reformers employed several tactics of citizen shaping.

Foremost among these was the concept of obedience; children were persons who needed discipline. Every time a young boy wandered from his desk, he was reprimanded. Every time a girl chatted idly with her friends during class, she was punished. Teachers were instructed to punish evenly, and to withhold violence. Reformers understood that corporal punishment had little effect on “bad” students and endangered teachers’ rapport with

“good” students. Conversely, because students dreaded public humiliation, the disapproval of one’s peers became the ultimate deterrent. Thus, when they left the

7 Benjamin Rush, Thoughts Upon Female Education (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787), paragraph 7.

classroom and became citizens, students of common schools would behave properly not for the state but to avoid neighbors’ disapprobation.

Before the advent of common schools, most schools had a personalized “tutor” system. This form of education brought the teacher in direct one-on-one contact with every student to assess his progress and tutor him in the necessary subjects. Common school classrooms bred uniformity as children sat in rowed desks and were given the same books and classroom implements. Teachers attended either professional seminaries called normal schools or teacher institutes, both of which were state-run. The reformer’s effort had two purposes: first, to improve the quality of education, and second, to attempt to ensure every student had the same education. While the latter goal was not logically attainable, there was far more uniformity in schools by 1850 than there had been at the beginning of the century.

Common school curriculum emphasized industry because it prepared students for the new market economy while also reinforcing moral obedience. The concept of protective childhood, wherein children are nurtured closely until they reach adolescence, did not resonate strongly with leading educators of the antebellum era. In common school there was a strong emphasis on ensuring that children accepted the rigors of hard work.

By 1850, the average school day had increased and the total number of days children spent in school swelled.8 Both are an indication of the importance that teachers placed on

8 Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 34-38. Figure 2.3 describes the “Average daily public and private attendance as a percentage of all children ages birth to 19, 1840-1880” calculated from Table A2.1. Figure 2.4 shows the increasing length of Massachusetts public school sessions from 1840 to 1880 calculated from Table A2.2. Kaestle and Vinovskis estimate that surrounding states (they use New York as an example) also experienced similar trends in educational attendance.

industry. Parents understood that their children would fall behind if they missed class or failed to keep up with their studies. Reformers emphasized the economic and moral problems that could arise if students failed to attend class: they would not be prepared for steady work, and they would be more likely to fall into pauperism and vice.

Aside from industry, common schools also stressed the importance of piety to avoid unhealthy lifestyles. Reformers rode the tidal wave of religious revivals that swept the nation and embraced religious education in common schools. Recalling education’s religious roots in New England, reformers encouraged teachers to offer prayers in school and to inculcate God’s moral authority in students. Religion would be the foundation upon which common school graduates built their sense of morality. As they turned their gaze Southward, Northerners continued to reflect upon the sinfulness of slavery in part because of their experience in common schools.

Obedience and industry were both traits essential for employment as New

England rapidly industrialized; temperance proved to be another economically valuable trait. Supporters of the temperance movement were concerned about the physical effects of imbibing alcohol, but they also recognized intemperance as a demonstration against order, morality, and poor work habits. Language admonishing intemperance abounded in the common school reform movement. Children obviously did not drink alcohol but they could act “irrationally,” which educators referred to as being intemperate. The context was different, but the concept was the same. Elimination of such irrationality was a large part of education reform because it helped to ensure that otherwise moral children would not occasionally act uncharacteristically. Parallels to the irrational actions of a drunken adult are found in the language used to describe both intemperate adults and children.

Temperate children – reformers realized – would become temperate working adults.

The concepts reinforced in New England schools were at odds ideologically with the South. While not a universal transformation, those who resisted were in the minority.

By the 1850s, anti-slavery sentiments trickled into common schools, which supplemented their geographical propensity to “other” the South. Children read anti-slavery texts that highlighted the barbarity of the institution. Prominent reformers and teachers openly expressed distaste for human bondage, some even viewing it as immoral. It is unlikely that parents, teachers, and reformers set out to mold their children into homogeneous laborers or thinkers who disapproved of Southern life. I will argue that educational reform nonetheless helped produce a generation that was ideologically opposed to the slaveholding South.

In my study, I have chosen to focus mainly on the shared story of two New

England states, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. For any scholar of the common school reform movement, Massachusetts is an obvious choice. Home to Horace Mann, the leading figure in educational reform, Massachusetts also boasted the most complete schooling infrastructure in the country. Rhode Island was typically among the first states to follow Massachusetts’s lead, so it offers many of the same themes. Broadly speaking, reform efforts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island spread throughout the region and followed pioneers westward. I do not attempt to extrapolate my conclusions outside of

New England, however, because the common school system in the Old Northwest had not developed to the extent of New England before the Civil War.

This study is important because it follows common school ideology outside of the classroom. In choosing such a monumental occasion to study as the eve of the Civil War,

I mean to demonstrate the power that lies in teachers’ hands. Men and women who control education policy have a great responsibility. Through the standards they establish for teachers they have the ability to affect students’ understanding of morality. In the antebellum era, schools changed students’ conception of labor, temperance, industry, obedience, and therefore the South. I hope to illuminate the deep reverberations that education can have on a society, even if that effect is inadvertent. While I do not assert that common school reform was the primary cause of the Civil War, I argue that its effects produced a Northern subjectivity that admonished the South.

The purpose of this exercise is to strengthen public memory of the common school reform movement by removing it from its current vacuum, and insert it into the debate over the potential causes of the Civil War. In this instructive example, I hope also to reestablish the proposition that teachers and educational policy makers make lasting changes to society.

Chapter I: Structural Changes and Advancing Pedagogy

Horace Mann was born in 1796 to a farming family in Franklin, Massachusetts.

Raised humbly, Mann received little formal education until he enrolled at Brown

University in Providence, Rhode Island. At twenty years old, he desired an “escape from digging and plowing” and saw Brown as an outlet.9 He began a meteoric rise, graduating from Brown in three years and Litchfield Law School in two. In 1827, Mann started his tenure in the Massachusetts State Legislature and then Senate, serving as the Senate president from 1836-1837. A decade after joining Massachusetts’s Congress, Mann took the helm of the country’s first board of education, though he appeared to have little interest in education prior to his appointment. Mann’s common school reform agenda was inspired by his involvement in the temperance and asylum reform movements.10 By making the school a bastion of progress, he would champion moral reformation; his success earned him the moniker “father of the American public school system.”11

Mann had a reform-minded counterpart in Henry Barnard, who worked to emulate

Mann’s reforms in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Rhode Island did not boast

Massachusetts’s deep educational roots. Massachusetts’s Calvinists founded their first public schools in the early 1600s and their first college in 1636. They saw education as a means to eradicate the influence of the devil. Historian Frank Tracy Carlton notes, “As might be expected, in Rhode Island where this theocracy (Calvinism) was never

9 Jonathon Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971), 27. 10 Ibid., 185. 11 Ibid., xi. Though here Messerli debates the utility of Mann’s moniker as the “father of the American public school system,” he concedes that many historians have referred to Mann as such.

enthroned, the early educational development was dwarfed.”12 A Yale University graduate, Barnard worked tirelessly in Connecticut to reform common schools, and

Rhode Island employed him to review its public schools in 1843. Barnard faced unique challenges in Rhode Island as he struggled to establish normal schools and endear the population to the concept of districted public schools, but he was able to mimic Mann’s policies.13

Though he was not involved in educational reform before he became secretary of

Massachusetts’s Board of Education, Horace Mann was chosen over fierce competition.

The foremost challenger was James Carter, a man who most contemporaries believed was a snug fit for the job.14 Carter was a fantastic teacher, prolific writer, and a brilliant politician; all the qualifications, it appeared, for the position of secretary. Since his graduation from Harvard University in 1820, Carter had worked as an educator and was intimately involved in the legislative battle that led to the establishment of the Board itself. However, for every ounce that Carter was brilliant, he was two ounces controversial. In his writings and speeches, Carter consistently blamed teachers in offensive tones and criticized their pedagogic practices. Perhaps more damning was

Carter’s opposition to the clergy elite of Massachusetts; while Mann was never considered a devout Protestant, he respected the power the Calvinists still held. The death knell for Carter, though, was his alienation from Edmund Dwight, the industrialist-

12 Frank Tracy Carlton, The Economic Influences upon Educational Progress in the United States, 1820-1850 (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1906), 16. Parentheses original. 13 The challenges were unique in the sense that no theocratic system of education existed in the state, as was the case in Massachusetts. 14 Jonathan C. Messerli, “James G. Carter’s Abilities as a Common School Reformer,” History of Education Quarterly 5 (1965): 14.

philanthropist who was at the heart of the Board’s foundation. Records historian Jonathan

Messerli, “[T]he plan for the State Board of Education was the product of a ‘little volunteer council of which Mr. Dwight was the centre.’”15 In addition to the negativity surrounding Carter, Horace Mann painted himself an attractive candidate. Despite his lack of direct educational experience, Mann proved himself an excellent orator in his defense of other millennial reform movements in Massachusetts. Mann was likely selected because of his affiliation to those movements and his public desire to apply the tactics of moral suasion to common schools. Where Carter represented a figure who would stick to “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” Mann meant to proselytize the value of temperance in schools.

Mann argued forcefully that “education must be universal” in his first annual report in 1837 addressed to the governor of Massachusetts, though published publicly.16

Nearly every white man and woman in his state was literate, but Mann sought greater gains: “Education must prepare our citizens to become municipal officers, intelligent jurors, honest witnesses, legislators, or competent judges of legislation – in fine, to fill all the manifold relations of life.”17 In 1837, the year Mann took his post as secretary of the board of education, much work remained to attain his expectations. Though nearly every

New England town had a schoolhouse and a teacher, the quality of that education could not be ensured systematically. Many students, for example, came to school without books or writing materials. Normal schools were established to regulate teacher training and

15 Ibid., 18. 16 Horace Mann, “Means and Objects of Common-School Education, 1837,” Lectures and Annual Reports on Education (Boston: Lee & Shepherd Publishers, 1872), 83. 17 Ibid., 84; John E. Murray, “Generations of Human Capital: Literacy in American Families, 1830-1875,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (Winter 1997): 416.

control the morals and knowledge of prospective teachers. In other cases, schools held students of varying skill levels with just one teacher in a single room. In the 1790s,

Boston and Providence organized their schools into districts, which rural schools were encouraged to emulate. Mann led the charge to improve schools statewide, regardless of the county’s population density. Progress was not uniform or continuous, but by 1860,

New England public schools had become more organized, better attended, and served broader populations than ever before.

The city of Providence, Rhode Island reformed its school system early on and served as a model for the other school districts Mann worked to improve. The General

Assembly of Rhode Island voted in 1800 to compel towns to establish free public schools.

Before this act, schools were either exclusively private or temporary institutions raised by the collective donations of townspeople to provide literacy for their children. Providence first responded to this measure; as the capital city it had the largest population in Rhode

Island. In 1800 Providence resolved to hire “four Principle Masters appointed at a Salary of Five Hundred Dollars per Annum” who would work in the four schools.18 The newly- formed school committee also crafted four districts that corresponded with the locations of the schools.

Mere months after the creation of the school committee to oversee the Providence

School System, the committee established a set of Rules and Regulations to govern the districts. The committee resolved,

The good morals of the Youth being a matter of the highest Consequence, both to their own comfort and to the progress in useful knowledge, they are strictly enjoined to avoid idleness and profanity, falsehood and deceitfulness, and every other wicked and disgraceful practice; and to conduct themselves in a sober,

18 Nathan Jackson, “School Committee Minutes:1800-1828,” MSS 214: 4, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. Irregular capitalization original.

orderly and decent manner, both in and out of school.19

The committee prohibited violent punishment, “as far as practicable,” and explicitly protected female students from corporal punishment. The Rules also enumerated teachers’ purpose for the newly formed Providence School Committee:

That they endeavor to impress the minds of their Pupils with a sense of the Being and Providence of God, and the obligation they are under to Love and Revere Him. – Their duty to their Parents and Masters, the beauty and excellence of truth, justice, and mutual love – tendencies of gentle creatures – the happy tendency of self government, and obedience to the dictate of reason and religion – the observance of the Sabbath as a sacred Institution – the Duty which they owe their Country and the necessity of a third obedience to its laws – and that they caution them against the prevailing vices.20

Enforcing these rules proved more difficult than writing them. The four school districts each reported directly to the school committee, which arbitrated disputes between teachers and parents. Teachers hired by Providence at this time were exclusively male, and while over time females were hired, schools did not employ them en masse until Mann endorsed the plan decades later. The committee often took the side of the teacher when weighing his testimony against a student’s. Usually, the punishment for disrespecting a teacher was expulsion, but the committee gave students the opportunity to

“make a suitable and humble acknowledgement for his misdemeanor … to the

Satisfaction of the Instructors.”21 These public spectacles of punishment and arbitration ultimately damaged students’ (and parents’) respect for teachers and boiled down to a circus of hearsay; they were abandoned in 1817 after more than a dozen “trials” that publicized the misdemeanors of minors in the Providence district. Enforcement remained under the control of the town council through the office of the “Preceptor, whose duty it

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

shall be to superintend the whole school; And order all such punishments, suspensions, or expulsions as may by him be thought necessary taking case upon any expulsions immediately to report the same to the Town Council.”22

As students poured into classrooms in Providence, teachers found children unprepared for instruction because students lacked adequate books. The Providence

School Committee resolved in 1802 “that the Several preceptors of the public schools be denoted not to receive any scholars in the same unless they are provided with suitable books.” For the moment, the Committee had not designated specific books as necessary.

The Committee apparently was still dissatisfied two years later with the number of

“suitable books” brought to school because it “ordered that the Parents and Guardians of such Children as attend the Public Schools without the necessary Books, and who are not able to provide them with the Same, apply in person to the President of the Town Council therefore.”23

In this early effort to provide all Providence children with books, the aim was not to spread literacy, but rather to ensure students were prepared for class and the standardized curriculum.24 Parents had little motivation to update their primers, which would have been a costly endeavor, because the books had succeeded in providing parents their own literacy. Literate parents sent their children to school more consistently,

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,1974), 38-42; William J. Gilmore, Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1982), 98. Lockridge notes that 90% of white males could sign their own wills by 1790. Gilmore, with a larger sample size, found an even higher rate in his study.

but their attachment to old books caused resistance to the adoption of new books.25 The average household owned only a copy of the Bible and a select few primers, so providing students with free books was essential to ensuring their quality education.

This act providing books for all children whose parents applied had little practical effect on book ownership in Providence. The School Committee kept detailed records of its transactions until 1818 (and then sporadically until 1828) and not a single parent appealed for the Committee to purchase books. Embarrassment was probably a deterrent, since parents were forced to appeal in person. In a city of such small scale, it is likely that such an action would be the source of gossip; to acknowledge dependence on the government was the mark of a lower-class citizen. Evidently, this was the case in the third Providence district, where Preceptor John Dexter noted “the propriety of placing in his hands one dozen of the first and one dozen of the second volume of Adams’ Spelling book for distribution at his discretion.”26 Interestingly, despite the provision by the

Committee to provide books for all needy students, none of the “dozen” in Dexter’s class applied. Dexter’s appeal served a dual purpose that appealed to the Committee: it ensured all his students would have books and standardized which text would be the norm.

Entering the nineteenth century, suffrage expanded to include larger swaths of white males, especially in the northeastern states. With the exception of Rhode Island, which did not enact universal male suffrage until 1843, New England states were among the first to expand the right to vote to most of its male citizens.27 To legislatures

25 Gilmore, Elementary Literacy, 415. 26 Jackson, “Committee Minutes,” RIHS. 27 The original Rhode Island charter in 1644 mandated strict districted representation and granted the suffrage to all white males who owned more than 143 dollars of real estate. No mechanism existed to respond to changing populations in the several counties.

throughout the region, the importance of education became linked to the democratization of the vote. Boys would shape the future electorate; molding them into men who would decide the country’s future was critical. Girls would grow up to raise children as

“republican mothers,” so their education held equal importance. Every aspect of children’s lives had to be scrutinized to ensure they would become republican citizens.

As Horace Mann averred, “Every book which a child reads with intelligence is like the cast of the weaver’s shuttle, adding another thread to the indestructible web of existence.”28 Book lists became common as educators recognized that some textbooks offered better pedagogic methods and also excellent moral guidance. Seeing the success of urban schools in Providence and Boston, Mann argued for the adoption of standardized textbooks.

Controversy over which book to standardize was rampant. Often, allegiance to an author caused schools to make selections that were not approved by all parents. Textbook authors usually tested their books by distributing them to teachers and soliciting their opinion. In more populous districts, school committees selected books, but teachers could then choose whether or not to implement them in the classroom. It was thus vital that teachers appreciate the texts before they were distributed. Josiah Bumstead published My

First School Book and Spelling and Thinking in 1842, writing to correct the inadequacies

Additionally, the Jacksonian Democrats who held the governorship through the 1830s were against universal white male suffrage. In 1842 a referendum was held to expand the suffrage, which was denounced by the existing “Charterist” government. Outraged, the suffragists, led by Thomas Dorr, orchestrated the Dorr Rebellion. Though the uprising failed to seize the arsenal in Providence, the Rhode Island “Charterists” ratified a new constitution that extended suffrage to all white men. 28 Horace Mann, “Third Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education,” The Common School Journal, Volume 2 ed. Horace Mann (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1840): 121.

of Noah Webster’s and Jacob Abbott’s books on spelling. Claimed one of Bumstead’s reviewers, “Mr. Abbott’s theory may make good children, but will never make either men or women; they would continue to be children, till [a new book] remedied the defect of such a training.” The reviewer “rejoiced” that Bumstead’s new books were “destitute of pictures.”29 In September of that year, the Board asked its teachers to test My First

School Book and Spelling and Thinking, and Bumstead solicited their experiences with the textbooks. Generally, they reviewed Bumstead’s books favorably. One teacher, after lavishing praise on the book, took the time to simply “ask the committee to put the Ten

Commandments in the Spelling and Thinking book.”30 Others criticized Bumstead’s book for its new organization (which attempted to teach students whole words before letters) and demanded that it be “syllabized” to allow students to sound words out.31 Bumstead edited the text to separate words by syllable, and the book was “introduced into the

Boston Primary Schools for the use of its First and Second Classes, by the unanimous vote of the Primary School Committee, 1841.”32 Though the process was turbulent and open to suggestions from teachers, central committees were able to standardize textbooks.

Standardization also manifested itself in teacher-training initiatives. Rapid innovations in the proliferation of books, effecting of punishment, and arrangement of classroom spaces demanded swift propagation to all teachers. Henry Barnard

29 Samuel Pettes to Josiah Bumstead, 11 September 1841, Josiah Bumstead Papers, MSS 1963, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Bumstead asked Pettes to review manuscripts of his new books and compare them to the works of other published writers. 30 Ibid. 31 H.M. Warren to Josiah Bumstead, 1 October 1842, Josiah Bumstead Papers, MSS 1963, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 32 Josiah Bumstead, Spelling and Thinking Combined (Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1860), 2. This later edition includes the statement that Boston schools adopted the textbook. This is absent from the first run because Boston adopted the book after it was first printed. For evidence of syllabized words, see word tables starting on page 9 and ending page 103.

spearheaded the creation of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction (RIII), which had the express purpose of ensuring that “new advances in any direction by one teacher will become known to all others.”33 The institute held weeklong seminars in various locations throughout the state. This way, the RIII could enlighten teachers unable to travel long distances. Barnard took notes at one meeting and described a litany of issues ranging the education spectrum, from the “proper degree of examination,” to “discipline,” to the difficulties teachers faced with absences.34 These meetings came to be known as

“temporary Normal Schools” and were considered by Barnard to be direct precursors to the establishment of a more permanent institution such as teacher colleges.35

Noting that many Rhode Island teachers found it difficult to attend the meetings, the Institute resolved to publish epic, three-hundred-page journals that were sold for only fifty cents each describing the meetings’ events.36 In his scrapbook, Barnard kept only three editions of the journal; given his meticulous scrapbooking, it is likely that was the extent of their publication. The RIII evolved into a statewide system of institutes – possibly one in every town. Barnard traveled the state campaigning for them. He offered advice to the Smithfield and Cumberland chapters regarding parent-teacher relations that emphasized organization and efficiency:

The Parents should hold the reputation of the teacher sacred, and never say or do any thing to prevent the children from regarding him as always right in his school and deserving their love. They should procure the books used by the others and commended by the committee, and thus prevent both confusion and waste of time. They should lay aside in their school business all kind of party feeling, and be united for their teacher. They should visit the school often, and thus encourage the

33 Henry Barnard, “Mr. Barnard’s Report,” in Journal of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction I, ed. Henry Barnard (Providence: B. Cranston & Co., 1846): 13. 34 Henry Barnard, “Henry Barnard Scrapbook,” Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society. 35 Ibid. 36 Book prices ranged from thirty-five cents to six dollars.

instructor and animate their own children in their studies.37

From rural teachers and parents, Barnard demanded organization rivaling more urban districts. The Institutes became excellent centers of pedagogical discussion for teachers who were not often exposed to the theoretical levels of instruction. In more rural areas, these institutions also offered a public stage for teachers to confront parents on the importance of properly constructed schoolhouses.

Figure 1: Depiction of Barrington's schoolhouse and its desks In the third volume of the RIII journal, Barnard highlights one particularly excellent schoolhouse in Barrington, Rhode Island, calling it “the most attractive, convenient, and complete structure of the kind in any agricultural district of the State - and, it is believed, in New England.” The schoolhouse offered all the latest conveniences, including ample heating and cast iron desks (see below). By highlighting this particular school, Barnard intended other districts to follow Barrington’s lead and construct their own well- appointed schools. He envisioned a Rhode Island school that was better suited for learning and provided a welcoming atmosphere for students. Further, because parents’ taxes paid for the school, there was a sense of communal responsibility and allegiance to it. Schools became the center of many New England towns and occupied a more public

37 Barnard, “Henry Barnard Scrapbook,” RIHS.

consciousness than the private schools of the past. It was schools like these that led to greater sustained attendance in Rhode Island and other New England states.38

Normal schools represented the next step in centralized teacher training. They were founded in Massachusetts in lieu of a teacher’s institute but also later spread to

Rhode Island. These schools were designed to instruct prospective teachers on the finer points of teaching as well as to reinforce the basic content they would be expected to teach. The schools functioned like modern teaching colleges; students’ time was split between studying the theory of education and practicing in a “model school” nearby.

Funding for the first three Boston-area normal schools came from both Horace Mann himself and from the state legislature. Likewise, after witnessing statewide success with the Institutes in Rhode Island, philanthropist Thomas Hazard “pledged himself to procure by voluntary subscription among the friends of the cause, a sum sufficient to establish a

Normal School in this State.”39 By funneling teachers through these schools, reformers like Barnard and Mann tried to indoctrinate teachers with their rules, sentiments, and morality.

The first Massachusetts normal school arose amid controversy. Opposition forces stood against the normal school’s proposed cost and its redundancy with the already existing teachers’ institutes. Those temporary institutes lasted no more than a few months and could be taken without quitting work, so they attracted hundreds of teachers and prospective teachers. Many in the state legislature saw the creation of a normal school as

38 Journal of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction, Volume III, ed. Henry Barnard (Providence: B. Cranston & Co., 1849): 288. The images above are found on page 288, as well. Italics original. 39 Henry Barnard, “Record of the RIII Meeting, February 20, 1845,” Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society.

unnecessary, given the efficacy of the institutes. There were also a number of private schools in Massachusetts that incorporated teacher training into their curriculum.

Predictably, they too opposed the creation of normal schools.

Reformers thought differently – as did a few philanthropists, namely Edmund

Dwight. Mann convinced Dwight that the Prussian “norm schools” would improve education standards. Dwight pledged $10,000 if the state legislature agreed to equal it.40

The sympathetic Whig legislature acquiesced, and the normal school opened in 1839. The state charged no tuition, but many families still found it difficult to pledge their working- age daughter to a year without breadwinning. Accordingly, only a dozen students enrolled in the first term. Adding to normal schools’ woes in 1840 was a Democratically controlled state legislature that wished to slash spending and lower taxes. Arguing that the normal schools were Prussian, redundant, costly, and poorly attended, Democrats proposed to discontinue the schools in 1842. Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and former

Whig Governor Edward Everett decisively attacked the slim majority and defeated the effort formally in March of 1842.41

Lexington’s first class consisted entirely of girls aged fifteen to nineteen who generally came from the surrounding counties of Massachusetts. The normal school at

Lexington was among a litany of places where women could receive a high school level education; normal schools doubled as high schools, giving girls training in higher education. According to historian Mary Kelley, by the early nineteenth century,

“Approximately the same number of women and men were enrolled in institutions of

40 Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), 130. 41 Robert B. Downs, Horace Mann: Champion of Public Schools (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 54.

higher learning.”42 Women saw the potential offered to them by education to affect public opinion by shaping the nation’s youth. Many of the famous female reformers of the antebellum era started their careers as teachers.43 In 1840, girls who wished to teach attended a seminary or normal school, or were hired by their local township. Lexington’s first classes were all female, but within a few years men enrolled in normal school at

Lexington and two other institutions that opened in the state. However, women still represented the vast majority of attendees; by 1854 83.1% of Massachusetts’s normal school attendees were women.44

Figure 2: Woodcut drawing of Lexington Normal School in Framingham, 1852.

Cyrus Peirce was the first principal and teacher at Lexington Normal School.

Horace Mann chose Peirce because he had an extensive career in education and was a

42 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 41. 43 Keith E. Melder, “Woman’s High Calling: The Teaching Profession in America, 1830- 1860,” American Studies 13 (Fall 1972): 19-32. Melder highlights Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, and Carrie Cott among the prominent reformers who were first teachers. 44 Richard M. Bernard and Maris A. Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher in Ante- Bellum Massachusetts,” The Journal of Social History 10 (1977): 334. Figure 2 found in Frances Merritt Papers, MC 11, Framingham State University Special Collections.

minister. Mann had the unfortunate reputation of appearing less pious than most wealthy

New Englanders, so Peirce represented a conservative choice. Peirce grew up in Waltham,

Massachusetts, and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1810 and returning in

1815 to pursue divinity school. Peirce taught during the week and performed his duties as a minister on the weekends. After teaching on Nantucket Island for many years, Peirce answered Horace Mann’s call to train teachers at Lexington Normal School. He taught subjects ranging from algebra to geography in addition to pedagogy. Peirce considered the “normalites” the future generation of educators.45 He fully intended the teachers to lead their coworkers to a new standard of excellence; he reminded them that “the

[common] school is yours. Its success or failure depends [on] the efficiency of the

Normal School.”46

Though it had controversial and inauspicious beginnings, the normal school at

Lexington flourished, increasing its class sizes despite the creation of other normal schools in the state.47 Contemporary observers attributed the school’s success to its indomitable principal, Reverend Cyrus Peirce. Persevering through disappointing attendance records and legislative battles that threatened his job, Peirce was able to realize Mann’s vision of the normal school. Lexington began with just twelve scholars, but only three years later had thirty who enrolled for a full term and were able to practice teaching at a corequisite “model school.” The model school offered Peirce the opportunity to critique personally his students’ teaching style. He attended their model

45 “Normalites” was a term Peirce used to describe his students at Lexington Normal School. 46 Lydia Ann Stowe, “Diary, 1840,” Stowe Papers, MC 17, Framingham State University Special Collections. 47 B. A. Hinsdale, Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 154.

school lessons and also required that they keep diaries for him to review. Horace Mann and others regularly visited the school to remind the student-teachers of the magnifying glass hovering over the normal school. While normal school graduates represented only

6.3% of schoolteachers in Massachusetts by 1857, reformers believed “normalites” should impress what they learned in school upon their colleagues, thereby spreading the message Peirce (and Mann by proxy) preached in his classroom.48

These normal schools demonstrate the profound effect the educational reform movement had on Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Henry Barnard visited Lexington

Normal in its first year, giving addresses to the teachers-in-training. “This is the first institution that has been established,” Barnard lectured, “and it is hailed by this and other states, as the Morning Star of a higher and more glorious day. Great responsibility rests upon you who are first to go out from this school.”49 He aimed to establish normal schools in both Rhode Island and Connecticut to ensure the quality of educators. The institution also offered Mann, Barnard, and other leaders who followed the opportunity to centralize the process of becoming a teacher. Before the normal school, the only qualifications required of prospective teachers were represented in vague notions like

“good morals.” Just as they attempted to do with textbook distribution, reformers aimed to control children’s experience by “normalizing” teachers.

During this period, schools in New England underwent a renaissance that resulted in a centralized and better-structured system of education. Horace Mann and Henry

Barnard stood as trailblazing figures in their respective states. While their reforms were mostly gleaned from the efforts of early reforms in urban schools, Mann and Barnard

48 Bernard and Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher,” 334. 49 Stowe, “Diary, 1840,” Framingham State.

dedicated themselves to providing a “common school” education – a school common to all and accessible everywhere. Even rural towns like Barrington restructured their schoolhouses. This example shows the reach of the movement and the physical improvement in school life students experienced. While attendance figures did not increase drastically during this period, education improved by lengthening the school day, strengthening pedagogy, obtaining and standardizing textbooks, and remodeling the schoolhouse to maximize students’ learning.50

One of the primary purposes of education during this period was to create citizens who would uniformly obey the laws of the state. Masking this purpose under the guise of morality, reformers aimed to make schools more effective at shaping obedient children.

From 1800 to 1850, the common school underwent drastic changes, ostensibly to spread the fruits of education to the masses. The issue for reformers during this period was that students were learning, but not the correct material. New England schools and parents had always been effective at maintaining literacy, but they often failed to imbue the average student with a uniform moral framework. Common schools of the mid-1800s no longer focused on ancient languages or distant geography; they turned their attention to citizen building.

In its first year, the Providence School Committee adjusted its corporal punishment policies to reflect new disciplinary tactics that cultivated conformity. The

Committee issued a suggestion in October of 1800 regarding corporal punishment: “That it be recommended to the school Masters, that as far as practicable, they exclude corporal

50 Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, 34-38.

punishment from the schools; and in particular that they never inflict it on Females.”51

This rule reflects the evolving nineteenth-century view of corporal punishment. At this time, violent beatings were being outlawed in the military and as punishments for crimes against the state. Municipalities began to explore the effectiveness of other types of discipline. Drawing from an array of literature demonizing public torture, the Providence

School Committee wrote that school masters should “endeavor to impress the minds of their Pupils with a sense of the Being and Providence of God, their duty to their Parents and Masters, the beauty and excellence of truth, justice, and mutual love – tendencies of gentle creatures – the happy tendency of self government, and obedience to the dictate of reason.”52 Instead of publicly punishing students in front of their classmates with a paddle, schoolteachers shaped them into citizens by getting them to want to be obedient.

Punishment by violence taught them to avoid getting caught; punishment by the disapproval of their peers did more to instill the motive for good. Furthermore, teaching republicanism was the hallmark of a school that aimed to create an obedient, temperate citizen. Because a single misstep could warrant the disapproval of classmates, students learned to internalize a social norm of good behavior. Such was the aim of the Providence

School Committee when it recommended that corporal punishment be withheld unless absolutely necessary.

The rule regarding corporal punishment published by the Committee in 1800

51 Jackson, “Committee Minutes,” RIHS. 52 Ibid. This was recorded in 1822, as schools became the place where the schoolmasters judged punishments. For a discussion of the changing vision of corporal punishment in antebellum America, see Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment (1984). Glenn notes that corporal punishment as a disciplinary tactic fell out of favor, particularly in New England. In her study of corporal punishment in schools, Glenn saw reformers move away from violence because it was thought to have inhibited “proper socialization.”

stipulates that girls never be subjected to violent treatment. White women had a

“protected” status in American society (that they did not necessarily desire); inflicting harm would be a violation of that position. As Jacob Abbott mentioned in his reference work, a responsible instructor could not exceed the moral demands of his employers, the townspeople. Publicly beating girls in a classroom would arouse response from indignant parents.53 Schools were to groom girls to become republican mothers, not women beaten into submission by overbearing teachers.

Correcting boys with violence was conceivable but unpopular in Providence. As early as 1803, Nathaniel Gladding appealed to the Providence School Committee that a teacher had wrongly punished his son violently. Palmer Cleveland, the teacher in question, “whipped and abused Nathaniel Gladding Jun. in a very considerable degree” for unlisted misdeeds.54 In response, Gladding Sr. demanded a formal reproach from the

Providence School Committee in light of its prior suggestion that teachers refrain from corporal punishment. Gathering the testimony of “several gentlemen who have Children at said school,” the Committee issued a formal warning to Cleveland: “It is therefore

Voted and resolved that Said Preceptor receives the Approbation of this Council for [his] conduct.”55 The Committee wanted obedience from its students but was unwilling to use violent punishment. Furthermore, teachers who beat children out of anger could be viewed as intemperate. Seeing the principles of “self government” as vital to good citizenship, Providence schools pursued an active policy of citizen-shaping that hoped to

53 Jacob Abbott, The Teacher: Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), chapter 4. There are no standard page numbers in Abbott’s publication. This is a reprint of the original 1833 run. 54 Jackson, “Committee Minutes,” RIHS. 55 Ibid.

create obedient adults. Children who were raised in a system of punishment that valued normalization could be expected to act compliantly as adults. Instead of fearing other students’ ire, adults would submit to their neighbors and public officials.

Reformers did not try to improve education in purely intellectual pursuits like classic languages because they sought a brand of education that would produce a specific type of citizen. Horace Mann lectured,

The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table, has no quality of sacredness in it; but if there is a sacred service, a holy ministry upon earth, it is that of setting a just bound to the animal appetites and sensual propensities of our nature, and quickening into life, and fostering into strength, all benevolent and devout affections; for it is by the relative proportions between these parts of its nature, that the child becomes angel- like or fiend-like.56

By attempting to control every step of the education process, from teacher selection to textbook choices, the state aimed to yield its “ideal republican.” As a purely theoretical figure, this “ideal republican” would be Christian, obey the state’s laws, express his individual ingenuity, understand political intricacies, refrain from immoral acts, and have a deep-seated sense of honor fulfilled by social standing. After witnessing the “mob’s” raucous actions during events like Andrew Jackson’s inauguration, New England educators redoubled their efforts to suppress immorality. Adherence to obedience spread the fires of anti-southernism. The question became, just how should they shape the school so students would become good citizens?

56 Horace Mann, Annual Reports on Education (New York: Lee & Shepherd, 1872), 346. This is a reprint from the original printing, which occurred after each annual report was issued.

Figure 3: Foucault’s Panopticon Twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault highlights in his landmark book

Discipline and Punish that the way society understood the power of the state changed dramatically during the early nineteenth century. Trials became public, investigations open, and prisons mechanized. Foucault evokes the image of “The Panopticon” to describe the changes in prisons. A Panopticon is an architectural structure in which one central authority can view the rest of the inhabitants, who generally are restricted from seeing one another (see Figure 3).57 This allows the authority to constantly monitor prisoners, usually through one-way glass, without the prisoner knowing when (or if) he is being observed. If punishment for infractions occurs even inconsistently, prisoners will begin to adjust their behavior to appease the unseen observer. Eventually, it is unnecessary for the observer to be present because prisoners simply think someone is observing them. As Foucault observes, schools in the nineteenth century began to mimic

57 Photograph (Figure 3) by Doug Dubois and Jim Goldberg, in “What Were They Thinking?” The New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

prisons’ practices by creating Panopticon-like environments and mechanizing systems of classroom instruction.

An excellent example of how schools approached citizen building through rigid definitions of uniformity and morality was the popularity of the Lancastrian System. The system was, according to historian Carl Kaestle, “cheap, efficient, and easy to implement.”58 At face value, this appears to be the main reason many schools chose to adopt Lancaster’s methods; the system’s effect, though, were wide reaching. Also known as the “monitorial” system, Lancaster’s technique relied on the mechanization characteristic of a Panopticon. Instead of maintaining personal interaction with students, teachers became distant observers. Students now competed to become “monitors” who worked for the head teacher as the equivalent of guards. Monitors ensured that younger students understood the rules of the school and mimicked the hierarchy of proper society.

Further, younger students learned to fear the observation of their peers and become mere

“numbers” to their head teachers. For schools that had more than five hundred children,

“If a new era was to emerge from such a pedagogy [as the Lancaster system], it would certainly be a mechanical era.”59 This method of instruction proliferated throughout New

England; by 1819, most school districts adopted at least some of the reforms Lancaster offered. While not all school districts embraced the Lancaster method, it serves as an archetype for larger reforms that embraced uniformity and obedience as the central themes of education.

58 Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 41. 59 Ibid., 43.

Figure 4: Plan for Cranston's new school, 1848. The spatial organization of Lancaster schools also reflects Foucault’s observations.

Students inhabited a well-organized, mechanized space. While the Lancaster school model did not survive in its entirety, elements of it were adopted in most common schools. For example, in Cranston, Rhode Island, the town constructed a common school

(pictured above) that arranged students in straight rows with desks and chairs nailed to the ground.60 Such an arrangement helped to ensure the teacher could be the constant focus of the class. Further, at the front of the room, the teacher instructed from atop a platform, allowing him/her the ability to properly observe the whole class. Because this was a single room schoolhouse, we can also assume that the students were arranged in rows based on age. While not an ideal Panopticon, the Lancaster classroom allowed teachers and monitors the ability to easily oversee all students. Compare the common school to the eighteenth-century private school pictured below (Figure 5).61 The setting is far more informal in the earlier school. The teacher is less able to monitor all the students,

60 “Plan of School-House in District No. 10, Cranston,” Journal of the RIII, Volume 3, 292. 61 “A New England Dame School in Old Colonial Times,” Engraving, 1713 (Bettman Archive).

one of whom appears to be hiding behind the wing-backed chair. On the left side of the image, a young boy is wearing the “dunce cap” to signify his insubordination, although the depiction shows his continued nonchalance. These sorts of private schools were still common in the South. While the smaller classes of the old private “dame” schools allowed more individual attention, mass education valued obedience and uniformity over individuality.

Figure 5: Eighteenth-century “dame school” Horace Mann applied these new concepts of obedience by normalization to his plan for reformed classroom discipline. Writing in 1841, Mann recognized the multiplicity of backgrounds from which Massachusetts’s students came. “From different households,” he wrote, “where the widest diversity of parental and domestic influences prevail, the children enter the schoolroom, where there must be comparative uniformity.”62 Mann noted that public education must also extend beyond any differences in status; his public schools welcomed children of all backgrounds. Mann intended to use the common school to unify the country, and he succeeded where common schools were embraced: everywhere but the slaveholding South. Establishing such “uniformity”

62 Mann, Annual Reports, 337.

required certain classroom elements to remain constant throughout. Mann argued firstly that corporal punishment should be used sparingly. He broke his argument against “the rod” into several parts, claiming, first, “Punishment excites fear; it is, indeed, the primary object of punishment to excite fear; and fear is a most debasing, dementalizing [sic] passion.”63 Mann recognized that students would not reform their actions but rather fear for their personal safety. Secondly, Mann observed, “Children should be taught that corporal suffering, and imprisonment, and death itself, are nothing, compared with loyalty to truth and the Godlike excellence of well-doing, so that when they become men they will be able to march, with unfaltering step, to the post of duty.”64 Duty to one’s community and oneself, argued Mann, would be the driving force behind discipline, not fear of corporal punishment: “A child may surrender to fear, without surrendering to principle. But it is the surrender to principle only which has any permanent value.”65 The

“principles” to which students “surrendered” challenged the backwardness and brutality of the Southern slave system. Michel Foucault’s observation that this era focused less on corporal punishment and more on reformation is evident in Mann’s reasoning of the proper form of classroom punishment.

Henry Barnard shared similar apprehensions regarding corporal punishment and praised regulation that demanded greater obedience. In his Report of the Committee in

1845, Barnard noted the proliferation of “Rules and Regulations” throughout the state of

Rhode Island making attendance mandatory. He writes, “The ‘Regulations’ which they have adopted after mature deliberation, and printed and circulated for the improvement of

63 Ibid., 342. 64 Ibid., 343. 65 Ibid., 361.

the public schools, have manifestly resulted in securing a far more punctual and constant attendance of the pupils. It is believed that the absences have been diminished full three- fourths, since the introduction of the Regulations.”66 Students’ lives became more regimented by the regular attendance of school, preparing them well for wage labor, but alienating them from the agrarian lifestyle embraced in the South. Problems arose from attendance because teachers now oversaw consistently larger classes. This increased the need for systematic discipline. Barnard wrote,

A spirit of insubordination has manifested itself among the older scholars [teenagers], which has greatly interrupted its order and progress. A system of government kind and affectionate in its spirit, and yet firm and decided in its execution, is greatly needed in this school to win the affections of the pupil, and bring them back to order and mutual confidence.67

Keeping with the works of Horace Mann, Barnard never advocates corporal punishment as a means of effective government.

Barnard expands on Mann in his discussion of the school space. While Mann argued that discipline and order derive chiefly from the efforts of good teachers, Barnard discusses how the shape of classrooms affected students’ ability to become good citizens.

In Barnard’s system, the teacher has a role as someone who has “an enthusiasm amounting almost to fanaticism,” but he leaves ample room for other physical influences.

A good schoolhouse, he explains, should be designed “for children whose manners and morals, whose habits of order, cleanliness, and punctuality, whose temperance, love of study, and of the school are in no inconsiderable degree affected by [its] attractive or

66 Barnard, “Henry Barnard Scrapbook,” RIHS. 67 Ibid.

repulsive location and appearance.”68 This effort by Barnard to regulate the classroom and schoolhouse spaces meant that he intended his three hundred and twelve Rhode

Island schoolhouses to be arranged in like fashion. Statewide initiatives required uniformity in book selection, teacher qualifications, and now schoolhouses as reformers saw the importance of well-devised classroom architecture. New England’s school system was becoming standardized, uniformly shaping a new type of citizen.

Expositions on obedience and uniformity in common schools also came from prominent pedagogy theorists. Jacob Abbott writes in The Teacher,

If every case of disobedience, or idleness, or disorder, is brought out publicly before the school, so that all witness the teacher's displeasure and feel the effects of it the school becomes, in a short time, hardened to such scenes… The scholars are prepared to do wrong with less reluctance, since the consequence is only a repetition of what they are obliged to see every day.69

Scenes of brutality fail to extirpate the desire to do wrong, and they create a barrier between teacher and student, an unnecessary rigidity begotten by fear. Abbott also addresses the nature of observation as a weapon of normalization and ridicule. He opines that all students, if frequently witnessing violence, will become numb to its effect.

Furthermore, if the students believe the teacher is right to punish the perpetrator, he will experience serious embarrassment possibly beyond the scope of the initial beating. If a teacher is seen to punish in a fit of passion, the message becomes even more distorted as students learn that wrathful violence is justifiable. For these reasons, Abbott delimits the use of corporal punishment to a private location and in the most somber fashion. A student in one of Abbott’s classes would likely be shocked to read accounts of the public

68 Henry Barnard, Journal of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction, Volume 1 ed. Henry Barnard (Providence: B. Cranston & Co., 1849): 30. 69 Jacob Abbott, The Teacher, chapter 4.

beatings slaves endured in the South; morality aside, he would view the act as barbaric after being normalized in common school.

The members of Massachusetts’s School Committee also observed the changing nature of confrontation between teachers and students in schools. Distributing ten thousand copies of their findings to parents and teachers, the Committee repeated the opinions of Mann, Barnard, and Abbott: corporal punishment should be used sparingly and in private. The Committee, though, also remarked, “In this country, when the boy escapes from school, he never hears the word Master again. He is free; free for good or for evil… And what must be the conditions of him who comes into such a life as this, with no habit and no idea of self-government, beyond that which he could derive from corporal punishment?”70 School served a dual purpose: to teach students academics and to produce good citizens. The Committee astutely observed in its experience with different classrooms that corporal punishment served to stop only an immediate violation of the law.

Public opinion in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island mirrored that of its reformers and statesmen. A letter to the Boston Courier in 1843 by a writer identified as

“Parents” commends the actions of an assembly in Albany that denounced corporal punishment in schools. “Parents” noted that although Boston’s schools were emulated all over the world, its boys and girls were still flogged. The letter cites a few anecdotes of extreme violence including an occasion when “a teacher seized two boys by the hair of their heads and knocked their heads together.”71 The “Parents” also found the beating of girls particularly egregious: “It is bad enough to flog boys, but it is shocking to flog girls,

70 Editorial, The Boston Daily Atlas, September 19, 1845. Emphasis original. 71 Letter to the Editor, Boston Courier, May 25, 1843.

even when they by vice or mismanagement become as it were unsexed.” When teachers performed corporal punishment on students, teachers were disavowing “any concern for their improvement.”72 For parents and educators alike, eliminating corporal punishment spared students physical pain and ensured that more productive forms of uniformity and obedience were implemented.

In the school’s development from small, private schools to mechanized student- factories, it altered the citizen who emerged. Whereas private schools and apprentices relied on the fear of corporal punishment, common schools created systems of normalization and observation that made children voluntarily obedient. This form of obedience also bred conformity, which may have contributed to New England’s developing regional identity. The aversion to corporal punishment in classrooms created another sectional rift between the North and South. Observing the Southern culture of corporal punishment and brutality, New Englanders must have scoffed, or at least felt a sense of cultural superiority. Northern society was changing, and the common school reflected, perpetuated, and spread those changes to new generations.

In the loosely defined “antebellum era,” New England states underwent an economic realignment that would affect the nature of education in common schools.

Simply put, the Northeast industrialized, urbanized, and became more populated. From

1810 to 1850, the percentage of people in urban areas boomed, and a distinct working class developed to fill burgeoning factories. Before this revolution, many New

Englanders practiced subsistence farming, aiming to simply feed themselves and their family. Population pressures, in combination with the abolition of primogeniture, forced

72 Ibid. Italics original.

sons and daughters of farmers to seek economic opportunity outside of the family. As

Alexis de Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America, “When the equal partition of property is established by law, the intimate connection is destroyed between family feeling and the preservation of the paternal estate.”73 This process compelled farmers to participate in the greater regional economy. New England factories became magnets for young workers increasingly detached from pre-capital agricultural systems. Reformers and parents alike came to view schools as an institution that could shepherd children through the transition from agrarian to factory life.

Frank Tracy Carlton provides an excellent starting point for our examination of the economics of common school reform. Writing in 1906, Carlton begins the shift in educational history from the efforts of Horace Mann (and other prominent reformers) and focuses primarily on the social and economic changes that precipitated school reform.

Carlton showed ingenuity in realizing the correlation between the rise of factories and the reformation of common schools; the school received “new problems” that “formerly devolved upon the home and the workshop.”74 While Carlton’s date of publication betrays archaic writing and antiquated analysis, his work represents the first major attempt to connect the dynamic social and economic landscape of the antebellum period with the educational reform movement.

Carlton establishes that tax-supported schools were the predominant governmental policy towards education during this period. Before this period, he notes, schools were entirely supported by those whose children attended classes, but by 1850,

73 Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard D. Heffner (New York: New American Library, 2001) 51. 74 Carlton, Economic Influences upon Progress, 1-2.

nearly all counties boasted a tax-supported system. This system shows the rising necessity of equitable schooling in even rural counties. This need was arising for a number of reasons. New England citizens expressed concern that uneducated voters posed a threat to democracy; many who did not personally benefit from schools still supported their public financing. Alternatively, artisans saw schools as the nexus of modernization, choosing to send their children to a common school rather than raise them in an apprenticeship. A liberal education provided children with the tools to seek a variety of occupations in a dynamic economy rather than pigeonhole them into one artisanal career.75

Carlton’s account gives us a general look at why many New Englanders chose to create a publicly funded school system, but as a clearly dated piece, it lacks nuance and treats educational reform as a political inevitability. Historians Carl Kaestle and Maris

Vinovskis portray a more complex political debate around common school reform.

Opposition to the project of reform existed, but only in a patchwork of partisan skepticism in the Democratic Party. The issue never became a core party platform, so many representatives voted according to constituent demands or personal philosophy.76

Economics and industrialization featured heavily in the debates as representatives agreed on the value of education but not on how to pay for it, who should control it, or its content. Kaestle and Vinovskis note that no single personal attribute could predict the voting pattern of any politician on educational issues.77 Support for entities like the board of education came from constituents of all socioeconomic backgrounds, proving the

75 Carlton, 49. 76 Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, 231. 77 Ibid., 233.

depth of the reform movement’s reach.

A study of educational reform in the antebellum period by Donald Parkerson and

Jo Ann Parkerson illustrates the rise of the common school in rural New England. The study illuminates how rural schools came to emulate the reforms that had defined urban

New England schools since the late eighteenth century. Parkerson and Parkerson argue that a new class of commercial farmers decided which teachers, books, and curricula went into rural classrooms; they generally mimicked the efforts of reformers in urban districts. Given the severe demographic pressures in New England, this new brand of farmer realized the limits of republican motherhood as an educational tool. Many began having fewer children as they saw the risk of splitting their landholdings threaten the younger generation. The market revolution affected rural farmers and artisans as the market began to assign their labor a market value.78 An industrial economy forced many commercial farmers to seek schooling that would provide both a safety net and upward mobility for their children. As more rural areas embraced common schools, the ideologies of reformers leaked out into the New England countryside.

The progression of educational reform in antebellum New England generally followed the rate of industrialization in the region. Cities started the process in the late eighteenth century; as we saw earlier, education in Providence was centralized by 1800.

Following the success of urban areas, rural areas fell under the yoke of the state boards of education by the 1840s. Along this trend, opposition to taxes sparked discussion in many small towns where parents collectively paid teachers only when they required educational services. In 1844, an exchange in the Rhode Island Congress simmered: “This is one of

78 Donald and Jo Ann Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 21.

the richest States in the Union,” argued Mr. Davis of the Rhode Island Institute of

Instruction, “It is the truest economy to give every child a good education. Universal suffrage requires universal education, or it is dangerous. You have extended your suffrage – you must extend your school system.”79 In contrast, a representative from

North Kingston (Rhode Island) argued: “My constituents, sir, or at least some of them, don’t believe it constitutional to tax them to educate other people’s children.”80 His complaints were overridden by a bloc from Providence that argued, “So far as regards the general provisions of the bill before us, nothing further need be said, for we all acknowledge its excellencies [sic].”81 Despite the pleas from Democrats, tax-supported school systems became the norm in New England.

Horace Mann argued for education as a path to material success. While he acknowledged that the wealth argument was less noble than a case praising education for its inherent value, he claimed its necessity to placate the (largely) Democratic coalition that opposed further taxation for educational funding: “If it can be proved that the aggregate wealth of a town will be increased just in proportion to the increase of its appropriations for schools, the opponents of such a measure will be silenced.”82 Aside just from the well being of entire communities, Mann also averred, “No hungry or homeless people ever were, or will be, an intelligent or moral one.”83 Here Mann provides the foundation for the argument that education acts as a safety net, which as we

79 “Mr. Davis’s Statement in 1844 RIII Meeting,” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 80 “Debate on the School Bill,” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 81 Ibid. 82 Mann, Annual Reports, 93. 83 Ibid.

saw above, caused commercial farmers to pine for common schools in rural areas of New

England. It was vital that school reform followed the current of economic and industrial transformation, carrying with it the ideals discussed earlier to more students for a prolonged period of time. While Mann did not believe economic gain to be the core reason to improve education, those who did represented a powerful voting bloc that he needed to placate in order to pursue education’s higher goals.

Participation in industrialization also meant general adherence to “free labor ideology.” This ideology’s basic tenet was that if a man worked hard in his job, he would rise up through the ranks and eventually achieve material and social wealth. As the economic landscape shifted, New England moved away from landownership and the paternalism of workshops and toward free labor ideology. Horace Mann’s words on the value of education ring in harmony with the principles of free labor – the school became an institution in which a student could seek individual perfectibility. At the dedication of his new schoolhouse in North Providence in 1846, President Wayland asked of those gathered, “Are you prepared to enter upon so noble a career of improvement?”84

Reverend Waterson, at the West Newton Normal School echoed Wayland’s sentiments; he told the future-teachers gathered: “As you scatter the seed of truth, have faith that it will eventually take root. I speak of the peculiar importance of your labors at this time; many are looking with painful apprehension upon the stability our institutions.”85 Free labor idealists saw common schools as the front lines of their campaign of “improvement.”

Indeed, Cyrus Peirce, master at Lexington Normal School, impressed the virtues of

84 “Address of President Wayland,” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 85 Reverend Waterston, “Address at the Third Triennial Convention of the West Newton School – 1848,” MSS 1848, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

“profit and improvement” upon his students from the start of their training program.86

Because of changing views on free labor, the school became the conduit through which any student, regardless of his or her social class, could succeed (provided the child was white).

Parents in Rhode Island often had to fight for socioeconomic equality in the public school system, both for their own children and for their allegiance to free labor. In an undated (probably mid-1840s) pamphlet sent to Henry Barnard imploring him to mandate new policy to protect the poor’s right to attend school, an anonymous author wrote, “While no statute existed forbidding pauper youth from attending common schools, there was a ‘cold shoulder’ policy enacted by many public institutions.” The note continued, “Poor parents do not send their offspring to such schools, to all the privileges of which they are entitled equally with the richest man in the city. They feel their children are not quite ‘good enough,’ in the external things at least, to be put into schools where high standards of dress and manners are in fashion.”87 The pamphlet warns against common schools that are too “aristocratic” in nature; some required a dress code to exclude poor children. These schools exhibited behavior opposite of the spirit hailed by free labor idealists, for those who did not participate in school “are left to grow up in ignorance, vice, and crime.”88 There was also tension expressed by the artisan class at the increased time commitment common schools demanded of their children. Because

“parents who are engaged in humble and laborious pursuits, cannot spare their children…

86 ,Papers, “Diary, 1840.” Framingham State. 87 “Aristocratic ‘Common Schools,’” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 88 “Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools, January 1850,” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

to acquire learning which can be of no avail to them in the trade or vocation which they will inherit from their fathers,” some New Englanders were hesitant to participate fully in the changing economy.89 However, as a broad trend, schools did not exclude the poor white population from attendance. Likewise, while some artisans felt school time could be better spent training their children for a trade, most saw the financial, moral, and civic advantages to sending their children to common school.

Law and custom excluded African Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities from common schools in New England. As slavery was abolished in New

England, de facto segregation plagued schools. By the 1830s, de jure segregation forced minorities out of white schools, despite their numerous pleas to be integrated.90 Horace

Mann, despite his desire to provide education for all, offered no aid to the movements to desegregate common schools. He, like many other reformers, shied away from black integration. Mann feared that embroiling common schools in such a controversial movement would weaken public support for his reforms. Always the politician, Mann eschewed his personal belief that schools should be integrated to preserve his political efficacy. Whites never made any effort to abolish black schools, but black Bostonians complained that their schools were inferior. Rhode Island allocated public funds for the maintenance of black schools, but the distribution was unequal:

The money paid out by virtue of this [tax], shall be divided among the several town in proportion to the respective white population of each town under the age of fifteen years: the colored population of such town under the age of ten years, and five fourteenths of the colored population

89 “Aristocratic ‘Common Schools,’” MSS 285, RIHS. 90 Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 130.

between the ages of ten and twenty-four years.91

After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, African Americans feared they needed education to prove their status as a free person. Education was a means to assert their American identity and freedom: many African Americans pushed harder for integrated schools. However, without full integration into common schools or the support of major reformers, minorities in New England states existed on public education’s periphery.

A confluence of various strains and ideologies in New England drew many different groups in support of common school reforms. Fear of a changing economic landscape obliged many parents to send their children to school and support schools’ modernization. Beyond acting as a safety net in the changing world, parents thought schools also propelled children upwards socially and economically, inculcating a work ethic for free labor. Though some resisted and others felt left behind, common school reform prepared Northerners to participate in the newly industrialized and capital-intense economy.

91 “Acts Relating to Public Schools,” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

Chapter II: Evolving Ideologies and Rising Anti-Southernism

After the War of 1812, New England urbanized rapidly, setting off economic and demographic reverberations across the region. Reformers saw cities as both a symbol of progress and a hotbed of inequity. In the volatile economic landscape of the early 1800s, wealth could vanish in an instant. Increasingly, upper-class citizens defined themselves by their moral and cultural superiority instead of raw wealth or land holdings. Wealthy

New Englanders participated in the Second Great Awakening, tying their sense of morality to Protestant values. Upper-class women and men also worked to improve the working class’s sense of morality, a reaction to millennial evangelism.

The Second Great Awakening was a nationwide revival of Protestant denominations, particularly Baptist and Methodists, that broadly increased church membership, peaking in the 1820s and 1830s. Its central ideological thrust was

“millennialism.” Millennial Christians believed that perfecting society would herald the return of Jesus Christ. Many forms of Christianity stress the importance of self-perfection or proselytization; millennialists felt the urge to go beyond themselves and outside simple conversions. They attacked urban areas rife (in their minds) with sin and tried to effect lasting reformations. Their tactics generally revolved around the concept of moral suasion, in which prominent figures and upper-class citizens tried to convince other classes to reform by persuasion and the strength of their own example.

Religion intertwined with education since Europeans colonized Massachusetts as

Calvinists emphasized that individual Bible study created pious adherents. Literacy then held special importance in their society which observed standards of asceticism that demanded obedience. Puritan schools aimed to mold children into God-fearing moral

beings. That educational legacy persisted in Massachusetts. In the nineteenth century, the

Second Great Awakening compelled Massachusetts’s Calvinist hierarchy to reform their practices to maintain church membership. As other major Protestant religions began to focus on a more millennial Christianity wherein anyone could receive salvation through personal conversion, Calvinists eased away from their adherence to predestination. The

Second Great Awakening filtered into schools in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which incorporated Protestant dogma into their curriculum.

Wealthy Americans had little use for education reform – private institutions and tutors offered their children access to sufficient instruction – but with the influx of immigrants and the rising population density, social control eluded upper-class

Protestants in the 1830s. Some saw the school as a means to reestablish cultural hegemony. Throughout the period, children commented on the religiosity of school.

Hannah Bliss, a common school student from Boston, wrote in her 1815 diary, “Religion!

Thou, the soul of happiness,” after a day of religious instruction from her teacher, Mr.

Storm.92 Ms. Bliss’s words are representative of the Christian theology permeating through schools. The 1828 Providence school “Rules and Regulations” mandated that every child own a copy of the New Testament, ensuring that Christian ideals defined students’ education.93 Reverend Waterston proclaimed in his “Address at the Third

Triennial Convention” of the West Newton School in 1848, “We should enlighten the reason, and spiritualize the affections, and Christianize the conscience.”94

92 Hannah Bliss, “Hannah Alvard Bliss Clarke Diary – 1814-1818,” Warren-Clark Papers, MSS 24, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 93 School Committee of the City of Providence, “The Providence Rules and Regulations, 1828” (Providence: H.H. Brown, 1828). 94 Waterston, “Address at West Newton School – 1848,” MSS 1848, MHS.

Religious tones surfaced in the new normal schools as evangelical movements swept through New England, reinforcing the Christian morality already present in most common schools. Stepping into his classroom in January of 1840, Cyrus Peirce introduced himself to his all-female class of prospective teachers. As outlined above,

Peirce was a Unitarian minister trained at the Harvard Divinity School. Many of the students were teenage girls from middle-class families who hoped to complete their education and enter the teaching profession. Peirce had the weight of heavy expectations on his shoulders. As any reverend would, Peirce took solace in his Bible, which he brought to class every day. Instruction commenced daily with a textual study of a Bible passage, read aloud to the class. Louisa Harris, a student of Cyrus Peirce, recorded that “a portion of the 9th Chap. of John was read this morning by [another student] Miss

Rogers.”95 More specifically, in this verse Jesus restores a blind man’s sight. Peirce chose an apt passage to inspire fledgling teachers who hoped to “give sight” to their students.

The “normalites” were expected to utilize the Bible in their classrooms and employ

Christian teachings to shape students’ morals. Cyrus Peirce’s appointment reassured proponents of religious moral suasion that the country’s first teachers’ college would continue to uphold Protestant values.

In addition to using the Bible daily, Cyrus Peirce utilized The Teacher: or Moral

Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young, written by Jacob

Abbott in 1834. The primer instructs teachers how and when to exert proper influence over the minds of their students. Though criticized earlier for his children’s primer,

95 Louisa Harris, “Diary 1839-1843,” Harris Papers, MC 5, Framingham State University Special Collections. This record is interesting because Harris did not record her time at Lexington very thoroughly. She seemed to enjoy the daily Bible readings that Peirce provided in particular.

Abbott’s The Teacher still was the preeminent instruction manual for prospective teachers. In chapter five, Abbott discusses how teachers may properly express their religion: “God has constituted the relation between the parent and the child, and according to any view which a rational man can take of this relation, the parent is alone responsible for the guidance he gives to that mind, so entirely in his power.”96 Abbott argues teachers have no right to influence children’s religion because that duty is reserved expressly for the parent. Teachers are employed for the specific purpose of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, “and [a teacher] has no right to wander from that purpose” to preach messages of God.97 Students should not hear conflicting messages at school and at home, especially in cases where God gives parents primacy.

This likely reflects Abbott’s close reading of John Locke’s Second Treatise, in which

Locke establishes natural parental power over children.98 However, Abbott lists a number of Christian tenets “in regard to which the whole community is agreed” that educators could safely teach without remonstrance.99 Abbott sees “the community” in agreement on the following points:

(1) There is a God; (2) We are responsible to God for all our conduct; (3) There is immortality of the soul; (4) We have a revelation from Heaven; (5) Personal attachment to the Supreme Being is the duty of every human soul; and (6) The life of piety is to be commenced by penitence for past sins, and forgiveness, in some way or other, through a Savior.100

96 Abbott, The Teacher, chapter 5 paragraph 11. 97 Ibid., chapter 5, paragraph 12. 98 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2009), 52-77. 99 Abbott, The Teacher, chapter 5, paragraph 13. 100 Ibid., chapter 5, paragraph 22.

So while Abbott argues against proselytization, he encourages Christian ethics; Protestant values should be taught unless a parent specifically forbids them. If a population forbids the teacher from expounding on these Christian tenets, Abbott suggests the teacher should “go and seek employment where a door of usefulness, here closed against him, will be opened.”101

Whether or not the community actually agreed on these points, the teachers of

Lexington Normal School surely committed them to memory under Cyrus Peirce’s guidance. Abbott’s The Teacher also offers pedagogic advice to teachers looking to inculcate piety in their students. “In the morning,” writes Abbott,

Open the school with a very short prayer. “Guide the teacher in all that he may do. Give him wisdom, and patience, and faithfulness. May he treat all his pupils with kindness; and if any of them should do any thing that is wrong, wilt thou help him, gently but firmly, to endeavor to bring him back to duty. May he sympathize with the difficulties and trials of all, and promote the present happiness as well as the intellectual progress of all who are committed to his care.”102

The primary goal of Jacob Abbott’s ideal teacher was to enjoin good morals to his student (Abbott always used the masculine pronoun). Religious faith acted as the foundation for those morals and its resurgence in the early nineteenth century filtered to schools in both teachers’ sentiments and the books from which they learned their profession. Abbott is careful to note that religious exercises should not become pervasive; teachers were not hired to be preachers. Abbott does, however, extoll the virtue of closing a school session with a lesson from the Scripture.103 This exercise was calculated to remind children of God’s, and of religious morality’s, role in their studies.

101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., chapter 5, paragraph 28. Here he is not quoting another source, but rather dictating what the teacher should say exactly in his or her prayer. 103 Ibid., chapter 5, paragraph 32.

Deepening religiosity in New England schools taught children to value piety as a prerequisite for morality. Teachers often held strong Christian values and supported mandatory Bible readings in school. Students likely attended church weekly and read the

Bible at home with their parents. Further, many of them were exposed to the events of the

Second Great Awakening, in which millennialism became a dominant paradigm. This culture of millennial Protestantism, while not accepted by all New Englanders, was strengthened by a better-organized and attended school system. Teachers presented students with two main reasons to be moral citizens: to gain status in the eyes of their community and to follow the word of God.

New England common schools expressed a fairly uniform conception of morality.

First, the reorganization effort, driven in the early republic by increasing suffrage, expanded access to schools for children in New England and centralized curricular decisions. Secondly, following trends present both in earlier schools and in larger society, common schools proselytized Protestantism. Christian ethics defined the school experience for New England children; teachers handed down God’s words to students as moral imperatives. Early in the 1800s, cities like Providence integrated those ethics into their school systems. Deciding definitively that “good morals” should be taught in schools, reformers aimed to break the idea down into a series of smaller concepts. One oft-repeated axiom in the common school movement was the significance of

“temperance.” In both the reformers’ own publications and in the publications they endorsed, elements of the temperance movement trickled into the common school.

The semantic and thematic similarities between education reform and the temperance movement affiliated them. Education reformers of the 1840s came a little

later than the temperance supporters of the 1830s, but showed an awareness of temperance’s successes. While the temperance movement did not cause educational reform, schools employed the temperance movement’s tactics and semantics to reach students and teachers. This is important because educational reformers fashioned themselves after the other major reform movements of the antebellum era, most of which were at odds with Southern culture. While the South appeared to move backwards towards a system of continued violence and oppression, through its reform movements, the North constructed a society fit for Jesus Christ. The reformers of both temperance and education were using the same language, which filtered down to teachers and students. I posit that the semantics of this movement helped to alienate New England children from their counterparts in the South and worsen the growing sectional divide that defined the antebellum era. In adopting the language of the temperance movement (and to some extent its ideology), the common school reform effort began its march towards even more radical ideas like antislavery and free labor ideology that placed it at odds with the slaveholding South.

Temperance supporters found city life problematic, as cities became centers of vice that challenged the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Confronting dense sin, religious reformers targeted urban areas vigorously. Historian Paul Johnson reports, “[T]he

[temperance] movement enjoyed widespread success among those merchants and masters who considered themselves respectable.”104 Finding drunkenness egregious, reformers advocated that business owners hire only temperate employees and discourage drinking at work. Many business owners realized that temperate men were generally more

104 Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 81.

industrious and kept more regular work hours. This marriage between economic and moral imperatives lent vitality to the temperance movement. Horace Mann and Henry

Barnard would later mimic this alliance in education reform. Temperance reformers pushed further as they attempted to implement a ban on the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

Cities grappled with the legality and prudence of such measures and the temperance movement itself split.105 Ultimately, the measure failed because it hurt small businesses and insulted those who did wish to drink on Sunday. Moral suasion was less risky and more successful than mandates. The temperance movement demonstrates that at least some wealthy reformer-minded individuals saw their social position as a pulpit and attempted to harness it to effect social change.

In 1800 the city of Providence started to record “rules and regulations” for its new publicly funded school system. Seeing temperance as one of the many facets of decent citizens, the Providence School Committee published rules that focused on sobriety. “The good morals of the Youth being a matter of the highest Consequence,” recorded Nathan

Jackson, a Providence School Committee clerk, “both to their own comfort and to the progress in useful knowledge, they are strictly enjoined to avoid idleness and profanity, falsehood [sic] and deceitfulness, and every other wicked and disgraceful practice; and to conduct themselves in a sober, orderly and decent manner, both in and out of school.”106

Here, “temperance” takes on a different meaning. The problem was not that children were literally imbibing alcohol but rather exhibiting the behaviors of drunken adults. In several cases presented before the Committee, students behaved themselves in a “very unbecoming manner” by performing various impolite acts ranging from insulting a

105 Ibid., 84. 106 Jackson, “Committee Minutes,” RIHS.

teacher to skipping school or forgetting class materials.107

Other Rhode Island towns followed Providence’s lead. Providence published its first public school “Rules and Regulations” in 1800 and continued to renew that broadside annually. The 1828 “Rules and Regulations” displays nearly identical language to the one issued in 1800. Eighteen years later in nearby North Kingston, Rhode Island, the town council issued its own “rules and regulations” which offered language again nearly indistinguishable from the original 1800 document. In a new section it urges teachers to “[i]mpress principles of piety, justice and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, chastity, moderation, temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society.”108 By 1846 North Kingston’s understanding of morality had become more complex, including both sobriety and temperance.

From 1839 to 1848 Horace Mann issued publicly an annual report on education detailing his accomplishments during the year and his goals for the future. In the Annual

Report of 1846, Mann wrote a brief history of public education in Massachusetts with the goal of enervating opposition to its aims. He argued that education helps form “public sentiment,” which could be harnessed to produce societal gains: “Public sentiment exceeds and excels the law. Annually, vast sums are given for eleemosynary and charitable purposes – to promote the cause of temperance, to send the gospel to the heathens, and to diffuse the doctrines of peace, which are the doctrines of the Prince of

107 Ibid. 108 School Committee of the Town of North Kingston, “The North Kingston Rules and Regulations, 1846.” Henry Barnard Papers, MSS 285, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

Peace.”109 Mann reminded his supporters of their ability to contribute not only their money but also their voice to public education. Moral suasionists hoped to spread temperance among adults; Mann hoped that they could also spread the cause of education for all children. To Mann, the critical point was using language with which reformers in other movements would sympathize.

The Annual Report of 1847 offers a defense of public education’s utility and uses language mirrored in the temperance movement. Mann writes, “Even were ignorance to be classed among the greatest luxuries of life, it would be found too costly an indulgence to be borne.” The “slavish submission to some tyrannous appetite – such as intemperance” could be eradicated through education.110 The virtue of proper education could defeat the vice of ignorance that led to intemperate tendencies. Education was necessary to shape moral citizens.

As Rhode Island’s commissioner of public schools, Henry Barnard edited three journals published by the RIII. The Institute was a state umbrella organization with subsidiary institutes in many major Rhode Island towns. Three-hundred-page tomes, these journals apprised Rhode Island teachers of the most current news in education and also published original scholarship and studies. It reflects the coalition among reform movements by stipulating that all teachers “Shall be of good moral character, temperate, and otherwise well qualified.”111 At every level education demanded temperance – no doubt sobriety became a fundamental component of morality for many schoolchildren.

109 Mann, Annual Reports, 552. 110 Ibid., 562. 111 Barnard, Journal of the RIII, Volume 3. The quotation is a note from Barnard in the margin of the Journal he attached into his scrapbook. The scrapbook can be found at the Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 285.

A common thread weaves through all antebellum reform movements: striving towards a more moral society. Reformers looked to the vices of pauperism, the sloth of slavery, or the injustice of penitentiaries and desired change. Whether or not they grounded their hatred of immorality in religious faith, reformers understood that many would oppose their crusade. The primary method of persuading their opponents was by attempting to adjust social norms. Just as Lyman Beecher was a teetotaler for the temperance movement and William Lloyd Garrison threw his weight behind the immediate abolition of slavery, proponents of education reform hoped to lead their movement by example. The intertwining methodologies of the reform movements also fostered overlapping ideologies, as temperance and education reform reflected.

As Horace Mann led the charge to redefine New England common schools, the campaign against slavery effervesced in New England streets, posing serious challenges to the institution upon which many Southerners (and New Englanders) depended. The antebellum classroom did not exist in a vacuum, merrily teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic while violent mobs attacked abolitionists’ homes. Indeed, the anti-slavery movement, carried on the backs of reformers like William Lloyd Garrison, sneaked into schoolhouses in a manner largely unnoticed by the conservative public. Along with the other reforms we have described, we can see how a student who graduated from a common school in 1850 would have a different worldview than he would have if he had attended school in 1800.

Before analyzing the school year of a student, it is useful to look at the diary of one Lexington Normal School trainee. Lydia Ann Stowe was sixteen when she entered the country’s first publicly funded teacher’s college. She and her fellow classmates were

at the forefront of the reform movement in Massachusetts; simply put, they represented

Horace Mann’s ideal teachers. The first class of Lexington Normal School was comprised of women because they were paid less than men, and Mann hoped to prove their utility (there was no family wage movement that included female members).112

They undertook a yearlong training program with a master teacher hand-selected by the

State Board of Education that Mann led. Centralized teacher training gave educational policy makers in the statehouse an avenue through which they could reach teachers statewide. They expected graduates of Lexington Normal to teach and proselytize the lessons they learned in training. For this reason, their ideology regarding issues like women’s rights and slavery held particular importance. Not only could they influence children in the classroom; they could also set the fashion for other teachers.

Lydia Ann Stowe took meticulous notes of her experience at Lexington Normal

School. Stowe’s diary alone received the undying praise of her teacher, Cyrus Peirce.

Peirce had assigned the diaries as a means to keep track of the ladies’ free time and ensure they used it towards their studies. Stowe generally mentioned that after school study hours were “carefully observed” in her entries and carefully recorded Peirce’s lectures. She respected her master teacher and strove to excel in Normal School. Despite a penchant for writing, Stowe struggled comically with mathematics, continually exclaiming in her diary, “What shall I say for Algebra? It was deplorable!” The school taught progressive ideas while continuing to incorporate Christian lessons.113 For

112 Melder, “Woman’s High Calling,” 19-32. Melder highlights that during this period, women were paid about 5.75 per month compared to 14.50 for men. Despite the little respect they earned from their male counterparts, women signed up to be teachers in droves. 113 For Christian lessons, see above: pages 22-26.

example, Mr. Peirce had “found females superior in scholarship to males,” and he opined,

“By some it is said the female mind is weaker than the other sex. I differ from this opinion. The weakness is owning [sic] to its not being called into proper action.”114

Inculcating young female teachers with this confidence allowed them to affect public opinion and increase the hiring of female teachers throughout the state. Lydia Stowe worshipped Peirce’s words and took to heart his effort to identify any faults she had been prone to, and made a “determination to correct them.” It was this determination to correct ills that Lydia and the other members of Lexington Normal School learned under Cyrus

Peirce – a legacy that they carried into their lives after graduation.115

Stowe completed Lexington Normal School and taught briefly in her hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts before marrying. In 1844, she married and moved to her permanent home in Fall River with her new husband, Robert Adams. When her teaching career ended she became a member of the local school board where her experience from

Lexington guided her influence on Fall River public schools.116 More importantly,

Lydia’s husband Robert was a Quaker and an infamous conductor of the Underground

Railroad in Fall River. The city became an important way station through his efforts, and his reputation burgeoned with the exodus of free blacks in response to the Fugitive Slave

Act in 1851. On many occasions, Lydia opened her home to fugitive slaves despite the risk of her arrest.117 Her commitment to the cause of African-American freedom cannot

114 Stowe, “Diary, 1840,” Framingham State. Stowe recorded Peirce’s words here. 115 Ibid. 116 Carlos Slafter, A Record of Education: The Schools and Teachers of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1644-1904 (Dedham Transcript Press, Dedham: 1905), 146. 117 Arthur Sherman Phillips, “Fascicle III,” The Phillips History of Fall River (Dover Printers: Fall River, 1944-1946), 131-134. This history was privately printed in Fall River

be questioned, and we can see from the progressive ideas she learned at Lexington that her position was strengthened by her experience there. While no explicit reference to anti-slavery is made in her diary, many of the visitors to Lexington Normal lectured publicly on their opposition or generally disapproval of the institution. No doubt, during her time in the classroom and on the Fall River school board, her antislavery sentiments surfaced and affected her students.

In March of 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Lexington Normal School. He spoke briefly in encouragement of the women (and Peirce), judging their cause just.

Emerson stood in opposition to forces of ignorance like slavery and viewed the Normal

School as another step towards abolishing slavery entirely. Emerson told the collected students and administrators that “angels would come from heaven to be teachers,” and that he held teaching in the highest respect.118 He visited Lexington Normal during the

Massachusetts Congress’s heated debate over whether public funding of the School should continue. His support, along with that of other influential figures like Horace

Mann and Henry Barnard, helped to secure the institution’s future. Beyond that, Peirce welcomed Emerson to Lexington despite his views on slavery; the implication being that

Peirce and the school tacitly approved of Emerson’s abolitionism. Emerson’s position was well known at the time, but because of his inflammatory views, he rarely gave public addresses on the matter.119 In a address given in Dedham, Massachusetts (Stowe’s birthplace), Emerson highlighted the moral superiority of the North: “The truth is,

and is no longer in print. It can be found online at http://www.sailsinc.org/durfee/fulltext.htm. 118 Stowe, “Diary, 1840,” Framingham State. 119 Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 38.

Northerners have good blood in their veins, and are able to give as good as they get; but they are old traders, and make it a rule rarely to shoot their customers, and never until bill is paid.”120 Even those who opposed human bondage but purchased cotton clothing in the

North perpetuated slavery. Further, according to Emerson, many merchants in the North opposed abolition because it threatened their industry. He supported the statewide implementation of common schools as a means to free Northerners from the prison that

Southerners constructed with the profits derived from slavery. To Emerson, slavery represented stagnation, maintaining slaveholders in a state of puerile sloth; he feared this would spread to the North. In his Dedham speech, Emerson highlighted the words of

South Carolina’s John Randolph: “Gentlemen of the Free States, we shall drive you to the wall: we have done it, and we shall keep you there.”121 The belief that slavery’s moral denigrations infected slaveholders and Northerners alike reverberated with many millennialists, as well as with Horace Mann and Henry Barnard.

Significantly for common schools, Mann personally abhorred slavery, though he saved his most vehement excoriations of the institution for his time as a United States

Congressman. In a speech given to Congress on February 23rd, 1849, Mann argued for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The oration was in response to the debate around the proposed legislation to ban the slave trade from Washington, D.C. In a sign of ultimate disrespect for Southern culture, Mann offered a scathing comparison of

Southern and Liberian education systems: “[Liberia] discards the institution [of] slavery,

120 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Antislavery Speech at Dedham, 1846,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 41. Just to note, there is no indication that Emerson and Stowe ever spoke; that he gave this speech in her hometown is coincidental. 121 Ibid., 42.

while we cherish it. A far greater proportion of their children than of white children of the slave States of this Union, are at school.”122 Through one powerful example, Mann argued that slaves would be better off without their masters and that masters would be better off without their slaves. Slavery was the institution that prevented the South from advancing at the same pace as New England and becoming an industrial economy, represented in this instance by their lack of public schooling.

Teachers felt the echo of Mann’s words. In an address to the “Third Triennial

Convention” at West Newton Normal School, Reverend Waterston spoke of Mann’s oratory in Congress:

His speech on the right of Congress to legislate for the territories of the United States, and its duty to exclude slavery therefrom, is one of the most eloquent and unanswerable arguments ever delivered in Congress. It reveals, in the most convincing manner, the terrible consequences of a system which is degrading and disgracing the country, and clearly demonstrates that this fearful evil (aside from future retribution which it may bring) is even now – acting as a moral curse, both upon the oppressor and the oppressed.123

The teachers, parents, and distinguished guests in attendance probably understood the gravity of Waterston’s words. Horace Mann, before leaving his chair as secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts wrote, “As is the teacher, so is the school.”124 The students of West Newton Normal School embraced opinions like Waterston’s and took them into their common schools, driving the sectional wedge and alienating the South. Northern ideology was sailing into threatening waters, and the common school was the figurehead that pierced the pitching sea.

122 Horace Mann, “Slavery and the Slave-Trade in the District of Columbia, Delivered to the House of Representatives, February 23, 1849,” (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Anti- Slavery Society, 1849). 123 Waterston, “Address at West Newton School – 1848,” MSS 1848, MHS. 124 Mann, Annual Reports, 85.

Henry Barnard took a more moderate view of slavery; he felt that it simply damaged the character of those who owned slaves. Like Emerson and Mann, Barnard abhorred idleness as an inexcusable sin. Though he commented only infrequently on the subject of slavery, Barnard once visited the South and according to historian Edith

MacMullun, “[L]iked having his fire lit in the morning [by slaves], but came to see slavery as sapping strength of the South, making the owner inhabitants indolent. The really enterprising men he met were all [Yale alumni] from the North.”125 Barnard held a somewhat low opinion of Southern culture, a view with which many Northerners would have agreed: “These Southern Nabobs,” Barnard wrote in a private letter from Greenville,

“would as soon part with life, as with the luxury of their slaves. They would die without them.”126 Barnard also foretold conflict if the North interfered with slavery, noting that “a convention would be held and the ‘question of Union be agitated and decided.’”127

Though he was writing in 1833 (and referring in large part to the Nullifiers), Barnard’s position on slavery showed remarkable perception. As a citizen, he thought slavery vile, but as a politician, he chose his public words about the institution carefully.

Emerson, Mann, and Barnard all paid a visit to Lexington Normal School in its first year to encourage the students and praise its methods. None of them, however, attended the common schools they all sought to perfect. Harriot Sumner Appleton’s diary from 1811 indicates how education was executed before the common school movement.

The diaries of Massachusetts students in 1850 indicate that antislavery and common schools coexisted, and that schools occasionally even encouraged outright antislavery.

125 Edith Nye MacMullen, In the Cause of True Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 28. 126 Nabob – a person of conspicuous wealth or status. 127 MacMullen, Cause of True Education, 29.

In the early 1800s, children’s education was a patchwork of intermittent private school and parental instruction. The diary of Harriot Sumner Appleton from 1814 notes,

“Papa says he will give [my brother] Coffin ninepence if he will learn the Multiplication

Table down to six in a fortnight.”128 No state inspector went to the Appleton home to ensure Coffin learned his multiplication table, so parents had to rely on piecemeal educational practices. Appleton recorded the practice of receiving hand-me-down textbooks, “Mary Booth gave me likewise a compass case and several writing books

[when she left school].”129 Before the common school movement, children often worked from second-hand learning materials and a serendipitous curriculum that facilitated an incomplete educational experience.

Elizabeth Atherton Clapp attended school just outside of Boston and commenced her 1852 diary at the age of thirteen. Following the entries describing her year in school with “Mrs. Blackmore” is illustrative of the massive changes that schools experienced during the antebellum era. Elizabeth begins by describing the length of the school day, noting that “One session is from 9 till 1 o’clock” and the second session was held in the afternoon until dinnertime. In the first week of school with Mrs. Blackmore, Clapp faced a difficult decision: inclement weather had rolled into her Boston suburb. In 1800, before the drive for attendance by Horace Mann and local school boards, she may have opted to stay home, but “still I went to school,” she wrote, “because I was afraid I should get down in my class if I should stay at home.” The reform effort also precipitated Clapp’s

128 Harriot Sumner, “Harriot Coffin Sumner School Diary, 1811-1817,” Curtis-Stevenson Family Papers, MSS 288, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. The brunt of the entries come haphazardly in the summer of 1814. At the risk of overanalyzing, this inconsistent entry style offers another interesting comparison to Clapp’s diaries, which were systematic, daily entries. 129 Ibid.

concern for her status within her class; it had become common practice to reward students who excelled and admonish those who frequently missed school or fell behind.130

Just two weeks into her Spring school session, Elizabeth Clapp underwent a state examination. Clapp noted, “This afternoon Dea. Simmonds came to our school and examined us.” Simmonds represented the state school board, and he monitored the progress of each school around the Boston area to ensure that standards mandated by law or decree were being properly observed. For Clapp, this meant serious pressure; she felt her teacher counted on her to excel in the examination. “I was very frightened,” Clapp explained, “as it is the first time I have been examined at the Bigelow School (which is almost two years.)”131 While it is coincidental that the state inspector arrived shortly after

Clapp commenced her diary, his influence on her school experience was palpable. Clapp likely decided to attend school despite the weather knowing that her absence would hurt her test score. The standards movement in Massachusetts removed the arbitrary desires of the parent from education and inserted a professional state task force that traveled the state enforcing state curricula.

Elizabeth Clapp continued to attend school, to write about her family, and to act like an average thirteen-year-old girl. After school and on the weekends, she often spent time with her friends, recording in her diary nights like April 25th, when “I have not been very sober after church tonight; [with] Marielle and Mary I have been laughing rather hard.” An evening later, though, Clapp’s brother John came home with a brand new two-

130 Elizabeth Clapp, “Elizabeth Clapp’s Diary,” David Clapp Papers, MSS 2151, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 131 Ibid. Parentheses original.

volume book entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At this point in her diary, Clapp had never mentioned any other books in her house. She probably assigned importance to the new text, because of its broad popularity in the North. Three days later, on April 29th, Clapp could resist no more:

It has been pleasant all day, and this afternoon was composition afternoon, and I had for my subject, “Spring” and it was not quite a page long so that I got it done at 3 o’clock, (as this afternoon was singing afternoon too) and so I had from that time until half past four (as singing begins then) to get my lessons for tomorrow, and so I have had time to read in some of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and it is a real interesting book about slaves.132

Here we find a thirteen-year-old girl who passes most of her free time “laughing” with her friends sitting down to read a two-volume tome on the institution of slavery. Among contemporaries and historians alike, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is widely noted for spreading the fire of antislavery in the North and the retrenchment of the South. Its text highlights the worst ills of slavery: from beatings to slave auctions and the general moral degradation that the institution caused.

Elizabeth did not stop after her first afternoon with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s monumental novel. The very next day, she wrote in her diary, “I have gone on reading

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is so interesting I can hardly leave off.” Two days later, she skipped school and “finished the first volume” instead. She begins the next volume later that week, reading now with Posey Sumner, a friend and relative of Elizabeth’s. They read from dawn until school time and then “after school, Posey came to our house and we read until half past seven.”133

What makes Elizabeth’s diary so interesting is that she was in all respects a normal girl; even as she read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she took time to play tag with her

132 Ibid. 133 Ibid.

friends when the weather was agreeable. She did not suddenly begin to attend antislavery rallies, nor did she express sympathy for African Americans’ plight. On May 9th, just eleven days after she started, Clapp finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her way of life remained unaffected, but subtle changes in her awareness of slavery as an institution are apparent. Days after she finished Stowe’s novel, Clapp wrote a composition for school that she entitled “Slavery.” While she did not write down any of its specific points in her diary, we can assume that after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Clapp felt slavery to be an abominable institution. She offered few diary entries the summer of 1852 as she had a break from school, imposed by her father “because I was so sickly.”134

In late July, Elizabeth enrolled again in school and immediately immersed herself in the daily activities managed by her new teacher (whose name she never mentions). The school resolved to perform a number of songs for the townspeople to hear in the form of an exhibition at the schoolhouse. This exercise offered citizens a chance to check up on the progress of the students and to inspect the school building. Whoever organized the exhibition included “some new songs, different from those we had before printed, and one of the songs is about Eva (in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) when she was dying.”135 Elizabeth herself neither chose the new song, nor personally performed it, but she reported, “A great many people were constantly coming in who could not get a seat, and so they stood up [on the] side of where I sat, and I could hardly see anything.”136 Uncle Tom’s Cabin infected the town, and the schoolhouse was an acceptable place for the themes of the book to be performed on stage. Elizabeth noted that the crowd continued to get larger as

134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. Parentheses original. 136 Ibid.

more people from the exhibition heard the song about Eva; parents craned their necks to get a chance to hear their children perform a song reproaching the institution of slavery.

The New England school was redefined during this period; no longer was it completely under Calvinist yoke. The state now owned and operated most schools in

New England. Elizabeth Atherton Clapp’s diary illustrates that the changes occurring in schools had broad consequences for the children that attended them. The Clapp family’s

Christmas in 1852 was a modest one that represents the changes that took place in the

North and were mirrored by schools. Wrote Elizabeth, “Mary and I had silk aprons for our presents. John had The Life of J.Q. Adams. Father and mother had a pair of French vases, which cost $3. Aunt Azubah had a book called The Mercy Seat. David had ‘The

Game of Uncle Tom and Little Eva.’” Silk aprons and French vase, now accessible to the growing middle class, represent the industrial and economic changes. John Quincy

Adams stood as a powerful early representative of the antislavery movement when he confronted John C. Calhoun during the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The “Mercy Seat” is a reference to the Biblical table under which the Arc of the Covenant was hidden, which signifies the strong Christian ethics of the region. Finally, “The Game of Uncle

Tom and Little Eva” was a little-circulated spinoff of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a purchase that seems to cement the family’s continued commitment to an antislavery ideology.

For this typical, middle-class, churchgoing family, anti-Southern sentiments occupied every aspect of their lives. By “anti-Southern” in this context, I mean to simply imply “not Southern.” By this distinction, I mean that outright anti-Southernism

(represented most virulently in the “slave power” conspiracy) was less common than the unconscious anti-Southern lifestyle many Northerners led. Elizabeth Clapp’s journal

shows us that the school represented another area wherein Northern ideals were both defined and strengthened. In the beginning of our period of study, Northern schools and

Northern society generally existed on a plane roughly the same as the South. Most people practiced agriculture, population pressures were nonexistent, and there were few large cities. By the close of the period and the onset of the Civil War, many in the North had adopted an entirely different ideology (free labor) from the South. Further, through the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard, we see how

Northern reformer elites responded to the rising sectional crisis in slightly different ways.

Emerson excoriated slavery in moralist terminology; Mann attempted to dismantle it politically; and Barnard did not speak publicly about the issue despite expressing his antislavery position privately. The common school became a place where a distinctly

Northern citizen was crafted and then encouraged to question the value of the South’s most vaunted institution, slavery.

Conclusion: From Schoolhouses to Battle Lines

By the year 1850, the common school reform movement had radically redefined

New England children’s educational experience. Long forgotten were the days of mass private schooling where students haphazardly learned rudimentary subjects. They were replaced by state-run, common schools that produced decidedly different citizens.

Students attended school for a longer portion of their lives, sat in better-regulated schoolhouses, and listened to professional teachers. Schools preached temperance and

Christian values while training students for the changing economy. Some common schools even allowed overt antislavery ideology to trickle into their schools (and with the broad approval of townspeople). Though these types of schools existed in limited form in major urban areas before the reform movement, they were typically open only to children of wealthy parents. The greatest legacy of this time period’s education reforms was its desire to reach students of every geographic and socioeconomic background, and give them one school – a “common” school to create a “common” student.

While these reforms did not reach every child, they did leave an indelible mark on those who did attend. The percentage of children who attended school in New England over this time period did not rise, but almost all of those who did were now attending a common school that was bureaucratically and ideologically under the yoke of the state board of education. As the testimony of students and reformers has shown, common schools formed (perhaps unconsciously) a wedge between the two sections, teaching students to reject the dependence on slave labor that previously wed the North and South.

Historian of education Carl Kaestle concludes in his discussion of common school reform: “School reformers believed that common schools could solve the problems of

diversity, instability, and equal opportunity.”137 He, like the scholars of educational reform that came before him, fails to address the possible implications of those beliefs.

The evidence presented in this paper shows that common schools supported Northern reformers’ causes and helped to encourage the momentum towards industrialization and urbanization. This new perspective clearly identifies common schools as an agent of change, as a participant in the regional paradigm shift, and as institutions that did not exist in a vacuum. Even though the express purpose of Horace Mann’s movement was to construct a “new” type of citizen, the history of antebellum education all too often stays inside the school walls.

This study has followed the student out of the common school by analyzing the writings of reformers, the creation of professional teachers’ schools, and the diaries of the students themselves. Historian Eric Foner summarizes the sectional tension of the 1850s:

“[W]hen Republicans turned their gaze southward, they encountered a society that seemed to violate all the cherished values of the free labor ideology, and seemed to pose a threat to the very survival of what Republicans called their ‘free-labor civilization.’”138

The newly-created Republican political party expressed the common school reform movement’s ideology. Few Democrats supported the common school reform movement and fewer still involved themselves in the actual instructional and curricular shifts that occurred. Most common school reforms occurred in the 1830s and 1840s; a decade later the Republican Party formed, just as common school graduates came of voting age.

Continuing to look at the Republican Party’s positions yields another anti-

137 Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 222. 138 Eric Foner, Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 39.

southern notion: slavery was holding back the Southern economy. Henry Barnard’s writings, discussed earlier, align nicely with mainstream Republican thought. Slavery was the reason the South stagnated in an agricultural state with limited education and innovation. In common schools, industry was one of the highest virtues, furthering the march of progress. Conversely, Southerners held industry as the domain of the poor who could not afford slaves to do their bidding. The tension came when Northerners, who increasingly passed through common schools, began to see Southern living as a degraded state of being. They demanded the discontinuation of slavery to preserve the virtue of industry throughout the United States. As western territories opened up, these opposing ideologies directly conflicted and eventually came into civil war. Common schools were breeding grounds for Republican thinkers – they admonished idleness and rewarded ambition.

Another change in common schools was later reflected in Republican (and

Northern) sentiments: the absence of corporal punishment. As the South dug in its heels and passed increasingly restrictive laws, the North outlawed public beatings. As the

South demanded fugitive slaves be hunted down and returned (even if the slave made it

North), the North reformed its prisons and focused on “corrections.” William Lloyd

Garrison hammered in The Liberator and Harriet Beecher Stowe exposed in Uncle Tom’s

Cabin that masters viciously beat their slaves and destroyed families by breaking them up at auction. For Northerners who never visited the South, books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave them a window into a totally foreign and disturbing culture. Any adult who attended common school a decade earlier and learned the value of non-corporal punishment would have rejected the brutal tactics portrayed in antislavery texts. Striking at the heart of

Republicans’ philosophy, the South must have seemed a brutish, backward society – one that urgently needed to be reformed.

Just as many Northerners saw the violent beatings and treatment of slaves as brutish, others saw the institution as immoral and demanded its immediate abolition.

Immediate abolitionists argued louder, but they were smaller in number than those who simply opposed slavery. Common schools were at the heart of this group because some explicitly questioned the morality of slavery itself. These abolitionists often found themselves marginalized by the broader New England society. However, many of the protests levied against abolitionists were not decrying their sense of morality, rather that they were agitators of conflict. As Henry Barnard perceived in the 1830s, any meddling by the North on the issue of slavery would precipitate violent, sectional conflict. For the millions of Northerners who depended on the Southern economy, war could mean economic collapse, along with a host of other negative effects that come with a civil conflict (like dying).

Still, agitate Northerners did. Still, Southerners felt dishonored. For decades a dance of conflict and uneasy compromise appeased both sides. The question is: why did the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 precipitate the Civil War? Why did the

Crittenden Compromise fail where the Missouri Compromise did not? Many historians find their answers to these questions in the themes of this thesis. Most of the New

Englanders who went to war in 1861 were shaped by their experience in school. Common schools were linked with every change in Northern society that made compromise untenable. War may not have been inevitable, but common schools helped shape citizens incompatible with a backward, slaveholding South.

Epilogue: “As is the Teacher, so is the School”

In this study, I illuminated the powers of educational reform when harnessed to effect social change. The common school reform movement produced citizens who were more likely to oppose the South, a section with which the North had much in common in

1800. The power of the school to change society cannot be overlooked. By observing schools with this understanding, one sees how common schools played an important role in stoking the fires of anti-southernism and heralding the Civil War. Armed with this influence, educators today should go forth and attempt to recreate the efforts of Horace

Mann (but not his pedagogic results).139 Recent years for this American republic have been rocky, and the quality of our modern public education may be at its low point.

Educators must take heart in reading about the efforts of reformers who came before them and the great strides they made to fix a system that served only the wealthy.

In the fifty years my study observed, the common school movement drastically changed the scope and intent of public education. As we approach another epoch of fast- paced economic and geospatial changes, perhaps it is time for another massive reform effort. Desks must be rattled, laws passed, and current paradigms of oppression destroyed.

Our challenge is not to create a wholly new system, as antebellum reformers did, our challenge is to obliterate the walls that exist within it. Common school reform facilitated the demise of slavery, the most deplorable institution ever conceived. With our reforms, we must tackle poverty, inequities, health and the environment, and a whole host of other

139 We now know many of Mann’s “reforms” to the art of teaching did not improve students’ learning experiences. For example, mandating that students sit still in desks nailed to the floor stifles their creativity and places them in an unnaturally torturous seating arrangement. Other problems, like absolute deference to teachers, are since being addressed.

problems. We have students without books, teachers without adequate salaries, and schoolhouses falling into disrepair. We ask cities to fund their schools while simultaneously dealing with a staggering amount of other structural problems. We simply cannot afford to have an education system that favors one class of people over another.

Every illiterate adult in this country is a failure of our school systems. No longer can we accept segregated districts; no longer can we accept failing schools for impoverished children who need them most. Often-described “barriers” to our goals for public education may seem overwhelming to some. But the purpose of this paper is to inform educators everywhere: They are surmountable. Our work begins now; the foundation is set by our dynamic history. As educators, we must stand together for our children who deserve a chance at happiness and intellectual fulfillment. Every child, not just children who look and live like mine: every child.

This history shows us the tools we are to use. We have a call to action: For the future of this nation, and of this planet, we must reform education.

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The Ornament of Human Society": Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools

The Ornament of Human Society": Anti-Southernism in New England Common Schools