Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727-1925 9781135316525, 9780415931182

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CHARTERED SCHOOLS

Studies in the History of Education Edward R. Beauchamp, Series Editor EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY:

GIRLS' SCHOOLING DURING THE

A History from the Ancient World to Modern America Edward J. Power

PROGRESSIVE ERA:

From Female Scholar to Domesticated Citizen Karen Graves

SCHOOL AND SOCIETY IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN:

COMMON, DELINQUENT, AND

Joseph Payne and the New World of Education Richard Aldrich

SPECIAL:

The Institutional Shape of Special Education John Richardson

DISCIPLINE, MORAL REGULATION, AND SCHOOLING:

GENDER, RACE, AND THE NATIONAL

A Social History Kate Rousmaniere, Kari Dehli, and Ning de Coninck-Smith, Editors

EDUCATION ASSOCIATION:

Professionalism and Its Permutations Wayne J. Urban

JAPANESE AMERICANS AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY:

Maintaining Language and Heritage Toyotomi Morimoto

TRANSITIONS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION:

A Social History of Teaching Donald H. Parkerson and JoAnn Parkerson

RADICAL HEROES:

l Go I WILL ALWAYS BE

GRAMSCI, FRIER£, AND THE POLITICS

WHEREVER

OF ADULT EDUCATION

A LOYAL AMERICAN:

Diana Coben

Schooling Seattle's Japanese Americans during World War II Yoon K. Pak

WOMEN'S EDUCATION IN EARLY MoDERN EuROPE:

A History, 1500-1800 Barbara J. Whitehead, Editor ESSAYS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTHERN EDUCATION:

Exceptionalism and Its Limits Wayne J. Urban, Editor

CHARTERED SCHOOLS:

Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727-1925 Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, Editors

CHARTERED SCHOOLS

Two HUNDRED YEARS

OF INDEPENDENT ACADEMIES IN THE UNITED STATES,

1727-1925

EDITED BY NANCY BEADlE AND KIM TOLLEY

First published 2002 by RoutledgeFalmer Published 20 I 3 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2002 by RoutledgeFalmer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chartered schools: two hundred years of independent academies in the United States, 1727-1925 I edited by Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93118-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-4 I 5-93 I 18-2 (hbk) I. Private schools-United States-History. I. Beadie, Nancy, 1958- II. Tolley, Kimberly. LC49 .C47 2002 371.02'0973-dc21

2001051102

Series Preface

The RoutledgeFalmer Studies in the History of Education series includes not only volumes on the history of American and Western education, but also on the history of the development of education in non-Western societies. A major goal of this series is to provide new interpretations of educational history that are based on the best recent scholarship; each volume will provide an original analysis and interpretation of the topic under consideration. A wide variety of methodological approaches from the traditional to the innovative are used. In addition, this series especially welcomes studies that focus not only on schools but also on education as defined by Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn: "the transmission of culture across generations." The major criteria for inclusion are (a) a manuscript of the highest quality, and (b) a topic of importance to understanding the field. The editor is open to readers' suggestions and looks forward to a long-term dialogue with them on the future direction of the series. Edward R. Beauchamp Series Editor

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Contents

Acknowledgments

IX

Preface

XI

THEODORE

R.

SIZER

INTRODUCTION A School for Every Purpose: An Introduction to the History of Academies in the United States

3

KIM TOLLEY AND NANCY BEADlE

INSTITUTIONS: ORIGINS AND PURPOSES Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1727-1850

19

KIM TOLLEY

From Anstalt to Academy: Moravian Boarding Education for Native American Children in the Eighteenth Century AMY C. SCHUTT

44

"A Triumph of Reason": Female Education in Academies in the New Republic MARGARET A. NASH

64

STUDENTS: MEANING AND CULTURE Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860 NANCY BEADlE

vii

89

Contents

viii "Endeavor to Improve Yourself': The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South

116

KATHRYN WALBERT

"A Good and Delicious Country": Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in NineteenthCentury Louisiana

137

MARY NIALL MITCHELL

TEACHERS AND INSTITUTIONS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES Leaving Home to Teach: The Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison,

1815-1841 KIM TOLLEY AND MARGARET

161 A. NASH

"Creating an Educational Interest": Sophia Sawyer, Teacher of the Cherokee TERI L. CASTELOW Alternative Pedagogy: The Rise of the Private Black Academy in Early Postbellum Mississippi, 1862-1870

186

211

CHRISTOPHER M. SPAN

The Chinese Western Military Academies in the United States,

1902-1911

228

CAROL HUANG

SYSTEMS: COMPETITION, STRUGGLE, AND TRANSFORMATION "Let the People Remember It": Academies and the Rise of Public High Schools, 1865-1890 SEVAN G. TERZIAN AND NANCY BEADlE

251

Betrothed to the State?: Nineteenth-Century Academies Confront the Rise of the State Normal Schools CHRISTINE A. OGREN

284

"Many Years before the Mayflower": Catholic Academies and the Development of Parish High Schools in the United States, 1727-1925

304

KIM TOLLEY

CONCLUSION Legacies of the Academy

331

NANCY BEADlE AND KIM TOLLEY

Contributors

352

Index

354

Acknowledgments

Many individuals have provided support for this project, but at the forefront are those whose encouragement has sustained us from beginning to end. Don Argus and Bruce Tolley occupied front row seats to an endeavor that yielded both unforeseen roadblocks and unexpectedly fruitful collaborations, while it alternately elicited moments of excitement, frustration and satisfaction. With enormous patience and good humor throughout the entire process, they rotated our tires, stocked us with Midol, read our chapters, watched our children, and fixed our printers. We do not know how we would have done this without them. Our excitement and enthusiasm for the idea of editing a book on academies originated at an Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society in 1998. During that meeting, we remarked on the dearth of published texts in this field and determined to do something to remedy the situation. Since that initial encounter, many individuals have provided advice and assistance, but we are especially grateful to those who encouraged us to begin. We would like to thank Margaret Nash and Bruce Leslie, who joined with us in a well-received panel presentation at the 1999 History of Education Society in Atlanta, Georgia. Linda Eisenmann and Richard Altenbaugh invited the four of us to submit short essay versions of our papers for publication as a symposium in the History of Education Quarterly, and the final edited book developed from this initial momentum. We would like to thank a number of individuals who gave suggestions along the way and introduced us to the work of several contributors to this book. Linda Perkins provided invaluable assistance by bringing Chris Span's work to our attention, and Sieglinde Lim de Sanchez recommended Teri Castelow's research on Sophia Sawyer and Fayetteville Seminary. For their thoughtful reading of essay versions of three chapters, we would like to thank Julie Reuben, Robert Church, and the anonymous reviewers of the History of Education Quarterly. Mary Mitchell was gracious enough to allow us to republish the article to which the History of Education Society awarded the Henry Barnard Prize in 1999. We could not have succeeded without the sabbatical leave granted Nancy by the University of Washington. Additionally, the University provided a wonderful retreat facility for us at the Whiteley Center on San Juan Island, where we edited contributors' chapters and completed our own work. ix

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Preface

One learns much about a people by studying the ways they raise and school their young. We teach our kids our deepest beliefs, and all that we detest or fear is cordoned-off from the children's minds. As a result, schools are a representation of a culture's values, and often a battleground for social concerns far larger than what goes on in classrooms. The grace and confidence and decency of a people, or lack thereof, are reflected in the ways and means that they treat their most vulnerable citizens. Children are a large and conspicuously vulnerable group. Accordingly, one learns much about America by looking carefully at its schools. The matter is not what leaders say about the children. Rather, it is ultimately what the people do for their young citizens. There are lessons in chalkdust. For this reason we are blessed that a group of social historians has turned its attention to the so-called "academy movement," the dispersed but remarkably energetic efforts of localities-across the fledgling, but expanding United States-to provide youth an education beyond the rudiments delivered by the common school. The growth of "academies" or "institutes" or nascent "high schools" was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon and was highly localized. The idea of formal, popular education beyond the rudiments, however, followed settlers as they moved West. Local though the foundations were, there were patterns that affected them. The essays in this volume shed light both on particular institutions and on the movement of ideas that influenced their creation and maintenance. The stories here are about education and much more. These are stories about religion, local pride and local government, women, racial minorities, the economy, and American ideals. These are stories about what it meant to be educated, and about the meaning of "public" and "private." Given our contemporary assumption of schooling as a "system"-a mechanism whose pieces can be tweaked to do what the system's engineers decide-the stories of the often-chaotic growth of mass schooling beyond the rudiments seem rather quaint. There was little order here. In response, the early twentieth-century progressives ultimately did what they could to bring rational stability. This was represented by the familiar public high school embedded within local and state government systems. Schools not in the new hierxi

Preface

xii

archy either folded into it, shut down, or transformed themselves into private schools and colleges. One of the organizational mechanisms used by early academies was a state "charter," basically a government-endorsed statement permitting institutions to hold property and to direct their own affairs. With recent charter school legislation, this sturdy old precedent has had a rebirth. This book is timely. Contemporary zealots for or against this idea would be wise to look back, to discover the roots of this form of public service (especially a public service that is replete with values). There is promise and democracy in the best of academy ideals. This volume tells some of their stories. These remind us to look into the mirror. Is what we offerindeed demand-of today's youth principled, measured, and fair? Does it reflect the best of Americans' traditional democratic values? Can the extraordinary efforts of our predecessors shed useful light on what appears now to be a breakup of the progressives' bureaucratic hierarchies? Can order and freedom coexist? These are not new questions. We should reflect on how our predecessors addressed them. Theodore R. Sizer

Introduction

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A School for Every Purpose: An Introduction to the History of Academies in the United States KIM TOLLEY AND NANCY BEADlE

"Twould give me great satisfaction to see a little flourishing academy in this place." So wrote the Reverend James Reed in 1766. As a result of Reed's efforts, the Colonial Assembly introduced a bill to incorporate an academy in New Bern, North Carolina. In the English-speaking colonies, New Bern became the second community to receive a charter following the incorporation of Philadelphia's Franklin Academy in 1753. Decades earlier, the Ursulines founded the first academy for women in Frenchspeaking New Orleans in 1727. 1 The presence of academies in the United States spans roughly three centuries. Such institutions generally served students between the ages of eight and twenty-five, providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. 2 Originating in the colonial era, academies spread across the country by mid-nineteenth century. During this period, various individuals, groups, and agencies founded a variety of academies to serve diverse constituencies with widely differing educational goals. According Henry Barnard, by 1850 there existed more than 6, l 00 incorporated academies in the United States, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the colleges. 3 Nineteenth-century supporters portrayed academies as exemplars of the nation's commitment to enlightenment and learning. Opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Those in favor of a large-scale system of public high schools dismissed academies as irrelevant and outmoded institutions. 4 The culmination of this controversy is well known, because it is reiterated in every secondary text on the history of American education. As a widespread system of public higher schooling supplanted the academies in the twentieth century, private and independent schools dropped out of the mainstream of American educational discourse. They also largely dropped out of United States educational history and historiography. This book seeks to recover something of the long history of academies in the United States and to reconsider the historical significance of these institutions in society. We contend that the academy is a significant institution in American history. We would press this point further by saying it was the dominant institution of higher schooling from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. To date, most secondary 3

4

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sources cast the academy as a predecessor of a later institution. A number of scholars have viewed the academy as an important antecedent to the public high schooJ.S Other researchers have interpreted academies as forerunners of such institutions as women's colleges and normal schools. 6 The following chapters propose an alternative paradigm, one that positions the academy as the prevailing institution of higher schooling in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Today, a search of the library for a current secondary text on the academy movement yields very little. Most histories of American education devote a relatively short section to these institutions, and the only book solely focused on academies remains a slim volume edited by Theodore Sizer in 1964. 7 Moreover, more than thirty-five years have passed since the publication of Sizer's book. Since then, a generation of scholars has been whittling away at all aspects of the historiographical corpus that Sizer's book presupposed. It can now safely be said that the standard textbooks on education no longer present a picture of the academy movement fully consistent with recent research findings. What can we learn by looking at the history of these independent institutions? What impelled local communities and various groups to organize and support them? What contributions have they made to local communities and to the larger society? What were the experiences of students and teachers in academies? This book addresses these questions over a two-hundred-year period through a collection of chapters that presents surveys and case studies of institutions, teachers, curricula, communities, and students. A historical investigation of the academy movement in the United States bears direct relevance to current educational debates. After nearly one hundred years of benign neglect by public school educators and policy makers, private schools became the focus of educational discourse during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, secondary school reformers seeking to create stronger ties between schools and local communities, experiment with alternative curricula, or emphasize presumably higher academic standards have pointed to independent and privately funded schools as viable alternatives to the "one best system" represented by the public high schools. Recent debates over school choice and reexamination of the advisability of funding a variety of educational arrangements rather than a single system highlight the importance of understanding historical contexts in determining future public policy. When we examine the local communities and various groups that organized and supported academies, it becomes clear that they acted from very diverse motivations. Currently, some educational reformers look to private schools as models of close school and community relationships. In their view, the academy promotes the values, beliefs, and culture of the local community, thus ensuring a strong continuity of learning from school to home. Because the local community and the institution share the same values, teachers and administrators presumably have the support of parents in decisions involving policy, pedagogy, and curriculum. However, in contrast to current rhetoric, the historical record reveals a far more varied and complicated picture. At various times and places in American history, academies promoted the religious beliefs, culture, and values of their local communities. During the colonial

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period, various denominations established academies to provide a professional education for the clergy and both academic and religious training for laypeople. In the French and Spanish territories, Catholic communities founded academies for the salvation of souls through religious teaching, to aid in the development of a Catholic middle class, and to raise funds for benevolent activities. During the antebellum era, evangelical groups collaborated to establish broadly pan-Protestant academies to promote Protestant values and culture while avoiding interdenominational strife and competition. Throughout the nineteenth century, various community groups, individuals, and mercantile associations established academies to provide a form of higher schooling for their youth, train a skilled workforce, or increase the property values in their towns. Some communities founded academies as an educational alternative to the forms of higher schooling provided by dominant cultural groups. Examples discussed in this book include the Catholic Institution in New Orleans, a school that actively promoted a radical political agenda among free children of color, and the academies founded by African Americans in Mississippi to provide literacy and racial uplift during the Reconstruction Era. In urban areas across the country during the late nineteenth century, Catholics established ethnic parish high schools to provide Catholic youth with an education that encompassed their religion, ethnic heritage, and native language. Finally, the case of the Chinese Western military academies highlights an institution that aimed to empower an ethnic minority-in this case, the Chinese-through a military and political alliance with Chinese nationalist revolutionaries on the one hand, and the support of American businessmen and soldiers of fortune on the other. Although twentieth-century reformers occasionally have portrayed academies as places where teachers always have received strong support from their local communities because of shared cultural beliefs, values, and educational goals, recent scholarship complicates this picture in a number of ways. Some academies existed with the aim of converting or acculturating students from different religious and cultural backgrounds, and in such cases, teachers may not always have enjoyed the full support of the local communities they aimed to serve. In this volume, Teri Castelow's case of Sophia Sawyer, a teacher for the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, suggests that teachers who formed strong empathic bonds with minority students sometimes faced disapproval and resistance from the administrators and patrons of the institution seeking to assimilate the students into the dominant culture. Additionally, those who moved from one geographic area to another in search of a teaching position often encountered a culture at variance with the one in which they grew up. Whether they agreed with the beliefs of their students' families or not, academy teachers often faced enormous pressure to maintain at least the appearance of conformity to local community values. Because their institutions received a substantial portion of their financial support from tuition, teachers and principals depended heavily on the good opinion of parents and often had to accommodate parental demands in order to avoid losing needed revenues. Finally, academy teaching did not always lead to occupational or financial security. The uncertain financial status of these institutions,

6

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changes in population, alterations in transportation networks, and competition with other schools sometimes drove academies out of business, leaving teachers to search for other teaching positions or alternative sources of employment. A number of chapters in this volume analyze the experiences of students who patronized academies. These studies challenge a number of theories about the nature of learning in these institutions. First, in contrast to earlier studies that have depicted the system of education available to young women as dramatically inferior to that afforded to men, antebellum educators in female institutions in North and South appear to have promoted a culture of intellectualism and competition among young women, a culture reflected not only in the curricula of these institutions but in the personal diaries of their students. Second, the episodic attendance records of academies have led some scholars to conclude that in general, the experience of attending an academy lacked academic seriousness. However, student diaries reveal a common practice of supplementing periods of academy attendance with periods of study at home. From this perspective, the rather elaborate courses of study published by academies helped students to bridge the occasional gap in their school experience by providing structure and direction for independent study. Finally, several chapters investigate the role played by academies in actively contributing to the formation of middle-class networks and culture by bringing together the youth of geographically dispersed populations. Previous research, focusing largely on urban environments, has emphasized the role of boarding houses, evangelical societies, and voluntary associations as agencies in the formation of a new middle class structure and culture during the antebellum period. The student diaries analyzed in this volume contribute to our understanding of the ways that academies, as predominantly rural and small town institutions, promoted the expansion of middle-class culture and education.

Institutions-Origins and Purposes The first section of this book focuses on the origins, evolution, and curricula of academies from 1727 to 1840. These chapters investigate the development and geographic distribution of academies and focus on issues of community sponsorship, institutional structure, governance, and multiple purposes. "Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling" analyzes the origins of academies and explains their expansion as a grass-roots synthesis of colonial academy structure and venture school entrepreneurialism. The chapter situates the academies among the many educational institutions that offered some sort of advanced schooling to Americans in the Early Republican period, from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Kim Tolley argues that the development of academies in America occurred in two phases. During the colonial phase, denominational and sectarian groups founded academies to serve the professional needs of the ministry and the religious and educational needs of laypeople. She notes that because religious denominations founded many of the colonial academies, it is important to qualify the view, often expressed in published texts, that academies arose in response to a grow-

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ing mercantile economy. At the period of their origin, American academies evidenced close ties with religious groups, not only through sponsorship and institutional support, but also through curricula that often included some study of the classics to prepare young men for the ministry. The second phase, representing the heyday of the movement, ran roughly from 1790 to the Civil War. The later phase of academy development evidenced a great deal of continuity, not only with the colonial academies but also with earlier venture schools established to meet the needs of a growing mercantile population. Like the venture schools, academies tailored their curricula to appeal to a local clientele interested in a relatively broad and practical education. However, unlike the earlier entrepreneurial schools, academies received some means of financial support from local patrons that ensured greater stability and potential longevity for the institution. During this heyday such support came not just from denominational and pan-protestant groups but from local townspeople, individual patrons, mercantile associations, and other sources. The rise of the academies was significant in heralding a new commitment on the part of local communities to provide funds in support of higher schooling for both sexes. In an era when free-wheeling educational choice was the norm, the motivating factors for this educational shift included local civic boosterism and the perceived need for greater stability and accountability than could be provided by venture institutions alone. "From Anstalt to Academy" examines the colonial origins of Moravian academies. Amy Schutt argues that Moravian academies, such as the Bethlehem Female Seminary (often cited as the earliest female academy in the country), the Linden Hall Seminary, and Nazareth Hall Academy, originated in institutions that were dramatically different from the institutions that developed after the American Revolution and that bore these names. This study reveals their radical origins as boarding institutions, or Anstalten, where Moravians offered Native American children an education together with European children. Ultimately, this chapter helps us understand the process by which Moravian academies, which started in a radical integrative social experiment, became not unlike many of the numerous academies for white children that flourished in the first part of the nineteenth century. As Moravians established separate day schools for Native American children, Moravian Anstalten at Bethlehem and elsewhere, which were once solely supported by the church, increasingly became white-only, tuition-supported academies. Eventually, the Moravians became well known for their education of white children from prosperous and often non-Moravian backgrounds and less known for their work in Native American education. Schutt's chapter adds to a more complex understanding of the origins and development of academy education in the United States in at least four ways. First, it revises a long standing premise, found in many published histories of education, that the Latin grammar school was the precursor to the nineteenth-century academy. Second, it examines developments in the Middle Colonies, an area often sidestepped in histories of early American education. Third, it looks at the period of religious excitement and turmoil known as the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century and considers its impact on the origins of academy education. Although the impact of the Second

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Great Awakening on academy building is clear, scholars have not considered the influence of this earlier burst of evangelicalism. Fourth, although a number of historians have linked academy building to the expansion of educational opportunities, this article shows that the move among institutions to popularize and attract those students "bearing their life-giving tuition" also reinforced and cemented the exclusion of most Native American children from the well-regarded Moravian academies. An investigation of the curricula of selected academies during the Early Republican period indicates that academy educators for both males and females held the same pedagogical goals. In "Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings," Margaret A. Nash argues that female education in academies during this period was more similar to male education than has been previously believed. According to Nash, the core curricular subjects offered to males and females in the early academies were virtually identical with the exception of a small proportion of courses related to vocation. Her essay draws from such primary sources as published contemporary writings, public addresses, and private correspondence. A number of scholars in the history of women's education have cited the work of Thomas Woody, who argued that the curricula in female schools tended to emphasize such ornamental subjects as embroidery, music, and/or art, and was thus qualitatively different and academically inferior to that of males. This view has persisted in the secondary literature. In dismantling this pervasive misconception, Nash points out that the term "ornamental," so often interpreted by modern scholars to denote a nonacademic subject, was used in various ways in the Early Republican period. The "ornaments" were not necessarily genderspecific subjects in the late eighteenth century, and sometimes educators applied the term "ornamental" to subjects we today consider academic, such as literature, rhetoric, or language. Second, she theorizes that academy educators for both sexes espoused the same pedagogical goals: to encourage academic competition and teach mental discipline and powers of discernment.

Students-Meaning and Culture The second section of the book investigates the expansion of academies from I 820 to I 860 with particular attention given to the experiences of those who attended them. These chapters focus on a range of institutions, from academies serving primarily a Protestant clientele in both the North and South, to a Catholic academy providing schooling to free children of color in Louisiana. Taken as a whole, the chapters highlight issues of institutional structure and purpose, student culture and peer networks, and the role of academies in developing students' social, ethnic, and political identities. The study of academies and their social milieu suggests that these institutions played a key role in the culture of education expansion. Additionally, the experiences of female academy students reveal the influence of student academy culture on the development of a form of moral and intellectual self-improvement increasingly associated with the middle class in America. The social demography of academy students and the conditions that contributed to the growth and development of New York acad-

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emies from I 820 to I 860 are explored in "Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State." Nancy Beadie's work is based on comparative data for over five hundred academies in New York State and the documentary materials of a number of individual institutions, teachers, and students. To discover the social conditions and contexts that supported academy expansion, Beadie examines the small town settings of many academies, the gender and social class backgrounds of students, and the meaning of academy attendance in the lives of students of diverse circumstances. Her essay challenges the assumption that academy students were not serious about their educations, or that they attended academies primarily for practical or instrumental reasons. She also discusses the history of the academy in the context of larger historical literatures on social class formation and education in the antebellum era, presenting a new interpretation of the significance of the antebellum academy. Drawing on the letters and diaries of several students to explore the experiences of women from middle-class or town-based families in the South, Kathryn Walbert concludes that Southern white women on the margins of antebellum plantation culture took education quite seriously, specifically articulating the value of Latin over music lessons and mathematics over hairstyles and social graces. In "Endeavor to Improve Yourself," Walbert challenges earlier studies of schooling in the South. Scholars have generally agreed that education for Southern belles was often academically rigorous, but that students and parents often failed to take that education seriously because Southern women were expected to marry and continue the plantation hierarchy rather than embark on professional lives of their own. According to this view, parents and students de-emphasized academic excellence and graduation, focusing instead on marriage prospects, the trappings of ladyhood, and ornamental grace. Walbert argues that as the postwar South became increasingly removed from the social and economic dominance of plantation agriculture, the experiences and attitudes of women like Lacy and Lea would become more and more common, paving the way for a new view of Southern women's education that emphasized intellectual activity for its own sake and the joys of self-improvement. The chapter also draws on the diary of Gertrude Clanton, the daughter of a successful Georgia planter. and the letters of Marcus Cicero Stephens, another member of the Old South elite, to explore the ways in which even the wealthiest members of plantation society may have considered education in more complex ways than previous scholarship has suggested. Concepts of self-improvement and material advancement had different meanings among various communities in the antebellum era. In "A Good and Delicious Country," Mary Mitchell explores the experiences of free children of color in a Louisiana academy. Her research for this chapter is largely based on letters written during the I 850s by male students between the ages of twelve and seventeen. The Catholic Institution opened in 1852 at the bequest of Marie Justin Couvent, a wealthy woman of color. Following the terms of Couvent's will, the school admitted children of any denomination and remained largely a secular school. In the 1850s the state of Louisiana granted annual sums to the school, but most of the institution's funding

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came from the charitable contributions of wealthy Creoles of color. Although the school's prospectus stated that every student would receive "une education pratique, morale, et religieuse," Mitchell's analysis of the letters students wrote as part of their school assignments reveals that their teachers strongly emphasized a political education along with the practical. The teachers and supporters of the Catholic Institution were among the leading French-speaking, Afro-Creole intellectuals and writers in Louisiana. With ideas inspired by the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the work of contemporary French writers, they developed a radical agenda with the objective of securing civil and political rights for people of color in the Americas. Among of the students at the Catholic Institute, the goal of self-improvement was inseparable from issues of race and politics. These students looked to emigration abroad as an opportunity for possible material advancement, rather than to employment possibilities in Louisiana. Their teachers encouraged in the students a political awareness and a sense of allegiance to other free people of color in the Atlantic World. The leaders of the Catholic Institution hoped that such an education would help sustain these children in the increasingly harsh racial environment of the Deep South prior to the Civil War.

Teachers and Institutions-Challenges and Opportunities The chapters in this section illuminate the experiences of those who taught in a variety of institutions from 1815 to 191 I. Although their experiences were very different, both of the northern teachers highlighted in the first two chapters not only founded their own academies but taught among cultural groups quite different than the ones in which they were raised. Susan Nye Hutchison spent close to thirty years teaching in the South, while Sophia Sawyer taught the Cherokee, first in mission schools in Indian Territory, and later in the Fayetteville Academy in Arkansas, an institution she established to serve both white and Cherokee students. These chapters emphasize the diversity of teacher experiences and explore several common themes: motivations to teach, the relations between teachers and their local communities, and the ideologies teachers referenced in ascribing meaning to their work. This section also investigates the role of academies as important educational strategies for oppressed minority groups seeking to provide a form of schooling not otherwise available to their youth. To this end, the last two chapters analyze the academies founded by African American communities during the Reconstruction Era in Mississippi, and the military schools established for the Chinese in the United States at beginning of the twentieth century. Teachers who traveled from one geographic region to another in search of academy positions often experienced cultural dissonance. In some cases, the relations of teachers with the their local communities evidenced varying degrees of accommodation or resistance to differing values, religious beliefs, or cultural mores. "Leaving Home to Teach" analyzes recent scholarship on those who taught in antebellum academies. Thirty-five years ago, historians generally portrayed the teachers in academies as transient and male. However, scholars from a variety of fields, working within the broad topic of gender and teaching, recently have provided a fuller understanding of

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the lives of those who taught in academies, both male and female. Tolley and Nash use entries from the diary of Northern teacher Susan Nye Hutchison as a foil for discussion of several historiographical issues arising from the secondary literature, focusing on such questions as: What ideologies did teachers reference in ascribing meaning to their work? How pervasive was the influence of local communities over the public work and private lives of teachers? How did teachers conform to community values, and how did they resist them? Their chapter clarifies the interrelation of several ideological, economic, and personal factors that influenced men and women to teach in the early nineteenth century. Additionally, Tolley and Nash present the experiences of Hutchison as a case study of the cultural dissonance, resistance, and accommodation sometimes experienced by nineteenth-century teachers transplanted from one geographic region to another. Exceptional teachers surmounted pressures to conform either to institutional authority or local community prejudice. Such was Sophia Sawyer, who founded Fayetteville Academy in Arkansas as an integrated school serving both white and Cherokee students. Her experiences as a white teacher working in mission schools serving Native Americans are explored in "Sophia Sawyer and Her Influence on Native American Education." In this chapter, Teri Castelow examines the structure and environment of the schools in which Sophia Sawyer, missionary educator of females and Native Americans, taught the Cherokee students in the missions of Tennessee and Georgia from 1823 to 1836, and later in the Fayetteville Female Seminary from 1839 to 1853. Sawyer felt a calling to Christianize and educate the Cherokee. She also displayed considerable respect for their culture, a trait that receives little mention in the descriptions of missionary teachers in many histories of white/Native American encounters. Cherokee leaders such as John Ridge recognized this dedication. In 1839, Sawyer established Fayetteville Seminary in Arkansas, enrolling both white and Native American children. She overcame community prejudice against the non-white students at the school and created a successful institution. Castelow attributes the success of Fayetteville Seminary to Sawyer's strong, independent personality, her positive experience with the Cherokee, and her previous training in Byfield Female Academy, an institution that also produced noted female educators Mary Lyon and Zilpah Grant. African American communities in Mississippi founded academies as an alternative to the schooling efforts of Northern missionary and freedmen aid associations. In "Building our Own: African American Schools in Reconstruction Mississippi," Chris Span presents a broad portrait of these academies, revealing that the rise of universal schooling for African Americans in postbellum Mississippi (1865-1875) was a multifaceted progression. Well documented are the initiatives northern missionary and freedmen aid associations played in assisting the state's freedmen in acquiring the rudiments of learning in slavery's aftermath. These efforts produced a small, but nonetheless significant, system of grassroots schools for the state's black populace, and served as a primary catalyst to the rise of universal schooling in Mississippi. Span demonstrates that the state's black populace did not wholly accept these Northernsponsored schools. Numerous Mississippi blacks chose to create their own schools-

12

Chartered Schools

with their own resources-as a response to their dissatisfaction with the schools created by Northern emissaries. These historically overlooked and virtually independent private black schools were also a critical agency to the rise of universal schooling in postbellum Mississippi. They served not just as institutions for academic instruction but also as local agencies that promoted freedmen's cultural self-expression, selfrespect, autonomy, and educational aspirations. Concomitantly, these institutions-in some instances-served as a direct challenge to the type of instruction being offered to the state's freedmen. Accordingly, this chapter explores how the rise of these virtually independent private black schools served as not only a catalyst to the rise of universal schooling in postbellum Mississippi but also as a direct challenge to the type of schooling Mississippi blacks deemed appropriate to best assist them in their transition from slavery to freedom. Excluded from public schooling in California and other states, several constituencies in the Chinese community founded the Western Military Academy in 1902 as an educational alternative for Chinese youth. Carol Huang explores the ways that diverse groups involved with multiple objectives founded the academy to provide higher schooling and military training to young Chinese men. In order to understand the social forces that facilitated the founding of this and other military academies to train the Chinese in the United States, she analyzes four aspects of the historical context: the political situation of the Qing Government in China, the status of the SinoUnited States relationship, federal policy and politics regarding United States expansion in Asia, and the social oppression of the Chinese in America. Groups and agencies that had an interest in establishing the Western Military Academy included Chinese literati, members of the Pao-Huang Hui (the Save the Emperor Society) in Canada, American adventurers and soldiers of fortune, American businessmen, Chinese revolutionaries, and members of the Chinese community in America seeking higher schooling for their sons. Many scholars have argued that academies operated either in conformity or in resistance to local community values and goals. Huang's case illustrates the ways that institutions such as military academies appear to have fulfilled, not simply local community needs or goals, but national political goals and agendas as well. Throughout the nineteenth century, military academies served as a particular type of educational institution serving national and state interests in the United States. At certain times and places in the nineteenth century, local boosters established academies incorporating some forms of drill training in order to provide military discipline as well as academic subjects. The case analyzed by Huang represents a unique manifestation of this historical trend, broadening our understanding of the range of academies operating in nineteenth and twentieth century America.

Systems-Competition, Struggle, and Transformation The chapters in this section focus on the development of educational systems, policy, and structure while they consider the impact of culture, class, and race on the evolution of higher schooling during the period from 1840 to 1925. During the postbellum

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era, different forms of higher schooling came into intense competition with each other, including non-denominational and denominational academies, coed and singlesex high schools and colleges, state and independent normal schools, and proprietary institutions devoted to everything from commerce to art. Historians, like public school reformers themselves, have tended to portray the defenders of academies and independent schools in this context as self-interested sectarians, but the chapters in this section suggest that complex stories of political, religious, ethnic, and class conflict also came into play. In some communities, the transition from academy to public high school occurred in the context of political struggle. In "From Academy to High School," Sevan Terzian and Nancy Beadie analyze the shift from academies to high schools as the dominant form of higher schooling in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on Ithaca Academy and Ithaca High School in Ithaca, New York, as a case study, they discuss the politics of this transition in one small commercial town. In 1875, Ithaca Academy conducted its final public exhibition and graduation exercises. The trustees of the institution had signed over its property and facilities to the new Ithaca High School, which opened the following academic year. The creation of the new public high school in the fall of 1875 was part of a consolidation of the local schools into a new unified town system. It also was the subject of considerable controversy in the town. For several years the plans to reorganize the local schools in this way had been the object of debate in the local newspapers. The criticisms of the new system continued for a decade after the changes were made. What were the main issues in this conflict of the shift from the academy to the high school? Who were the main proponents and opponents of the new system, and what was at stake from their different perspectives? This chapter explores these issues in the context of Ithaca Academy's history of fifty years as a highly successful institution of higher schooling. When states established normal school systems in the 1860s and 1870s, they challenged existing academies that had provided much of the regional teacher training until that time. Some academies met this challenge by successfully applying to become normal schools for their areas. Others, by contrast, actively opposed the creation of normal schools in their regions. In "Bethrothed to the State?" Chris Ogren examines this period of competition between academies and normal schools through a comparative analysis of two contrasting case studies, one in Platteville, Wisconsin, and one in Geneseo, New York. In the Geneseo case, partisans of the existing Temple Hill Academy, fearing increased competition from another institution, resisted the efforts of local leaders to secure the site of a new state normal school for their town. Ogren argues that debate over whether to establish a normal school in Geneseo could not be separated from the division between Old- and New-School Presbyterians. Temple Hill Academy, which had affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in 1849, aligned with Old-School Presbyterianism by the mid-1860s and transformed itself into a distinctly sectarian, rather than a pan-Protestant school. Although Platteville Academy also had a longstanding affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, the denominational controversies so evident in Geneseo did not form a significant part of the debates in Platteville.

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Chartered Schools

There, academy leaders and local residents apparently saw little ideological conflict between the educational aims of the academy and a state normal school, and joined efforts to secure a normal school charter. These contrasting decisions resulted in two very different sets of consequences for the institutions. Facing decreasing enrollments due to a smaller population of students interested in a specifically Old-School Presbyterian form of schooling, Temple Hill Academy closed its doors a decade after the normal school controversy in Geneseo. In contrast, the Platteville Academy, transformed into the Wisconsin State Normal School at Platteville, lived on. Although, religion has played a minimal role in the explanations given by historians for the decline of academies in the late nineteenth century, a survey of recent scholarship on Catholic educational institutions raises intriguing questions about the influence of struggles between Protestants and Catholics in the evolution of academy education in the United States. How was the development of the public high school influenced by anti-Catholicism in some communities? How did conflicts over religion contribute to the decline of academies in many areas of the country? In "Many Years Before the Mayflower," Tolley situates the development of the Catholic academies and parish high schools within the context of the broader common school and related public high school movements. She argues that in many communities with large Catholic populations, the development of publicly-funded high schools and the expansion of Catholic parish high schools occurred partly as a result of efforts by both groups to effectively promote their own ethnic identity, culture, class, and religious beliefs in opposition to the perceived educational encroachments of the other. Through a system of parish high schools, some of which provided bilingual education, Catholics sought to preserve their own culture and heritage while successfully helping their members assimilate to the larger, dominant American culture. Tolley notes that the two elements of the nineteenth-century school question-the termination of public aid to private schools and the elimination of religious instruction from public schools--continue today to generate controversy and debate.

Legacies The independent academy left many historical legacies. As institutions, academies established an infrastructure of capital assets and political and financial support for higher schooling that continues to live on today in public schools as well as in alternatives to the public system. As sites of cultural production and reproduction, academies gave expression to cultures of community boosterism, class identity, and missionary zeal as well as to cultures of ethnic and religious identity and resistance. Finally, as historical precedents, academies provide a body of evidence for considering a number of ongoing policy issues in education such as charter schools and school voucher policies, and issues of school size, teacher autonomy, school funding, local control, and church and state. In this chapter we examine each of these three sets of historical legacies of academies in tum: (l) institutional legacies; (2) cultural legacies, and (3) policy legacies.

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Most of the histories of education published before the mid-twentieth century tell a story in which the central and most important development is the creation of the public school system. In the 1960s, several scholars reproached historians of education for their uncritical depiction of schooling and for failing to consider the many influences upon children's learning apart from formal institutions. 8 While we agree with this critique, we believe that it is important to analyze the development of public schools in order to understand the formal and deliberate choices a society makes for the education of its young. However, without understanding the history and development of those institutions that served as alternatives to public schooling, our understanding of the educational choices Americans made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will always be hopelessly one-sided. The shelves of college and university libraries contain many texts focusing on the common school movement and the development of the public school system in the United States. Often an overwhelming amount of information can convey the impression that everything there is to know is already known. We believe, however, that sometimes it is important to locate places where there have been silences, where stories have been untold. Sometimes the story is woefully incomplete until all sides have spoken. Placing the academy at center stage in the history of higher schooling restores our capacity to appreciate the alternatives to the "one best system" that eventually achieved dominance in the twentieth century. Academies have remained an important grassroots educational strategy for various groups seeking greater choice in their children's schooling, whether to promote their religion, language, and culture, or to provide a different curriculum than that available in public schools. As educational institutions largely unregulated by local or state governments, twentieth-century academies have represented a far broader spectrum of ideological and political beliefs than have their public school counterparts. On the one hand, schools such as those established by the Freedmen in postbellum Mississippi and the Chinese western military academies founded at the tum of the century aimed to provide alternatives for ethnic and religious populations excluded from, or oppressed by, the public schools. On the other hand, academies founded by segregationist groups in some areas of the South after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to avoid public school integration by creating alternative, all-white private schools. 9 With the expansion of the public school system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the academy has continued to play a role as an educational option for a wide range of communities in the United States, whether as an alternative to perceived oppressive educational practices, or as a means of circumventing civil rights laws and policies. Focusing on the academy thus highlights issues of class, culture, and race in the history of American education.

NOTES I.

News clipping, 'The Academy: the Forerunner" in M.C.S. Noble Papers, fol. 37, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For discussion of academies founded by Catholic teaching orders, see Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the

16

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Chartered Schools Education of American Catholic Women, I860-I920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987). There existed a great deal of variation from one institution to the next. Some of the academies discussed in this volume limited enrollments to students older than twelve, others served students between the ages of eight and eighteen, and others admitted any scholars able to pay, regardless of age. Henry Barnard, "Educational Statistics of the United States in 1850," American Journal of Education, I (1855), 368. George S. Boutwell, "The Relative Merits of Public High Schools and Endowed Academies" (1857), in The Age of the Academies, ed. Theodore Sizer (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964), 156. For example, William Reese noted that academies and private schools were an important source of educational innovation in eighteenth-century Boston. When public high schools emerged in the nineteenth century, they continued to offer many of the pedagogical practices and subjects that had first appeared in these earlier institutions. William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 5. For instance, in her investigation of the opportunities available to women in higher education, Barbara Solomon acknowledged that the academies played an important role in offering both liberal and vocational opportunities to a range of nineteenth-century women during a period when colleges and universities had not yet opened their doors to females. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Theodore Sizer, The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964). See Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1965). Michael Fuquay, "Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi," History of Education Quarterly 42 (Summer 2002), in press.

Institutions: Origins and Purposes

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Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1727-1850 KIM TOLLEY

In a report on the educational statistics of the United States for I 850, Henry Barnard claimed there existed more than 6, I 00 incorporated academies, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the colleges. 1 Contemporary supporters portrayed academies as exemplifying the era's commitment to enlightenment and learning, whereas opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Today, historians generally agree that during the nineteenth century, academies provided the first form of higher education for American women. However, there is less agreement among scholars about the origins of these institutions, their structure, curriculum, or general historical significance apart from the field of women's education.Z What was an academy? To what extent did schools calling themselves academies represent a distinctly new turn in the history of American education? To address such questions, this chapter explores the differences and similarities among a number of institutions that provided some form of higher schooling to Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The term higher schooling denotes any advanced variety of formal education beyond the common school level apart from that offered in colleges and universities. Such modem terms as elementary, secondary, and higher education are not particularly useful for the historian of education, because although the academies most closely fit the middle category, they overlapped all three. By clarifying the relations between the various types of institutions during the post-colonial period, I theorize that the historical significance of the early academy movement is far broader than the intellectual or curricular reform discussed in much of the secondary literature.

Working Definitions There exists some confusion in published secondary sources about the nature of the diverse educational institutions during the late eighteenth century. For instance, some authors refer to a dame school as an institution providing only rudimentary instruction in reading and writing to very young children, while other authors refer to any institution run by a woman as a dame school, even one providing relatively advanced

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Chartered Schools

instruction to older students. To understand the origins of the academies, it is important to comprehend the educational institutions that preceded them. Because the terms venture school, dame school, academy, and seminary are often used interchangeably in the existing secondary literature, the following discussion begins with a number of working definitions. A venture school is defined here as an institution supported entirely by tuition. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century venture schools were entrepreneurial in nature, characterized by market supply and demand. Both male and female venture school instructors marketed their services to prospective students through newspaper advertisements. The sample of eighty-one venture schools analyzed for this study placed newspaper advertisements during the period from 1808 to 1842. Although many venture schools offered instruction in just one or two subjects, such as dancing, languages, navigation and surveying, or needlework, the schools discussed in this paper claimed to offer a diverse curriculum that went beyond the basic studies of reading, writing, and spelling. 3 A dame school was a specific type of venture school, often run by a woman in her own home. Dame schools enabled students to gain a basic literacy necessary to read Bible passages, knowledge of simple sums, and skill in sewing. 4 In some cases the daughters of freedmen had similar opportunities to obtain a rudimentary education in dame or town schools, although in the South the education of slaves was subject to the disposition of the master. Various religious groups sponsored church schools to provide a basic education in literacy, numeracy, and religion. Such institutions as Church-sponsored grammar schools, parson's schools, charity schools, and Sunday schools fall into this category. Anglican ministers conducted parson's schools in the Chesapeake region during the eighteenth century. In Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, Anglican ministers provided basic instruction to the children of local parishioners, often for a small fee. In contrast to the custom in England, colonial parishes rarely used parish funds to pay for the tuition of poor students. 5 In an attempt to fill this gap, missionary societies provided free instruction to indigent children in the northern, middle, and southern colonies through the work of charity schools. For instance, the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts established approximately 170 missionary stations from New Hampshire to Georgia before the Revolution. More than eighty teachers worked in such stations, instructing children in the fundamentals of Anglicanism and basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. 6 After the Revolution, prototypes of the first American Sunday schools began in Philadelphia, established by the ecumenical First Day Society in 1791. The Society aimed to offer poor working children the opportunity to learn basic reading and religion. In 1796, the Methodist evangelist Francis Asbury urged his fellow preachers to establish Sabbath schools for the benefit of the children of the poor. Other denominations followed suit. Some Sunday schools hired paid teachers, while others were staffed by volunteers who taught reading, writing, and religion to poor or black children, many of whom were excluded from other schools. According to Anne M. Boylan, girls unable to attend publicly funded schools in the 181 Os and 1820s learned basic literacy in Sunday schools.

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Excluded from other means of obtaining free schooling, African Americans enrolled in Sunday schools. In New York, for example, blacks represented 25 percent of the pupils in the Sunday-School Union Society's schools by 1817. In 1819, approximately two-thirds of the adults in Philadelphia Sunday and Adult School Union schools were black. In the South as well, reports from such cities as Nashville, Charleston, and St. Louis mentioned schools that included blacks, usually instructed in separate classes and at different times than white students.7 Town schools appeared in northern and southern local communities during the eighteenth century. Town schools were governed by an elected group and received varying degrees of financial support from local and often state grants. Like church schools, such institutions provided a basic education in literacy and numeracy. Following the colonial General Court's injunction for grammar schools to prepare youth for the university, a few of the larger towns established Latin grammar schools for boys already able to read. Although they are often characterized in the secondary literature as providing instruction exclusively in the classics, Latin schools offered many subjects, including English composition and literature, mathematics, philosophy, Greek, and some science. 8 Nevertheless, in such schools as Boston Latin Grammar School, boys spent six or seven years reading Latin texts. Middle- and upper-class parents desirous of providing a relatively advanced classical training for their sons enrolled them in local Latin grammar schools either in preparation for college, or to attain the gentlemanly polish necessary to maintain or improve their social status. 9 Well before the Revolution, however, it was clear that such institutions served only the privileged and the very few destined for college. Increasing numbers of communities began to support English grammar schools with the goal of offering instruction in such basic subjects as reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic. By the close of the century, the curricula of many town and church schools expanded to include more advanced subjects such as geography. 10 Kathryn Kish Sklar has documented the popular discontent with Northampton's Latin grammar school, where a town meeting in 1756 ordered the schoolmaster to "Spend no more Time with ye Latin Scholars than their Equal proportion with other Scholars." 11 By mid-eighteenth century, even Boston's famous classical school faced increasing competition from local English grammar and venture schools. According to William Reese, by the mid-eighteenth century, Latin grammar schools had declined to such an extent that the colony's famous laws requiring towns to establish classical grammar schools were essentially dead letters. 12 In contrast to a town, church, or venture school, an academy is defined here as an institution providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. Academies were founded by religious groups, local communities, counties, fraternal and educational societies, colleges and universities, and by private individuals. Academies can be distinguished from other institutions on the basis of their administrative structure, their relatively private form of control, and their curriculum. An academy's articles of incorporation usually stipulated the formation of a board of self-perpetuating

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Chartered Schools

or otherwise relatively independent trustees responsible for control of policy and oversight. During the early nineteenth century, educators also used the term seminary to denote such an institution, although there are no clear institutional differences to help scholars distinguish the two. 13 This is not to say that every nineteenth-century school calling itself an academy fit these criteria. It is likely that in some cases, administrators of venture schools simply attached the word "academy" to the name of their school in order to enhance the institution's prestige. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this study, a school's articles of incorporation, administrative structure and financial resources, rather than its title, determine whether or not it falls into the category of an academy. Many schools designated as institutes belong in this category, including the mechanics' institutes established by local mechanics' associations during the early nineteenth century. The sample of 147 academies analyzed for this study published school catalogs and in some instances placed newspaper advertisements during the period from 1794 to 1842. 14

Geographic Distribution We know enough about the distribution of academies throughout the country to make some tentative generalizations based on recent research. Some of the largest collections of academy material are found in Northeastern archives. Perhaps this fact alone has led some scholars to conclude that the first academies originated in the North, but this is not the case. Religious groups founded many of the earliest academies in both Northern and Southern states. Various teaching orders in the Catholic Church established academies in the early seventeenth century, particularly in the Catholic colony of Maryland and in the French and Spanish territories. 15 The Moravians opened a number of academies for women in the Mid-Atlantic states during the mid-eighteenth century. 16 Some of the first academies endeavored to train students for the ministry. For instance, Irish Presbyterian ministers established schools in pre-revolutionary America to serve the sons of Irish Presbyterians in the middle and southern colonies. According to Elizabeth Nybakken, more than forty-four such academies existed before 1775. 17 Because religious denominations founded many of the colonial academies, it is important to qualify the view, often expressed in published texts, that academies arose in response to a growing mercantile economy. Seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury colonial academies provided a form of higher schooling to serve the professional needs of the ministry and the religious and educational needs of laypeople. In terms of creating a timeline, we might consider the colonial phase of the academy movement to have lasted roughly from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. The institution that proliferated in response to increasing commercialism in the colonies appears to have been the venture school, and as the following discussion will show, the next phase of the academy movement saw many preexisting venture schools incorporate as academies.

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Although historians typically date the academy era as extending from the American Revolution to the Civil War, relatively few new academies emerged during the decade of the Revolutionary War. Most local communities focused on issues other than higher education during the 1780s. The documentary evidence examined for this study indicates that the greatest expansion of academies began during the last decade of the eighteenth century. This period, running roughly from 1790 to the Civil War, we might consider the heyday of the academy movement. During the heyday of the movement, academies spread throughout all areas of the country. Ohio incorporated roughly 100 academies between 1803 and 1840, and Illinois chartered at least 125 between 1818 and 1848. By the 1830s, both Indiana and Iowa established "County Seminaries" built on land granted by the state. During the years from 1800 to 1840, newspaper advertisements in Southern states such as North Carolina and Virginia indicate that Northern teachers emigrated to teach at new and expanding academies in the South. By the 1830s, there were as many as twenty-four incorporated academies in Alabama and fifty-five in Virginia. 18 Teachers from wellknown female seminaries, Troy and Mount Holyoke for example, traveled from the Northeast to all regions of the country as demand for their services increased. Texas had ninety-seven academies by 1850. 19 The distribution of academies in the nineteenth century evidenced some regional variation. States that provided some form of legislative or financial support to academies appear to have experienced a greater increase in the number of these institutions than states where the support was minimal or nonexistent. For example, New York had incorporated forty academies by 1817, a number that rose over the subsequent two decades. One reason New York invested money in academies was to train teachers for the growing common schools. In 1827 the state designated funds for academies to train teachers in special departments, and in the mid-1830s it mandated an academy with a pedagogical department in each senatorial district. 20 In contrast, territories that joined the union relatively late in the century seem to have focused their efforts primarily on the development of public secondary schools rather than academies. For instance, in California, the school that is recorded as being the first to be opened in the newly acquired territory was a small venture school established in 1846. The school served approximately twentyfive students and operated for a mere two months. Six years later, California had its first female academy. Managed by an all-male board of trustees, the Young Ladies Seminary opened in Benecia in 1852 "for the higher education of the daughters of the pioneer families of California without the necessity of making the long ocean voyage to New York and severing family ties." 21 During the next several decades, however, Californians devoted their energies to the establishment of public high schools rather than academies.22 Events in Utah followed a similar course. The first schools providing a form of secondary education were venture schools. The Union Academy, an institution for boys and young men, was established by Orson Pratt in 1860 with an appropriation from the Mormon Church council and the support of Bringham Young. Tuition at the academy was free, but the school closed after eleven years because of lack of patronage. 23

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From Venture School to Academy To understand how the academies evolved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, it is important to explore the relationship between the academies and the early venture schools. In his landmark essay, The Age of the Academies, Theodore Sizer referred only briefly to venture schools, characterizing them as ephemeral, "shadowy enterprises limited in their purpose and as private as the Latin school had been public."24 Until recently, there existed little published research on venture schools, and the nature of their relation to the academies was thus unexplored. Following Sizer, scholars have viewed academies as representing a distinct break with the traditional classical education offered in the earlier Latin grammar schools. However, during the colonial period, denominational academies by and large offered the kind of classical instruction common to institutions aiming to train students for the ministry. A few early reformers argued that academies should be established to promote useful learning. Examples that are often cited in the secondary literature include Benjamin Franklin's call in 1747 for an English (as opposed to a Latin or a classical) academy that would teach both the sciences and the ornaments, 25 and Benjamin Rush's shortlived chemistry course at the Young Ladies' Academy in Philadelphia in 1787. 26 Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, such experimental academies were the exception rather than the rule. The eighteenth-century institution commonly providing some form of higher schooling in "useful and practical subjects" was the venture school. Within the context of a rapidly expanding mercantile economy, eighteenthcentury educational entrepreneurs established venture schools to attract students seeking more specialized study or an education more suited to business. In both rural and urban areas boys, and sometimes girls, could receive instruction from private schoolmasters or in venture schools, institutions that provided instruction in whatever subjects students paid to study. For example, Robert Leeth's school placed an advertisement in the New York Gazette-Weekly Post Boy in 1751, offering instruction to both sexes in "two handsome Rooms, with Fire-places, the one for Boys and the other for Girls.'m Newspaper advertisements of this period reveal a plethora of venture schools calling themselves "day schools," "evening schools," "select schools," "boarding schools," and so on. After the Revolution, venture schools proliferated to meet the needs of an expanding population. Many venture schools offered instruction at a variety of times during the day and evening. Some schools opened as early as 5:00A.M. and closed as late as 9:00 P.M. in order to accommodate the needs of working students. While rural venture schools offered such traditional instruction in elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic, venture schools located in towns and commercial areas commonly offered a larger range of subjects, including the classics and technical courses including surveying, navigation, astronomy, geography, geometry, trigonometry, penmanship, accounting, and mapmaking. For instance, in 1824 the American Mercury in Hartford, Connecticut, carried advertisements for a number of venture schools,

Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling

25

including one calling itself simply "A New School." The New School offered instruction for boys in "reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography and history, mathematicks [sic], surveying, navigation, and mensuration." Students had to pay an additional charge for the last four subjects. 28 The Mercury also carried advertisements for "Mrs. Whale's Dancing School," offering "separate times for men and ladies",29 a Writing Academy in which students learned the "Mercantile Running Hand" in 14 lessons, 30 a Music School, 31 and a variety of institutions billing themselves as schools "for young ladies". 32 Newspapers in both Northern and Southern states carried similar advertisements during the early nineteenth century. Sizer depicted venture schools as "usually one-man enterprises," but recent scholarship on women and education has revealed that women founded many venture schools. 33 In many cases, women opened venture schools in order to support themselves financially through teaching. Cases well known to historians include the Beecher sisters, Mary Lyon, Sarah Pierce, Zilpah Grant, Emma Willard, and others. More obscure examples are easily found in archival sources, such as the case of the Nash and Lollock Select Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies in Hillsboro, North Carolina. The school originated after the death of Judge Frederick Nash in 1858. Judge Nash left an estate too small to support adequately his wife and two daughters, Sally Lollock and Maria Jane. As a result, the judge's daughters decided to open a school in their home at Hillsboro. 34 Married women also opened venture schools on occasion. For example, Susan Nye Hutchison, formerly a teacher at Raleigh Female Academy in North Carolina, returned to teaching during a period when her family faced financial ruin. After her husband lost the good part of his fortune speculating on the cotton market in 1827, she wrote in her diary that "My husband spoke with great feeling of his continued losses and expressed his wish that I should return to town to open a school." 35 Venture schools served a variety of students. On the one hand, some venture schools providing higher schooling catered to the children of elites. In this category falls Murat's Select Boarding School for Young Ladies, whose students came from notable families in distant places such as the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Spain. As a means of making a living, Lucien and Caroline Murat founded this school in Bordentown, New Jersey. Lucien Murat was the son of Napoleon Bonaparte's cavalry leader, Joachim Murat, the Grand Duke of Berg and later King of Naples and Sardinia. According to a former student at the school, during the 1830s there were no more than sixteen boarders in addition to day students from the village. 36 During the 1840s the school's enrollments decreased, in part perhaps due to the success of the local Diocesan school. The elitism and social class bias of the Murat's school is revealed in a letter from Jane W. Fraser, an instructress at the school and the sister of Caroline Murat. While bemoaning the increasing success of the local Diocesan school "with its overpowering patronage," Fraser complained that "few are there who consider the evils of bringing up a girl with more than one hundred others of different stations, manners and principles." 37 At the other end of the spectrum, some venture schools catered to workers in manufacturing or business, seeking evening students interested in gaining

Chartered Schools

26

literacy and improving technical skills. The following advertisement for an evening school in North Carolina is fairly representative: The subscriber will open an Evening School ... [where] will be taught Reading, Writing, English Grammar, Geography, Arithmetic, Trigonometry, Mesuration of Surfaces and Solids, Navigation and Surveying. 38 There currently exists a great deal of confusion in secondary sources concerning the distinction between venture schools and academies. For example, historians frequently claim that Sarah Pierce founded Litchfield Academy in 1792, 39 and that Catharine and Mary Beecher opened an academy in Hartfield, Connecticut, in 1823. 40 Both of these statements are inaccurate. In 1792, Sarah Pierce opened a school for girls in the dining room of her home in Litchfield, Connecticut. During the next several years, students and townspeople referred to the school as "Sarah Pierce's School," "Miss Pierce's School for Girls," or "The Litchfield School for Young Ladies." While scholars often refer to this little venture school as the Litchfield Female Academy, the school was not incorporated as an academy until 1827. 41 Similarly, Catharine and Mary Beecher opened a school in 1823, placing newspaper advertisements to attract students. Newspaper advertisements show that the Beechers called this institution "Catharine and Mary Beecher's School for Girls." 42 This small school, located over a harness shop on Main Street in Hartford, was clearly an entrepreneurial effort, deriving its support from tuition without an established board of trustees. Historians of education generally have depicted the academies as representing a distinct break with the earlier venture schools. However, in many cases, academies established in the nineteenth century arose from preexisting venture schools during the postcolonial period. Venture schools could become academies through acts of state legislation or through incorporation by the local town government, private supporters, or church groups.

The Founding of Academies A school bearing the name "academy," "seminary," or "institute" differed from a venture school in having some form of financial support other than tuition, articles of incorporation, and the oversight of a board of trustees. Incorporating a venture school as an academy provided benefits both to the academy's founders and to the community. For the founders, a source of revenue in addition to tuition allowed for the purchase of additional educational resources and the possible construction of new and larger buildings. For the community, the incorporation of an academy guaranteed a greater continuity of educational services. In contrast to the venture schools, which appeared and disappeared depending on the number of available students or the whim of the instructors, the financial stability of the incorporated academies provided a greater likelihood of survival and growth. Additionally, the creation of a Board of

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Trustees ensured a larger degree of accountability to the community, because the board not only provided input in the selection of the school's curriculum and the hiring of teachers, but often assisted in overseeing public examinations of the students at regular intervals during the school year. Some states facilitated or promoted the organization of academies through legislation. One of the earliest examples of legislative support occurred in colonial North Carolina. In 1764, Thomas Tomlison opened a venture school in the town of New Bern. Having a keen interest in the enterprise, in 1766 the Reverend James Reed began to solicit support for the incorporation of the school as an academy. "Twould give me great satisfaction to see a little flourishing academy in this place," wrote Reed. As a result of his advocacy, that year a Mr. Cogdell introduced a bill in the Colonial Assembly to incorporate the school. The bill passed and became the first charter issued to a private school in the colony of North Carolina, and the second in the English colonies after Philadelphia's Franklin Academy (1753). In 1784, the school changed its name from New Bern School to New Bern Academy. By the end of the century, the legislature had granted charters to thirty-four academies, two of which, Martin Academy and Davidson Academy, were located in Tennessee. 43 Several states followed suit. For example, New York established a Board of Regents to oversee education within the state in the late eighteenth century. The Regents administered funds for the support of academies, periodically inspected the schools, and required regular reports. In 1806, Tennessee received a congressional grant of 100,000 acres of federal land with the stipulation that funds raised from the sale of this property should be used for the benefit of state-sponsored county academies. The state then established an academy fund along with a college and common-school fund. 44 During the early nineteenth century a number of states, including Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, and Texas, provided for the founding of academies as a part of the public school system. For example, in 1818 Indiana's state legislature passed a law entitled "An act respecting public seminaries, and for other purposes." In accordance with this law, later cited as the "County Seminary Law of 1818," the governor had the power to appoint a trustee in each county responsible for using county funds to support a local seminary. 45 Local supporters either provided or solicited the financial backing necessary to incorporate a venture school as an academy. In Texas, more than half of the institutions chartered by the state legislature were promoted by local leaders in towns and villages. In many cases where academies were founded, a group of influential citizens formed joint stock companies and sold shares to the public. 46 In more rural areas, wealthy farmers or planters sometimes banded together to incorporate an academy. For example, Warrenton Female Academy in North Carolina originated as a venture school started by a Mrs. Turner. According to a former teacher at the academy, Mrs. Turner's husband "was not of the accumulative kind, and she had resorted to this method of obtaining a living." The school served both day students from the town and boarders, primarily planters' daughters from the surrounding country. "[Mrs. Turner] ran the school quite successfully for a few years, and at her death, some of the planters around Warrenton purchased and continued the school." 47

28

Chartered Schools

Mechanics' institutes followed the academy model both in terms of financial support and administrative structure. Most received some kind of initial endowment or ongoing grant from a local mechanics' association. A Committee on Instruction appointed by the sponsoring association usually provided administrative and policy oversight for the school. According to Edward W. Stevens, between 1818 and 1850 there existed approximately one hundred mechanics' institutes and libraries in the North, Midwest, and South. The general goal of mechanics' institutes was to offer a blended liberal and technical program so that technical expertise and upward social mobility could be attained by both apprentices and adult workers. Many institutes conducted a variety of educational activities, including day and evening classes, lyceum lectures, and demonstrations. Although some associations provided charity schools to teach basic skills to the children of mechanics, institutes generally charged tuition for higher studies. For instance, in 1826 students enrolled in the high school of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute paid seven dollars per quarter to learn English, elocution, and mathematics; elective subjects included geography, linear drawing, French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, and chemistry. 48 Military academies represented both state and national interests. Several states founded academies close to state armories, such as the State Seminary of Learning and Military of Louisiana. In such cases, academy students often served as guards of the states' munitions. 49 The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, was created in 1802 to provide trained military engineers for the new Republic and to develop officers capable of leading troops to battle. From its founding, West Point Academy came under fire from congressional critics who urged elimination of the school and transfer of its officer training responsibilities to state institutions. Although the Academy fell into additional disfavor in the North when large numbers of its graduates joined the Confederacy after the outbreak of the Civil War, the Academy survived as a school aiming to serve national rather than regional interests. 50 Some institutes received endowments from private individuals. For example, in Philadelphia, Quaker goldsmith Richard Humphreys left a bequest in 1832 for "The benevolent design of instructing the descendants of the African Race" in such subjects as mechanics, trades, and agriculture. After a failed experiment with a short-lived farm school, the Board of Managers met in 1848 to discuss the idea of apprenticing students to black mechanics. A group of black tradesmen proposed apprenticing the students by day and opening an evening school so that black youth could receive a higher schooling comparable to that of white students in Philadelphia. In response, the Quaker Board gave the black tradesmen authority to form a Board of Education Auxiliary and to select teachers and students and provide oversight to the project. Within a month after opening in 1849, the school enrolled thirty students. Thus originated the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. 51 In 1848, philanthropist Sarah King Peter already had founded the Philadelphia School of Design for Women with the goal of providing design training for "respectable" women required to support themselves. 5 2 Nineteenth-century religious zeal contributed to the expansion of academy education. In addition to local communities, counties, fraternal and educational societies,

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and private individuals, religious groups founded academies. During the period historians call the Second Great Awakening, from 1795 to 1837, such religious denominations as the Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and others increased their efforts to evangelize through education. These efforts were often more competitive than cooperative. As soon as one denomination established an academy or institute in a growing town, another would found a competing institution. In 1859 the town of Marshall, Texas, included a university, a select boarding and day school, Marshall Grove Academy, Marshall Masonic Female Institute, Marshall Republican Academy, and Marshall Collegiate Institute. Since the town of Marshall boasted a total population of only 1,411 that year, the competition for enrollments must have been acute. 5 3 Even in the ostensibly nondenominational institutions, religion had its place in the curriculum. In contrast to the many of the eighteenth-century academies, some of the newly founded nineteenth-century academies were broadly Protestant but nonsectarian. For example, the 1835 prospectus of Mount Holyoke Seminary stated that the school would "raise among the female part of the community a higher standard of science and literature, of economy and of refinement, of benevolence and religion." 54 Such claims could potentially attract students from a variety of religious backgrounds and still assuage the concerns of parents who desired some blandly Protestant form of moral and religious education for their children. Catholics founded some of the earliest colonial academies, including the Ursuline Convent School in New Orleans, established in 1727. In the Southwest from the colonial period until 1848, when Mexico surrendered large portions of its territory to the United States, students of Hispanic background in New Mexico and the Mexican Americans of California and Texas had access to higher schooling in the academies operated by the various Catholic teaching orders. Prior to 1840, conditions in sections of the country other than the Catholic colonies were not always favorable to the early development of Catholic schools. For example, sixteen years after the Ursulines opened St. Benedict's Academy in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1820, it was leveled to the ground by a mob of rioters. In spite of regional and episodic sectarian strife, however, the Catholic academies attracted a fairly interdenominational clientele throughout the antebellum era. For example, Protestants comprised one-third to one-half of the boarders at the Society of the Sacred Heart's Academy in frontier St. Louis in 1834. 55 Some academies were distinguished by visits from noted Protestant statesmen. President James Madison officiated at the commencement exercises of the Visitation Academy at Georgetown, and in 1825 Henry Clay distributed diplomas at the commencement of Nazareth Academy in Kentucky. 56 The number of Catholic academies increased also from the 1840s, numbering over 660 by the century's end. After 1840, a wave of emigration from Europe brought increasing numbers of Catholics to the United States, and the Catholic population grew more than fourfold from 1840 to 1860. During these years the number of Catholic academies roughly quadrupled in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, Missouri, and Indiana. 57 Newspaper advertisements placed by Catholic academies

30

Chartered Schools

show a great deal of similarity to the advertisements of non-Catholic academies and venture schools. For example, in 1842 the Carmelite Sisters' Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, advertised instruction in such Enlightenment subjects as bookkeeping, botany, natural philosophy, astronomy, natural history, and Italian. Sacred History is the only subject appearing in the academy's advertisement indicating the presence of religion in the curriculum. 58 During the nineteenth century, colleges and universities founded or established special relationships with academies that served as preparatory departments. Reportedly, in 1889 approximately 83 percent of nearly 400 institutions of higher education supported a preparatory department. 59 According to Geraldine Clifford, early institutions in California competed for the same small supply of academy and high school graduates and the privately tutored, and all enrolled more preparatory than college students. For example, in 1852 the head of Santa Clara College stated that "we do not now claim for it even the name of a college," being rather "a select boarding and day school." In 1875, a mere third of its 275 students were enrolled in college courses. 60

The Curriculum To what extent can academies be distinguished from other institutions on the basis of their curricula? Most of the standard history texts claim that academies represented a significant curricular break from the relatively narrow schooling that previously had been available to students in the early Latin grammar schools. 61 After thirty-five years of additional scholarship on the curricula available in academies, to what extent does this thesis still stand? Before addressing this question, it is important to recognize that academies served many purposes throughout the nineteenth century. Various individuals and constituencies established academies to provide a professional education, to prepare students for college, to socialize young men and women into the middle or upper classes, or to provide useful, practical training in order to develop a skilled local workforce. Often, individual institutions had multiple purposes. To increase their appeal to a broader range of students, some academies offered both the kind of vocational training designed to draw those interested in the professions and the more traditional studies associated with preparation for college, all under the same roof. Even institutions that targeted specialized forms of knowledge occasionally catered to both ends of the educational spectrum. For example, in 1854 the Board of Directors for the Philadelphia School of Design for Women developed a tuition fee schedule with a sliding scale for three categories of students: those who studied "for accomplishment" or self-improvement with no desire or intention of becoming self-supporting; those who enrolled with the goal of attaining a professional career in art; and those who planned professional careers but could not afford even the lowest tuition rate. 62 Generally speaking, postcolonial academies offered a broader range of subjects than either the Latin grammar schools or the denominational academies established during the colonial period. Newspaper advertisements placed by academies often

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listed the traditional subjects of English, Latin, Greek, declamation, writing, and arithmetic, and some portion of the newer subjects of French, geography, logic, geometry, and natural philosophy or astronomy. 63 However, when compared with preceding institutions, it can be argued that the curricula of the academies also evidenced a great deal of continuity. Many of the larger nineteenth-century academies continued the tradition of colonial academies and the Latin grammar schools by maintaining a separate department in which students could pursue the classical course of study. For instance, in 1836 Hemdon Academy in North Carolina offered both a "Classical Department" and an "English Department," with different rates of tuition for each, payable in advance. Tuition for "common English scholars" was $7.50 per session, whereas tuition for "Latin or Greek Scholars" was $12.50. 64 Although there is insufficient research on Latin grammar schools to be able to draw any general conclusions, some academies originated as Latin grammar schools. For instance, in New York Schenectady Academy (1771), Washington Seminary (1776), and Farmer's Hall (1784), developed as classical schools first and later broadened their curricula to attract a larger student population. 65 Some institutions established for the purpose of professional training eliminated the classics from their curricula, but others did not. When Henry 0. Flipper attended West Point Military Academy from 1873 to 1877, classical subjects did not appear in the four-year course of study. Flipper's studies included such subjects as mathematics, French, Spanish, natural and experimental philosophy, mineralogy, chemistry, practical military engineering, ordnance and gunnery, and tactics of artillery, cavalry, and infantry. Moreover, school policy after 1812 emphasized applied knowledge over lecturing, with the result that students regularly worked on assigned problems such as the throwing and dismantling of pontoon bridges. 66 Neither did Latin or Greek appear in the curriculum of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where those seeking the polish of an accomplished lady enrolled in "fine arts" and those seeking a means of becoming self-supporting enrolled either in "commercial design" or in "normal art" for teachers. 67 Although Latin may not have appeared among the subjects offered at either of these institutions, the subject increasingly became a hallmark of intellectual accomplishment and a perceived means of attaining social mobility in some nineteenth-century professional institutions. For instance, in his study of mechanics' institutes, Edward W. Stevens Jr. noted that the founders of the Franklin Institute (1824) viewed classical study as the traditional prerogative of "children of the rich" and deliberately included classical subjects in the Institute's high school department in order to promote the upward social mobility of their pupils. 68 Similarly, in her study of Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, Linda Perkins notes the addition of Latin and Greek to the curriculum by 1857. 69 Although many scholars have portrayed academies as institutions that emphasized practical, useful subjects as opposed to the classics, Latin remained one of the three subjects most frequently appearing in academy courses of study throughout most of the nineteenth century. Why did Latin persist in the curriculum? In trying to explain this phenomenon, Theodore Sizer theorized that perhaps the knowledge of Latin lent stature to

32

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young men, even on the frontier. 70 However, because he did not examine female schooling separately, Sizer overlooked a national trend in female and coeducational academies. Rather than remaining steady, Latin enrollments in these institutions gradually increased. This was not a phenomenon occurring in a small number of institutions, because at midcentury, the majority of pupils in higher schools were females, not males. 71 The turn to Latin in female schools occurred in both Northern and Southern states, as evidenced by local newspaper advertisements and school catalogs. In Massachusetts, Westford Academy included Latin and Greek in its curriculum in 1792. The school was open to students of any nationality, age, or sex who could "read in the Bible readily without spelling." 72 Although a small number of schools began to include the classics in their advertised courses of study, it is difficult to know how many female students actually enrolled in Latin or Greek during the first decades of the nineteenth century. A sample of three coeducational schools that offered Latin to female students suggests that very few females in New England may have actually studied Latin before 1830 (see Table 1). When Mary Lyon established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, she offered students the option of studying Latin, and according to a former student, by "1840, about one-fourth of the pupils were voluntarily pursuing it." 73 Including Latin by degrees in order to avoid offending certain members of the community, the trustees of Mount Holyoke required the subject for the first time in the 1846-47 school year, noting that although the Seminary had originally planned to require Latin in the course of study from its founding, "it has been necessary to accommodate to the general views of the community on female education, and to the desire of many parents to finish the education of their daughters just at the age, when they have acquired strength of constitution enough to begin hard study." 74

Table 1 Latin Enrollments in Three New England Coeducational Schools, 1822-1830 Males

Females

Latin students/ Latin students/ Total Enrollment Percentage Total Enrollment Percentage Monson Academy, 1822 Wesleyan Academy, 1828 Sheldon English and Classical School, 1830

24/67

36%

0/18

0%

34/105

32%

3/58

1%

26176

34%

5172

1%

Sources: Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Wesleyan Academy (Wilbraham, Massachusetts, !828); The Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Sheldon English & Classical School (Southampton, Massachusetts, !830); Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Monson Academy (Connecticut, !822) 75

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In North Carolina, female academies and venture schools increasingly mentioned Latin after 1810 (see Table 2). Initially, female schools offered Latin as an elective subject. In North Carolina, the female department of North Carolina's Raleigh Academy included Latin, French, music, painting, and needlework as electives in its course of study in 1811, as did New Bern Academy in 1823. 76 Although evidence is sketchy, the study of Latin may have been more prevalent in some areas of the country than in others. As shown in Table 3, 42 percent of a sample of female higher schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland included Latin in their advertised courses of study from 1820 to 1842, in contrast to 13 percent in Virginia.7 7 In her history of women's education in the antebellum South, Christie Farnham claims that Latin appeared more frequently in Southern female schools than in Northern institutions. In her study, Farnham draws on a small sample of five North Carolina schools. While the data in this study might support the speculation that females studied Latin in North Carolina earlier than did their counterparts in some areas of New England, the discrepancy in the results for Virginia and North Carolina make it impossible to draw more general conclusions without further study. Why did authorities in both Northern and Southern female schools begin to include Latin in their courses of study? Some educators promoted the study of Latin for its presumed ability to discipline the mind or to develop habits of patience and perseverance. "How much patience is needed to get one lesson in Latin,'' asserted educator John Todd in 1854, "or to make a single good recitation in algebra!" 78 Educators also viewed the subject as a vehicle for enhancing their schools' status and prestige and as a means of making their institutions more comparable to male academies. For example, in 1838, the well-known educator Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps proclaimed that the object of her school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, was "to furnish females with the means of acquiring a liberal education, coinciding, as far as the varying conditions of the two sexes will admit, with a collegiate course for the other sex." 79 Pursuing a so-called collegiate course involved some study of the classics. Another important social development fueling the rise of Latin among females was the opening of new institutions for women bearing the designation of "college." Some scholars have dismissed these early attempts at postsecondary education, viewing them

Table 2 Percentage of North Carolina Female Higher Schools Advertising Latin, 1800-1830 Year

Percentage

1800-1809 (6 schools) 1810-1819 (12 schools) 1820-1830 (24 schools)

0% 17% 21%

Source: Data compiled from newspaper advertisements included in North Carolina Schools and Academies 1790-1840: A Documentary History, ed. Charles L. Coon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915).

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34

Table 3 Percentage of Female Higher Schools Offering Latin Before 1840 in Selected States Dates

Sample size

States

Schools Offering Latin

1750-1829 1820-1830 1835-1838 1820-1842

36 24 31 24

Pennsylvania North Carolina Virginia Massachusetts; Connecticut; New York; Maryland

5(14%) 5(21%) 4(13%) 10 (42%)

Sources: Newspaper advertisements published in the Richmond Enquirer, 1835 to 1838; James Mulhern, A History of Secondary Education in Pennsylvania (New York: Arno Press, I 969), 428; Newspaper advertisements included in North Carolina Schools and Academies, 1790-1840: A Documentary History, ed. Charles L. Coon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915); Newspaper advertisements included in American Mercury, 1820 to 1828; Daily National1ntelligencer, 1825; Columbian Centinel, 1827 to 1831; New York Evening Post, I 835 to 1836; Baltimore Sun, 1841 to 1842.

as colleges in name only. 80 Nevertheless, as the following discussion will show, such institutions had an overlooked and important influence on the curricula of higher schools aiming to prepare students to meet the new collegiate entrance requirements. The first experiment in women's collegiate education in the United States took place in the South, with the chartering of Georgia Female College in 1836, an institution authorized to "confer all such honors, degrees, and licenses as are usually conferred in colleges or universities.'' 81 The college opened on January 7, 1839. As a new educational experiment, the college was the subject of some criticism, not only from those who ridiculed the notion of higher education for women, but from others who questioned the rigor and quality of its studies. Traditionally, the presence of the classics in the entrance requirements served as a marker of an institution's relative quality. Because Georgia Female College did not require a demonstration of classical knowledge for admission, contemporaries judged its academic standards to be relatively low. In explaining the college's admission policy, the college president admitted that "the standard of admission especially is reduced so low as to present an incongruity between the high character of a college ... and the requisitions laid down in our plan, as published in the catalog." Low standards were a financial necessity, he argued, since elevating them would potentially "diminish the number of scholars, and consequently, the receipts from tuition." 82 Despite fears that high admission standards might limit the number of qualified scholars, it was not long before other newly-organized institutions designated as women's colleges began adding the classics to their entrance requirements. For example, in 1842, Wesleyan Female College at Cincinnati, Ohio, required Latin grammar, Latin reader, the Commentaries of Caesar, and Greek grammar and reader. Established in 1853, the Wesleyan Female College at Delaware, Ohio, offered students the choice of either a scientific or classical four-year course. Entrance requirements for

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the classical course required some knowledge of Latin and Greek: "first and second books." 83 The admission requirements of Mary Sharp College, which opened in 1851 at Winchester, Tennessee, specified knowledge of Greek grammar, Testament, Latin grammar, Virgil, Cicero, and Horace. When Vassar opened in 1861, its entrance requirements included Latin grammar, syntax, Latin prose, two books of the Commentaries of Caesar, two orations of Cicero, French, and several modern subjects. Finally, the opening of Smith College in 1875 represented a landmark of sorts. Its admission standards, heavily weighted with the classics, matched those of Amherst and Harvard. 84 Reflecting the shift toward the classics in the entrance requirements of women's colleges, the percentage of female higher schools offering Latin visibly increased during the rest of the century. Based on a sample of 162 female academies and venture schools from 20 states, historian Thomas Woody reported that 47 percent provided instruction in Latin between 17 49 and 1871. However, by including eighteenthcentury schools in his sample, Woody's data may not reflect accurately the degree of increase of Latin in the curriculum after 1830. James Mulhern, who discovered that between 1830 and 1889, 72 percent of Pennsylvania female schools offered Latin, provides a possibly more representative picture of developments in the latter half of the century. 85 To a lesser extent, academies serving females began to offer Greek as well, although this subject lagged behind Latin in both male and female institutions throughout the century. For example, in Pennsylvania from 1750 to 1829, only 3 percent of female schools offered Greek, whereas 14 percent offered Latin. In later years, from 1830 to 1889, 37 percent of female schools offered Greek, whereas 72 percent offered Latin. Conceivably, these schools placed a greater emphasis on Latin than on Greek during this period because educators viewed Greek as a prerequisite subject for those preparing to enter the ministry, a field largely closed to women. 86 In addition to evidencing some continuity with the curriculum of the Latin grammar schools, the academies also drew from the tradition of the venture schools. To some extent, although the early academies developed established courses of study, their students also had a great deal of flexibility in their studies beyond the basic subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The published tuition rates at both Northern and Southern academies indicate that students almost always had to pay extra for instruction in languages and the classics, or for such ornamental subjects as painting or fancy needlework. For example, at Union Academy in Bennington, Vermont, the 1834 school catalog listed the following rates: For common English studies ... $3.00 For geometry, algebra, natural and intellectual philosophy ... $3.50 For French, Latin and Greek Languages, and Chemistry ... $4.00 87 In 1840, Utica Female Academy charged $3.00 each for instruction in chemistry and botany, $3.00 for conchology, $3.00 for Latin, $3.00 for French, $7.00 for drawing,

36

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$7.00 for flower pamtmg, and so on. 88 Academies serving male students often charged extra for instruction in such subjects as navigation and surveying. The prevailing view among historians is that the academies represented a distinctly new tum in the history of education because in contrast to the earlier Latin grammar schools, they offered a wider range of curricular choice and served a broader clientele. According to this view, the impetus for this curricular shift was the new Enlightenment philosophy of education espoused by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush, among others. The documentary evidence examined in this study suggests another interpretation. The major competitor to the Latin grammar school was the eighteenth-century venture school, not the nineteenth-century academy. Additionally, venture schools offered a broad, nonclassical curriculum well before the period when Franklin, Jefferson, or Rush wrote about the need to introduce such subjects into publicly supported schools. The venture schools arose in response to a public demand for practical training within the context of an expanding population and a growing mercantile economy. When seeking the financial backing necessary to the establishment of an academy, the founders of such institutions often invoked the Enlightenment ideas expressed by Jefferson and other well-known and respected leaders. In such cases, the theories being invoked often served as useful rhetoric to justify support for a preexisting curriculum. In 1799, when Benedict Arnold wrote to Bartholomew Booth concerning the subjects his two sons might study at Booth's school, he asked that his children receive a practical education, not because of the inherent value of an Enlightenment curriculum over the classics, but because of the political and financial uncertainty of the new country: I want their education to be useful rather than learned. Life is too short and Uncertain to throw away in Speculation on Subjects that perhaps only one Man in Ten thousand has a Genius to make a figure in. You will pardon my dictation to you, Sir, but as the fortunes of every man in this country are uncertain, I wish my Sons to be educated in such a manner that with prudence and Industry they may acquire a Fortune, in case they are deprived of their patrimony, as well as to become Useful Members of Society. 89 Although the academies generally can be distinguished from other institutions by the greater breadth of their curricula, it is important to acknowledge their continuity with both the venture schools and the Latin grammar schools. To a great extent, the academies synthesized some of the curricula and pedagogy of both institutions. The establishment of academies in the nineteenth-century formalized the free-wheeling entrepreneurial schooling offered by the early venture schools. Venture schools embraced change as quickly as the market demanded it, offering every useful subject prospective students might wish to study. To be competitive, the early academies followed suit, and thus the entrepreneurialism of the venture schools facilitated a widespread curricular reform in higher schooling. Even the sectarian Protestant and Catholic academies included the newer curricular offerings in their courses of study.

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The distinction between the academies and venture schools lies not in the curriculum they offered so much as in the degree of stability and accountability the academies represented. The rise of the academies resulted from the desire on the part of some states and local communities to institutionalize a level of study that was both broader and more advanced than that attainable in common schools or in the early Latin grammar schools. With the creation of boards of trustees to oversee the development of curricula and assessment, academies also became more accountable to the community for the quality of their students' learning.

Conclusion The roots of the nineteenth-century academie in the United States can be traced both to their colonial precedents and compe .tors. Their colonial precedents, the denominational academies, provided professio tal training for the ministry and spiritual education and higher schooling for laype •ple. The evolution of the academies after the Revolution owed much to competitior with entrepreneurial venture schools, institutions created to offer almost any subjec prospective students cared to study, from the classical to the ornamental or practic !. The constituencies that established academies during the antebellum period turn d to the familiar academy model of governance and financial structure in order t. ensure more financial stability and pedagogical accountability to the local community than was available through venture institutions. The synthesis of academy structure and venture school curricula allowed for a proliferation of academies created for multiple purposes. Some institutions focused on the useful practical training associated with such professions as mechanics, commercial illustrators, or military engineers, whereas others offered the kind of liberal education that Americans believed would enhance the upward social mobility of their children. Others, rooted firmly in the religious heritage of the colonial academies, aimed to provide a higher schooling to the youth of their congregation to ensure that graduates and attendees remained faithful to the Church. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, academy founders also established institutions to convert nonbelievers, to assimilate those of differing cultures, or to empower community members through racial uplift or political awareness. For the historian, the period of transition from the venture schools to the academies provides a fascinating area of research. The issue of choice, coupled with concerns for educational equity, continues to hold a place in the educational debates of today. In the twenty-first century, the desire for greater choice expresses itself in the charter school movement and in experiments with vouchers and schools run according to an entrepreneurial business model. Although some educators and policy makers express the view that such experiments are only very recent, the desire for choice, to study on a "need to know" basis, has its roots in the early academy movement, during a time when the community's desire for stability, formality, and accountability led to a greater degree of institutional structure.

Chartered Schools

38

Within the history of education, the age of the academies represents a territory that is relatively unexplored and thus beset with unanswered questions. First, while some scholars have claimed that by charging tuition, the early venture schools and academies served elites, it is unclear whether this is the case. By offering classes at night, such schools may have provided instruction to students who worked. Second, we need more information about the kinds of students who studied in these institutions. More research is required to understand the extent to which venture schools, and the later academies, may have served the needs of free African American students. Although there are many case studies of the experiences of Native American students in religious and secular academies, and some research on the experiences of Hispanic students, there is little information about venture schools that may have served students from these and other ethnic groups. Third, research is needed before we can conclude that the venture schools declined as the numbers of academies increased. As noted by contemporaries, the drawbacks of the venture schools included their relative lack of standards and accountability and the transience of their founders and instructors. On the other hand, such institutions undoubtedly continued to fill a useful niche for students needing to gain skills in a limited number of subjects or for those wanting to study during more flexible hours. A perusal of the yellow pages in most cities today indicates that venture schools providing some form of higher schooling below the college level continue to exist, even if they rarely invite the attention of educational researchers. Fourth, our knowledge of the geographic distribution of academies throughout the country remains sketchy, particularly in regions like the West and Southwest. Did the academy movement originate later in the West, or did Western and Southwestern states largely skip the academy phase and focus on the construction of public schools? Finally, although scholars have begun to examine the role of women in the early academies, the experiences of females in the earlier venture schools is yet unknown. Documentary evidence suggests that some girls may have studied relatively advanced subjects in venture schools earlier than has been suggested by historians.

NOTES I. 2.

Henry Barnard, "Educational Statistics of the United States in 1850," American Journal of Education, l (1855), 368. Scholars interested in women's higher education in the nineteenth century have focused their attention on a wider range of academies. The earliest study to make extensive use of academy material was Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States (New York: Octagon Books, 1929). More recent texts include Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997 [ 1980]): Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996 [1980]). In her study of the rhetoric of"women's sphere," Nancy Cott also devoted considerable attention to academies. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. I I.

12. 13.

14.

39

The venture schools comprising the sample for this study placed advertisements in the following newspapers: The Columbian Centinel (Massachusetts) 1827, Jan. 1831-Mar. 1833; The American Mercury (Connecticut) Jan. 1820-1828; The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser (Pennsylvania) 1824; The New York Evening Post (New York) I Aug. 1835-31 May 1836; The Richmond Enquirer(Virginia) 29 Sept. 1835-17 Nov. 1837; The Maryland Gazette (Maryland) 5 Jan. 1832-22 Oct. 1835; The Baltimore Sun (Maryland) 12 Aug. 1842-23 Aug. 1842; The Globe (Washington, D.C.) 1831; The Daily Nationalintelligencer (Washington D.C.) 1825. Another important source are the newspaper advertisements included in North Carolina Schools and Academies 1790-1840: A Documentary History, ed. Charles L. Coon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915). Dame schoolteachers operated schools from their homes during the seventeenth century and flourished among such groups as the Quakers. See J. Jensen, "Not Only Ours But Others: The Quaker Teaching Daughters of the Mid-Atlantic, 1790-1850," History of Education Quarterly, 24 (1984): 3-19; Andrea Wyman, Rural Women Teachers in the United States: A Sourcebook (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1996). See Fred Wells. Parish Education in Colonial Virginia (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1923), 17-29. John Calam, Parsons and Pedagogues: The S.P.G. Adventure in American Education, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971 ). Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). See Ruskin Teeter, The Opening Up of American Education: A Sampler (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 23. Joseph Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread ofNumeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Edward W. Stevens, Jr., The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). See Kim Tolley, "Geography Opens the Door," in The Science Education of American Girls, I784-1932, Ed.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996, 11-60. Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750-1820," Histmy of Education Quarterly, 33 (Winter, 1993), 511-539. For a brief discussion of the venture schools in colonial Boston, see William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University, 1995). Margaret A. Nash, "Academies," in Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States, ed. Linda Eisenmann (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998), 3-6. The academies comprising the sample for this study placed advertisements in the following newspapers: The Columbian Centinel (Massachusetts) 1827, Jan. 1831-Mar. 1833; The American Mercury (Connecticut) Jan. 1820-1828; The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser (Pennsylvania) 1824; The New York Evening Post (New York) I Aug. 1835-31 May 1836; The Richmond Enquirer (Virginia) 29 Sept. 1835-17 Nov. 1837; The Maryland Gazette (Maryland) 5 Jan. 1832-22 Oct. 1835; The Baltimore Sun (Maryland) 12 Aug. 1842-23 Aug. 1842; The Globe (Washington, D.C.) 1831; The Daily Nationallntelligencer (Washington D.C.) 1825. Another important source are the

Chartered Schools

40

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 3 I.

newspaper advertisements included in North Carolina Schools and Academies I790-I840: A Documentary History, ed. Charles L. Coon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915). Nikola Baumgarten, "Catholic Education," in Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States: 68-71. See also Baumgarten's "Education and Democracy in Frontier St. Louis: The Society of the Sacred Heart," in ibid., 34 (Summer 1994): 171-192. Mabel Hailer, Early Moravian Education in Pennsylvania (Nazareth, PA: Moravian Historical Society, 1953); Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). Elizabeth Nybakken, "In the Irish Tradition: Pre-Revolutionary Academies in America," History of Education Quarterly, 37 (Summer 1997): 163-183. See Theodore Sizer, The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964); Albert Mock, "The Mid- Western Academy Movement: A Comprehensive Study of Indiana Academies, I810-I900 (Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1949, mimeographed 1949); Clarence Ray Aurner, History of Education in Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa; State Historical Society of Iowa, 1915), Paul E. Belting, The Development of the Free Public High School in Illinois to I860 (New York: Arno Press, 1969) Henry Barnard, "Educational Statistics of the United States in 1850," American Journal of Education, I, (1855), 368. See George Frederick Miller, The Academy System of the State of New York (New York: Arno Press, 1969); see also Nancy Beadie, "From Student Markets to Credential Markets: The Creation of the Regents Examination System in New York State, 1864-1890," History of Education Quarterly 39 (1): l-30; and "Market-Based Policies of School Funding: Lessons from the History of the New York Academy System," Educational Policy 13 (3): 296-317. Charles Burgess, "Abiding by the Rule of Birds: Teaching Teachers in Small Liberal Arts Colleges," in Places Where Teachers are Taught, eds. John I. Goodlad, eta!. (San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 87-135. William Warren Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California, 1846-1936 (Oakland, California: West Coast Printing, 1937). See Laverne Clarence Bane, The Development of Education in Utah, I870-I895. Dissertation submitted at Stanford University, 1940. Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 4. See Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 70-71. Wyndham D. Miles and Harold J. Abrahams, "America's First Chemistry Syllabus-andCourse for Girls," in School Science and Mathematics, 58 (1958): I 11-118. For a general overview of Enlightenment reformers, see Lorraine Smith and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, I 993). Quoted in Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, (New York: The Science Press, 1929), 225. "A New School," The American Mercury (Hartford, Connecticut), 15 June 1824. "A Card," in ibid., 13 June 1820. "Writing Academy," in ibid., 16 May, 1820. "Music School," in ibid., 19 October, 1824.

Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

41

For example, "Mrs. Grovesnor and Mrs. Sheldon's School for Young Ladies," in ibid., 21 March, 1820, and "Miss Spellman's School for Young Ladies," in ibid., II April, 1820. Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 4. News & Observer clipping, 27 September 1831, in M.C.S. Noble Papers, fol. 37, Southern Historical Collection, Chapel Hill. "Aug. I, 1827," in Susan Nye Hutchison Diary, I790-I867, Southern Historical Collection. Laura Battle Phillips, "School Days at Bordentown," in Charles Phillips Papers #2462, fol. 34, 1-2. Southern Historical Collection. Jane W. Fraser to Laura Battle Phillips, undated, in "School Days at Bordentown," 32. "A Night School," in Raleigh Register, 30 September 1828. See Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States, ed. Linda Eisenmann, 5. See ibid., 38. The most complete study of Litchfield Female Academy remains the dissertation of Lynne T. Brickley, a work in two volumes. See Lynne T. Brickley, "Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, 1792-1833: Ed.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985. "C & M Beecher's School for Girls," in The American Mercury (Hartford, Connecticut) April 20, 1824. News clipping: "The Academy: the Forerunner ..." in M.C.S. Noble Papers, fol. 37, Southern Historical Collection, Chapel Hill. For a discussion of academies in New York, see Nancy Beadie, Defining the Public: Congregation, Commerce and Social Economy in the Formation of the Educational System, 1790-I840 (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1989). Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 24-25. Richard G. Boone, A History of Education in Indiana (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892), 42--43. Frederick Eby, The Development of Education in Texas (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 127. "Maria Florilla Flint Hamblen Reminiscences, September 1860-June 1861," in Flint Papers, fol. I, Southern Historical Collection, Chapel Hill. For a comprehensive study of mechanics' institutes in the nineteenth century, see Edward W. Stevens, Jr., The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Theodore Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 33-34. James L. Morrison, Jr., The Best School in the World: West Point, the Pre-Civil War Years, I833-I866 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986): Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1966). For a full history of this interesting institution, see Linda M. Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, I865-I902 (New York: Garland, 1987). Nina de Angeli Walls, "Educating Women for Art and Commerce: The Philadelphia School of Design, 1848-1932," History of Education Quarterly, 34 (Fall 1994): 329-355. Eby, The Development of Education in Texas, 152. Carole B. Shmurak, "Mary Lyon," in Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States, ed. Linda Eisenmann (1998): 253-255.

42

Chartered Schools

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

Nikola Baumgarten, "Catholic Education," in ibid., 68-71. Sister Catharine Frances, The Convent School of French Origin in the United States, 1727-1843 (Philadelphia: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1936), 18-19; Nikola Baumgarten, "Catholic Education," in Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States, 68-71. Sister Catharine Frances, The Convent School of French Origin in the United States. 1727-1843 (Philadelphia: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1936), 18-19. "Carmelite Sisters' Academy," in Baltimore Sun (Maryland), 12 August 1842. Theodore Sizer, Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) Geraldine Jon~ich Clifford, "Equally in View"; The University of California. its Women, and the Schools (Center for Studies in Higher Education and Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 26-27. Most history of education texts have incorporated Theodore Sizer's thesis. See Sizer, The Age of the Academies. Ibid., 346. North Carolina Schools and Academies 1790-1840: A Documentary History, ed. Charles L. Coon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1915). See the newspaper advertisements for the following male academies: Pittsborough Academy (1800), 35; Hillsborough Academy (1801), 280; Caswell Academy (1802), 18; Franklin Academy (1804), 84; Edenton Academy ( 1805), 326; Hyco Academy (1805), 22-23: Salisbury Academy ( 1807), 346-47; Kilpatrick's School ( 1809), 382. Several North Carolina female academies or seminaries also offered geography during the first decade of the nineteenth century: Fayetteville Academy, Female Department (1801), 60-61; Raleigh Academy, Female Department (1806), 396; Mordecai's Female Seminary (1808), 595; Mrs. Milligan's School (1807), 229; Mrs. Gregory's Boarding School (1808), 295. "Herndon Academy," in Raleigh Register, 13 December 1836. George Frederick Miller, The Academy System of the State of New York (Albany: J. Lyon Col, 1922). Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, ZZ Press, 1998 [1878]). Walls, "Educating Women for Art and Commerce," 332. Edward W. Stevens, Jr., The Grammar of the Machine; Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States. 118-123. Linda M. Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865-1902 (New York: Garland, 1987). 68. Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 36. See David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 114. Thomas Woody, A History of' Women's Education in the United States (New York: The Science Press, 1929), 341. Mary 0. Nutting, "Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, South Hadley," in The American Journal of Education. 30 ( 1880), 590. For more information about Mount Holyoke, see Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1979). Tenth Annual Catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1846-7 (South Hadley, Massachusetts), 12.

Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

43

These catalogues are in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Thomas Coon, North Carolina Schools and Academies, 1790-1840, xxx; xxxiv. It is important to note, however, that the mere inclusion of a subject in an institution's advertised course of study is no indication of the actual numbers of students who may actually have enrolled. See Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Ante-bellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 28-32. Quoted in Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, I, 408-09. Quoted in Mulhern, A History of Secondary Education in Pennsylvania, 396. See Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 12ff. Farnham argues that current scholarly assessments of these schools reflect, not only a northeastern bias, but an unwarranted dependence on the views of earlier scholars, who dismissed women's colleges because they did not offer the classics to the same degree as the leading men's colleges of the period. Quoted in Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education, 2, 161. Quoted in Woody, A History of Women's Education, 2, 164. Ibid. Ibid., 167; 169-70. Woody, Women's Education in the United States, 1, 418; James Mulhern, A History of Secondary Education in Pennsylvania, (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 428. Mulhern's data were derived from the catalogs of ninety Pennsylvania female schools. Mulhern, A History of Secondary Education in Pennsylvania, 428. Union Academy, Catalogue for the year, ending September 4, 1834 (Bennington, Vermont: J.C. Haswell, 1834), 13. Catalogue of the Officers and Members of the Utica Female Academy, During the Year Ending August 6'", 1840 (Utica: Bennet, Backus & Hawley, Frankline Square, 1840), 21. Quoted in Maurice Whitehead, The Academies of the Reverend Bartholomew Booth in Georgian England and Revolutionary America; Enlightening the Curriculum (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 102.

From Anstalt to Academy: Moravian

Boarding Education for Native American Children in the Eighteenth Century AMY C. SCHUTT

In 1747 at Gnadenhutten, a Christian mission village in the upper Lehigh Valley on the borders of Pennsylvania, a Native American father and mother sought the help of a Moravian missionary in placing their child in a predominantly white boarding school, or Anstalt, in a Moravian Gemeine-a congregation or religious community-in this case at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The parents, named David and Sara, told the missionary that they were anguishing "because they did not understand how to raise their son and believed that if he died while living with them, he would not become blessed. If, however, the Gemeine accepted him and he died there, so would they have a certain hope that he would be blessed." Several days later David traveled with his son to Bethlehem where he could live "in the care of the Gemeine." For his part, according to the Moravians, "the boy took leave of all the Brethren [i.e., to enter the Anstalt] with much joy in his heart." 1 It is intriguing that these and other Native parents asked to have their children educated in a Moravian boarding institution along with white children. Some of these Native American children were younger than three years old, and a number were between the ages of six and nine when they lived in the boarding schools. What led Native parents seemingly to relinquish child-rearing functions to the Moravians, in some cases for very young children, especially given the deep and abiding nature of kinship structures within Native societies? Why were parents willing to send their children to live in Moravian institutions, known as nurseries and Anstalten, away from daily contact with mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents who customarily participated in their rearing? What would have led them to accept this seemingly abrupt change in their children's lives'l The answer to these questions lies in a convergence of factors, including the troubled situation of Native American families living on the borders of Pennsylvania and the philosophies, attitudes, and educational approaches of the Moravians, a group of German-speaking pietists and recent immigrants to the American colonies 2 Examining the education of Native children in Moravian Anstalten provides a useful account of one of the diverse strands that contributed to the origins of academy education. Moravian institutions deserve a prominent place in the history of

44

From Anstalt to Academy

45

academies and seminaries in the new nation, especially since the Bethlehem Female Seminary is often cited as one of the oldest boarding schools for girls in the country. What needs clarification, however, is that this institution and other late eighteenthand nineteenth-century Moravian academies and seminaries had their origins in the Moravian Anstalten of the 1740s, which differed significantly from the well-known institutions of the post-Revolutionary War era that attracted students from prosperous non-Moravian families. Besides the Bethlehem Female Seminary, other successful Moravian schools in Pennsylvania-Nazareth Hall Academy for boys and the Lititz girls' seminary (later called Linden Hall Seminary)-succeeded Moravian Anstalten of the mid-eighteenth century. These church-sponsored academies owed much of their development and continued existence to the growing demand in the post-Revolutionary War era for formal education beyond the elementary level and in a variety of subjects, but each also had roots in the radical evangelicalism of an era that predated the American Revolution. 3 Laying out these radical origins highlights the role of eighteenth-century revivalism and pietism as originators of educational developments. Evangelicalism in this period was diverse enough that labeling the movement a "Great Awakening" as if it were a single entity is problematic. From the 1730s through the 1760s there were outbreaks of evangelical revivalism that shook established church structures and inspired a highly emotional response to preachers trying to impress their listeners with the power of Jesus' saving grace. Not all aspects of this evangelicalism promoted social radicalism. Some evangelicals, such as the Lutheran minister Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, sought to create religious institutions that would strengthen ministerial authority and reduce the role of the laity. Others, such as New England Baptists, took a socially radical approach, creating "a sense of community among individuals who thought themselves beyond the bounds of conventional social categories." Among the more radical groups, women and children joined men in prophesying and preaching. As historian Margaret Connell Szasz has shown, revivalists from Congregational and Presbyterian backgrounds established schools, both boarding and day, for Native students, who themselves sometimes became evangelizers, as in the case of the Mohegan Samson Occom. Among the various revivalists, however, it was primarily the Moravians who defied conventions by undertaking a radical experiment of educating European children together with Native American children in boarding institutions. 4 A standard work on academy education, The Age of the Academies, by Theodore Sizer, states that the predecessor to the nineteenth-century academy was the taxsupported Latin grammar school of the New England town. Examining the Moravians' radical experiment, which led eventually to several well-known and wellrespected post-Revolutionary War academies, allows us to broaden the view of academy origins that Sizer expresses, not only by raising the issue of evangelicalism but also by expanding the regional basis of academy research. The Moravian story moves us beyond the New England orientation of Sizer and many historians of education in early America. It ensures that the often-neglected Middle Colonies become part of our understanding of the genesis of academies. 5

46

Chartered Schools

The focal point of Moravian settlement in North America was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which lay on land along the Lehigh near where it joins the Monocacy Creek in the Delaware Valley. Although local Native Americans continued to dispute white settlement in the area for some time, the Moravian population quickly swelled from about seventy settlers at Bethlehem in 1742 to approximately five hundred by 1755. The establishment of Bethlehem emerged from developments in Europe over previous decades. Beginning in I 722, religious refugees from Eastern Europe had gained asylum on the Saxon estate of Nicholaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf. These refugees, who came from Bohemia and Moravia, were part of a movement called the Unitas Fratrum (or "Unity of the Brethren"), which originated in the fifteenth-century Protestant Hussite movement. Increasingly, Pietist influences that stressed both ethics and emotion in religion had a profound effect on the eighteenthcentury development of the Unitas Fratrum. Also known as Herrnhuters (named after Herrnhut, the Moravians' headquarters in Saxony) or as Moravian Brethren, the members of the Unitas Fratrum led by Zinzendorf began an ambitious project of sending missionaries to far-flung parts of the globe. After establishing Bethlehem, they quickly organized missions to German- and English-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania and to a variety of Native peoples living on the borders of New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. These Native peoples spoke languages and dialects classified within the Algonquian linguistic family. They largely included Mahicans originally from the Hudson Valley and Delawares who represented not one unified tribal entity but instead a variety of different groups originally from the Delaware Valley as well as from the lower Hudson. 6 The heart of social organization in the first decades at Bethlehem was something called the choir system. The Moravians carefully divided their community into groups, called choirs, based on gender, age, and marital status. These arose because of the Moravians' belief that people who shared certain characteristics could have an unusually strong spiritual connection. Thus, little boys had their own choir, as did little girls; older boys and older girls made up two more choirs; single women or "sisters" and single men or "brothers" comprised separate choirs; and married men and married women each had a choir as did widows and widowers. Within each of these choirs, there were also subgroups called bands or classes. In band and choir meetings Moravians offered each other spiritual nurture, guidance, and a sense of community. 7 The choir system was an inextricable part of the educational life of Bethlehem. Children grew and learned within their choirs and related institutions. The nursery was the boarding institution for the youngest children, made up of those aged about eighteen months to about age four. Boys and girls remained together at this very young age. When it came time to leave the nursery, children moved to one of the Anstalten, separate boarding institutions for boys and girls. Various adults accepted the duty of serving as live-in teachers within these Anstalten. Under this system, family and parental education was superseded by choir education that began at a very early age. Hence, the Moravians, according to one scholar, "develop[ed] a family surrogate in the form of the choir system which, by explicitly subordinating a Mora-

From Anstalt to Academy

47

vian's familial obligation to his religious duties, would maximize the individual's loyalty to the religious goals of the community." 8 To understand what Native American children encountered in Moravian institutions, it is useful to look at the goals and functioning of the Anstalten. Like many boarding schools in later centuries, they were created to serve a common overarching goal. By serving this single purpose, the boarding institutions were in alignment with all other parts of the community. Zinzendorf stated this sweeping purpose as "Alles aus Christus, durch Christus, mit Christus, and zur Verherrlichung Christi" (Everything from Christ, through Christ, with Christ, and for the glorification of Christ). The Moravians expected institutions, as well as individuals, to be subordinate to the larger purpose of serving Christ by imitating Christ. This shared purpose created inextricable links between members of the Gemeine. A Moravian explained the organic nature of the community to a group ofNativeAmericans: "we ... cannot be content if one part, the head or the body, does not exist for the Savior because we were created as one body and as a help to one another." 9 Moravians constructed their institutions to create communities infused with, and guided by, the Holy Spirit. To build these communities they utilized institutions to nurture and guide children with great care. Although never rejecting outright the notion of original sin, Zinzendorf elevated the child as a model of meekness, simplicity, and pure faith that all Christians should imitate. Putting children on a pedestal for all to see and emulate, Zinzendorf wrote, "Children are little royal majesties. Baptism is their anointing, and from then on they should be treated as none other than a king by birth." By implication, the Anstalten were to preserve all that was good about childhood, rather than harm the innocence and faithfulness of this stage of life. 10 In this sense, the Moravian institutions differed from the European Lutheran model of the Anstalt. Famous for establishing his own Anstalten, the Lutheran pietist August Hermann Francke insisted on a harsh breaking of the natural will of the child as part of the educational and Christian conversion process. In the late seventeenth century Francke was appointed minister to a parish in Glaucha, a suburb of Halle under the jurisdiction of Brandenburg-Prussia. Plundered during the Thirty Years' War and hit by plague in the 1680s, Halle and the surrounding area were in a seriously depressed condition when Francke arrived. As historian Richard Gawthrop describes, "The school system was in terrible shape, with no poor or free schools at all. Most of the city's young people roamed the streets with nothing to do ... Out of two hundred dwellings in Glaucha, thirty-seven were taverns, and many of these were also brothels." At Halle, Francke proceeded to establish Anstalten that included boarding and day students, all of whom followed a tightly regulated schedule. The goal was to instill obedience to both their teachers and ultimately God. At the Halle Anstalten play was restricted and rules were enforced. 11 Although the Moravians were more likely to embrace the innocence and simplicity of childhood than to fear it as a corrupt stage of willfulness, they still advocated close monitoring and supervision of the young. In this manner, they partook in the spirit of institutional oversight that had been part of the Halle projects. Zinzendorf

48

Chartered Schools

himself had attended school at Halle, and his grandmother Henriette, Countess von Gersdorf was an early supporter of Francke's Anstalten. Zinzendorf's ideas differed from Francke's, however, in that for him educational oversight was less about willbreaking than about enabling the child to maintain an innocent and simple state that allowed growth in the Holy Spirit. 12 This belief pervaded life in the Anstalten, which exposed children to a wide variety of religious observances on daily, weekly, monthly, and annual ritual cycles. Each day usually began with the Viertelstunde, which was a worship service that lasted one-quarter hour. A similar brief service ended each day. On a regular basis there was a Gemeintag, or "Prayer Day," set aside for children. A typical children's Gemeintag started with a morning litany and might include reading aloud from letters or biographies of other children, hymn singing, and a simple meal called a lovefeast. On one occasion in June 1746 at Nazareth the main activities of the children's Gemeintag began at three o'clock in the afternoon. As was true of many Moravian experiences, music was part of the routine. Catechism instruction began with the pastor Abraham Reincke singing each question and the children singing their responses. "Afterwards we set before them [the children], what the Lamb [Jesus] had done for them & what Pains he had taken with them to make them so happy," the Moravians reported. Children's letters "were read, one English [and] one German alternately, & sung some sweet verses with them between." Children became wrapped up in the events of the day: "The Children were uncommonly earnest & attentive ... just like hungry little Chickens who co[ul]d not be satisfied." Near the end of the service, several children participated in a ritual prostration, called the Anbeten: "Fifteen of the Children, who had the most feeling in their Hearts, fell down on their Faces in the midst of the Hall with the greatest veneration & other Children stood & look'd on only.... The Children did not whine in the least, nor did they pray to be heard, but only lay & wept so before the Sav[io]r so sweet & still & so heartily that the Place where they lay was wet with the Tears they had shed." 13 The classrooms of the Anstalten had their own sacred activities as well. Children learned to read, write, sing hymn stanzas, and recite as part of their regular curriculum. They also received instruction on musical instruments and participated in groups that performed sacred music. A young Mahican named Joshua, who became a noted player of the spinet, apparently received his early musical instruction in a Moravian Anstalt; and religious music, in general, was a major part of the instruction that Native American children received in Moravian schools. Despite the pervasive religious atmosphere in the schools, the Moravians did not use the Bible itself as a textbook. One Moravian writer commented that using the Bible in this way would belittle it and that it should not become "just another schoolbook, as not to expose it to the danger of being made contemptible to the children, as all school-books usually are." This remark reflected a general development among European educators to teach with collections of scriptural excerpts rather than with the Bible in its entirety. Like many of their contemporaries in Europe, Moravian children learned to read and spell from a variety of books that included scriptural selections and Bible stories, on the as sump-

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49

tion that these were more appropriate and less intimidating for children than the Bible as a whole. These and other Moravian classroom practices were designed to ensure that the child's mind was constantly returning to the overarching purpose of the community, to serve Christ through imitating and building a relationship with Christ. 14 The Anstalten and choir system in Pennsylvania developed at a time in Moravian history known as the "Sifting Period" (Sichtungszeit), a time of heightened emotionalism and sensuality. Moravian school records, particularly from the latter half of the 1740s and the early 17 50s, were filled with graphic references to the blood and wounds of Christ. Children learned to focus their thoughts on the "sidewound" made after the Crucifixion when a soldier pierced Jesus' body with a spear, releasing blood and water. Their teachers and student leaders encouraged them to visualize and experience being immersed in the Savior's wounds, sensing the healing power of Jesus' blood. When three little Native American girls entered the Miidchenanstalt (girls' school) at Nazareth in 1746, they were greeted by another girl singing the verse: "Powerful! [sic] Wounds of Jesus, So moist so bloody, 0 bleed ye on their Hearts so will they then be, of Courage good!" 15 The Moravians gave these three Native American girls nicknames-Dove, Chicken, and Worm-that were typical of terminology from the Sifting Period, when Moravians likened themselves to "little fools, little worms, baby chicks, and even little bees." With these names, they depicted the Christian as diminutive and weak, sucking or feeding meekly on the blood from the Savior's wounds. Polly Price, a white girl about age six or seven, at the Nazareth girls' boarding Anstalt "pray'd very earnestly for the 3 New [Indian] Children that they also might come to feel the Blood in their Hearts & cleave like Hungry Bees to the Wounds of Jesus, & love nothing but the Wounds, which were made for them also." 16 During the Sifting Time many non-Moravian colonists looked upon the Moravians with great suspicion. Their emotionalism and fervor were certainly not unique during these years, given this was a general time of revivalism and awakening. But the Moravians' sensuality, elaborate ritual life, and close-knit communalism seemed strange and alarming to some outsiders, many of whom questioned the pietist group's close connections to Native peoples. After the outbreak of King George's War between France and England in 1744, colonists believed the Moravians harbored and even encouraged Indian raids on white settlements. Hostility to the Moravians was strong in New York, where the Moravians had established a mission among Mahicans and Paugussetts (or "Wompanosch") at Shekomeko (present-day Pine Plains) in the Taconic Mountain region. When Moravian missionaries refused to swear loyalty oaths and to join the militia, angry New Yorkers expelled them from the colony. In Pennsylvania many German colonists had also become suspicious of attempts by Zinzendorf to try to break down confessional divisions and unite them into an overarching "Congregation of God in the Spirit," which many probably saw as a ploy to turn them all into Moravians rather than to create a truly ecumenical body. 17 Thus, as the Moravians constructed their Anstalten in the 1740s, they faced criticism, opposition, and even persecution. They were outsiders among other European

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Americans, but in many ways they accepted this outsider status. They guarded carefully who might enroll in the Anstalten of Nazareth and Bethlehem, maintaining the exclusivity of these institutions. The late 1740s and early 1750s, the height of the Sifting Period in Pennsylvania, did not constitute a time of pragmatism among the Moravians. Spiritual goals and nurture took precedence over practical matters. Even though their work with Native Americans made them targets of suspicion, they risked criticism and incorporated Native children into the boarding schools they were building for their own children. 18 What, then, might have stimulated Native American parents to request placements of their children in these institutions structured around this singleness of purpose? These requests seem puzzling when we recognize the traditional importance of kin in guiding these children's lives and shaping children's identities. Dating back generations, nuclear families were important units of economic and emotional support among these native peoples originally from the Hudson and Delaware valleys. Husbands fished and hunted deer, bear, and many other animals, thus providing meat for food and pelts for clothing. Wives planted and cared for crops, particularly com, squash, and a variety of beans. Their marriages were reciprocal arrangements, to which each made a contribution. Husbands and wives raised their children together, but the bond between mothers and children was especially strong. Children traced their descent through their mothers. If divorce occurred, children normally stayed with their mothers rather than with their fathers. The fundamental kinship unit for these children was their matrilineage, which included a large number of extended relatives on their mother's side. Thus, nuclear families and matrilineages formed a crucial combination in guiding the lives of children. 19 Only a severe state of crisis would have led Native parents to consider placing their children in boarding institutions, away from constant contact with kin. The depletion of their land base led to economic dependence on Europeans and to repeated migrations in search of safe places for building new communities. Whites forced Mahicans and Paugussetts from their land at Shekomeko by the mid-17 40s. This loss of Shekomeko was no doubt devastating since, for many of the early Moravian converts, this land probably was their last link with their Hudson Valley homelands. Abraham, the first Mahican convert, traced his claim to this land at Shekomeko back through his matrilineage to his grandmother Mannanochqua, who he explained had died "about sixty years ago" when there "was a great epidemic among the Indians." Leaving Shekomeko for Pennsylvania, Mahicans and Paugussetts joined Delawares who had been repeatedly dislocated by Europeans moving onto traditional hunting, fishing, and planting areas. The expansion of Pennsylvania had a dramatic impact on Native peoples all up and down the Delaware River, as the colony grew from 20,000 to 150,000 during the first half of the eighteenth century, largely through immigration. Throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, epidemics depleted the populations of Native peoples originally from the Hudson and Delaware valleys, and the Europeans' introduction of alcohol also proved devastating to them. 20

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Such conditions led some Native parents to look for outside assistance for their children. These parents sought divine favor for their sons and daughters as well as bodily nurturance and care that the Anstalten seemed to offer. Parents probably felt their own ability to raise their children was being undermined by the difficult circumstances they had to endure. The missionary David Zeisberger described a cultural crisis in the eighteenth century among Native peoples who saw a decline in respect for the older generation by the younger: "Formerly, the young revered the old, especially if they had gray or white heads. They believed that these must be very wise and prudent, because they were of such an age and seemed to be favored of the gods .... the young no longer revere the aged as was the case at one time." In the 1740s and 1750s, among the solutions that the missionaries offered was a Moravian boarding education for Native American children; but in offering this, they seemed to question the abilities of Native parents and to threaten parents' confidence that they were capable of rearing their own children. 21 There are several examples in the Moravian mission records of Native Americans questioning their own parenting abilities. Abraham, a Mahican sachem, and his wife Sarah told the Moravian missionary Anna Mack that "they were both very troubled about their girl and said that they feel certain in their heart and see also daily that they could not raise the child for the Savior, ... so they cried inwardly and thought if only the Gemeine might have mercy on their child and accept it." Similar to David and Sara, the couple quoted at the outset of this chapter, Abraham and his wife Sarah believed that if their child died at Bethlehem in one of the Anstalten, the child would die blessed, or saved. Benjamin and Zippora, another married couple, also doubted their ability to rear their child and asked that the Moravians take their son or daughter because "they saw daily that they could not rear their child for the Saviour." As part of becoming a good Christian, the Moravians had encouraged these parents to become like little children themselves so that they would exhibit a simple and direct faith in Christ. Yet, now, this lesson of dependency and meekness may have led Benjamin and Zippora to feel weakened in their own capabilities as parents. 22 In some cases, parents' requests for the Moravians to help them rear their children occurred in the context of internal family crises, sometimes taking violent form. Several months before Benjamin and Zippora requested that the Moravians educate and rear their child, this couple had been engaged in a serious marital dispute. Zippora left the GnadenhUtten mission on the upper Lehigh for a brief time because Benjamin had struck her. The Moravian diary reported that "on the whole he is not nice to her." Another couple, named Philippus and Lydia, resorted to violence in dealing with their child and then seemed horrified at what they had done. The Moravian missionary explaining this event wrote, "Philippus and Lydia requested very tearfully that I should certainly accept their child and raise it for the Savior, that it should be my own. The child had gotten into something yesterday and had been struck [for it]." 23 Corporal punishment of children reflected cultural turmoil and the potential severing of Native peoples from their traditional approaches to child rearing and family life. Philippus and Lydia's resort to physical chastisement was probably far more than

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an example of parents frustrated with their inability to handle an obstreperous child. It hinted at a serious crisis because Native parents did not traditionally use corporal punishment; thus, Philippus and Lydia may have realized in horror that they had violated a deeply held stricture against striking one's child. The Moravian missionaries David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder each commented on the customary resistance to physical punishment of children among the Native Americans they encountered. Zeisberger wrote, "The parents are careful not to beat their children, lest the children might remember it and revenge themselves on some future occasion." "The parent's authority" is never "supported by harsh or compulsive means," explained Heekeweider. "No whips, no punishments, no threats are even used to enforce commands or compel obedience." The preferred approach was to appeal to the "child's pride." Thus, "a father needs only to say in the presence of his children: 'I want such a thing done; I want one of my children to go upon such an errand; let me see who is the good child that will do it!' This word good operates, as it were, by magic, and the children immediately vie with each other to comply with the wishes of their parent." 24 Marital violence also reflected a clash of older and newer values; in this case Moravian views of marriage conflicted with traditional notions among Mahicans and Delawares. Evidence from as early as the seventeenth century reveals that divorce was a culturally accepted way of responding to marital discord among these Native peoples. Although husbands and wives depended on each other, their deepest kinship bond was with members of their matrilineage, not their spouse. Adriaen Van der Donck, a Dutch lawyer and commentator from the seventeenth century, explained, "Marriages with them are not so binding but that either party may altogether dissolve the union, which they frequently do.-1 have known an Indian who changed his wife every year." While Vander Donck probably exaggerated the frequency of divorce, his remarks indicate its acceptance within the Native societies that he encountered in the Hudson Valley. When the Moravians entered Native Americans' lives, they tried to change this practice by encouraging couples to work out their differences and to remain married. Every September Moravian mission towns held a festival for married couples. This Married People's Festival, or Married Choir Festival, was a celebration of the ideal of marriage as well as of specific conjugal unions. Such events failed to relieve the strain on certain husbands and wives. One such couple was Bathsheba and Joshua, both Mahicans, who fought bitterly while they lived in the Moravian missions. In addition, Benjamin's battering of Zippora may be seen as an outgrowth of traditional Native values conflicting with Moravian marital norms. In non-Moravian settings, these unhappy couples would have probably divorced, while counting on kin from their matrilineages for emotional and material support. 25 Children added to the sense of cultural disjunction by undermining their parents' confidence and authority as they absorbed Moravian viewpoints and attitudes. After Philippus and Lydia struck their child, this child laid a burden of guilt on them, saying "Why don't you give me to Martin [i.e., the missionary Martin Mack]; you are unable to raise me properly for the Savior." These cutting words surely pained his parents greatly. On another occasion, David and Sara's daughter approached a missionary

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about allowing her to move into the children's institution at Bethlehem. When such children appealed for admission to the Anstalten, they probably sent an unspoken message questioning their fathers' and mothers' parenting abilities. 26 Some of the children who sought admission to the Anstalten likely remembered an earlier happy experience as a visitor to one of the children's choirs at Bethlehem or Nazareth. Such an experience made the boarding schools and choirs more familiar places. Visits might have coincided with a special event, undoubtedly rendering them more memorable. For example, at the time of a festival for the Older Boys' Choir held in Bethlehem in 1752, several Native American boys came to take part in the celebration. According to Moravian records, "33 [boys] came together in one of their [choir] rooms, which was adorned simply and prettily with green sprigs from the woods. Among the 33 were also 5 Indian boys, who had arrived this afternoon ... from Gnadenhutten." The youths heard an address "about the goal of this festival and about the special heart-connection that this choir could and should have with the Savior." The Mahican Joshua who had accompanied the boys to the festival translated the address, presumably into the Mahican language, for the visiting children "who listened very attentively.'m In part, Native parents may have agreed to send their children to Moravian Anstalten because Moravians built up trust in the boarding institutions. An important factor was that Moravian missionaries sent their own children away to live in the Anstalten. When Native American parents observed white children leaving their parents and entering the boarding schools, they probably became more willing to trust that the Anstalten offered a beneficial environment for their own sons and daughters. In the spring of 1747 Martin and Anna Mack, two dedicated missionaries who were particularly loved among the converts, sent their daughter Benigna away from their home at the Gnadenhutten mission north of the Blue Mountains to live at Bethlehem. Anna Margaretha and Johann Georg Jungmann were additional missionaries who sent their own children to live in boarding institutions. Their son Johannes moved to the nursery at Nazareth in 1750, and two years later their tiny daughter Anna Rosina entered the nursery after it had been relocated at Bethlehem. 28 Keeping lines of communication open also helped promote trust in the Moravians' project. The Moravians took measures to make sure that Native American parents did not lose touch with their children. They read aloud from the diary of the Children's Choir at Bethlehem, in which the teachers and other adult caretakers kept a careful record of the children's activities and spiritual development. When these reports arrived at mission villages, the missionaries found various occasions to pass along their contents to eager family members. On a February Prayer Day (Gemeintag) at the Gnadenhutten mission, the Moravians read aloud from the Bethlehem Children's Choir diary twice, once in the afternoon and again after the evening meal. On another occasion, they replaced a scheduled hymn-singing service with an oral reading from this diary. Children also learned to write their own short letters to their families, which the missionaries read aloud to the assembled congregants or read privately to the child's parents. In 1748 John Christopher Pyrlaeus, a Moravian mis-

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sionary, visited various Native American families in their homes at Gnadenhutten. When he reached the home of Nicodemus and Eva, he "read ... [to them] a little letter from their fourteen-year-old daughter Salome which gave them great joy." The growing literacy skills of Native American children, combined with the missionaries' oral readings, allowed parents to maintain connections to their children. Furthermore, parents kept in touch with their children through frequent visits to the Anstalten. Moravian missionaries sometimes encouraged these visits and certainly made no attempt to prevent them. Although not directly explaining why Native American parents sent their children to the Anstalten, this emphasis on family communication helps clarify how these parents reconciled themselves with their children entering Anstalten. Surely crucial to Native Americans' views of the boarding experience was the ability of parents and children to have regular contact-through letters, diaries, and visits-with each other. 29 Some of the first Native American children to enter Moravian Anstalten were refugees from the ill-fated mission at Shekomeko, New York. Pushed off their lands at Shekomeko as whites overran it, forty-four Native American Christians left New York in April 1746. These families lived temporarily near Bethlehem in an area called Friedenshutten, but most soon moved to the mission town Gnadenhutten. Particularly between 1746 and 1753, many of the Native Americans at Friedenshutten and Gnadenhutten entrusted their children to one or more of the Moravian Anstalten. In 1746 the Moravians reported that Native parents from Shekomeko wanted their children to obtain schooling among the Brethren. "Their request was granted to enroll one of their children in our Anstalt," the Moravians noted. These included the daughter of two Native American Christians named Nathanael and Zippora, who had accompanied her parents in their relocation from the Hudson Valley to the Bethlehem area in mid-1746. 30 Several different Anstalten enrolled Native American children. The boarding school for girls shifted between Bethlehem and Nazareth during the 1740s. Anna Maria, Nathanael and Zippora's daughter, was one of the Native children who lived in the girls' school as it moved between these two places. Some very young Native children entered a nursery located at Bethlehem and then Nazareth. One of these was the little girl nicknamed Quatschel whose family had come to Pennsylvania from Shekomeko. Another nursery student was Thomas, the son of the Paugussett Esther who became an important female leader among the Native American Christians. The Friedrickstown boarding school for boys (in present-day Montgomery County) housed and educated a number of Moravian boys, both Native American and white, beginning in the mid-l740s. This Frederickstown Anstalt operated in a brown sandstone farmhouse donated by Henry Antes, on land where the famous revivalist George Whitefield had once preached to a gathering estimated at three thousand. By 1746 there were children of various ages at Frederickstown. Some of the younger boys were indeed small. Philippus and Lydia's son Machap, probably the child who had been struck, entered a nursery at Fredericks town when he was about age two or three. After several residents of Germantown petitioned in January 1746 for a boarding

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school, the Moravians agreed to establish boys' and girls' Anstalten in this town near Philadelphia. Two Native American girls enrolled in the Germantown girls' Anstalt, including Martha, possibly age nine or ten, whose family had originally come to Pennsylvania from Moravian missions east of the Hudson. Native children also attended, at least briefly, two other Anstalten. These were the Maguntsche school (present-day Emmaus, Pennsylvania) and the Ysselstein school on the south side of the Lehigh not far from Bethlehem. 31 Native American and white children created friendships and close bonds through their time in the boarding Anstalten. The choir system encouraged children to communicate their spiritual journeys to each other and to help each other discover the Savior's love. When a student was baptized, this was not a purely individual experience but rather one that the school community shared. Maria and Martha, two Native girls about age nine, were both baptized on the same day in 1746. When they returned to the Nazareth Madchenanstalt following their baptisms at Bethlehem, their fellow pupils spent the next few days discussing and celebrating the event with them. First, the students learned from their teacher or minister Abraham Reincke "how sweet the Baptism of Martha & Mary had been, how powerfully the Blood had been felt, & how all were melted into Tears." After evoking the emotions of the event, "he read them also 2 Hymns which had been made on their Baptism." With affection, the rest of the school greeted the arrival of the newly baptized Native American girls. The choir records state, "What a Joy did their Presence Cause amongst them? How did they embrace and kiss them?" On the fourth day after their baptism, Martha and Mary "told the Children, how they had felt themselves at their Baptism & how the Blood of our Savr. had overstream'd their Hearts." 32 The arrival of the girls, nicknamed Chicken, Worm, and Dove, stirred passionate interest among the students at the girls' school, who considered how they might prepare space for the newcomers. Reincke used a question and answer method, modeled loosely on a catechism approach to instruction, to encourage the girls' care and concern for Native American children. At a lovefeast he "asked the Children ... if they wo[ul]d have more Sisters?" When the pupils responded affirmatively, he asked, "If they wo[ul]d have brown [i.e., Indian] Sisters likewise?" After they answered yes, Reincke asked the two white student leaders how many they could add to their rooms. One decided she had room for six Native girls, the other believed she could take three; however, each soon regretted "that they had ask'd [for] so few, & said 0 that we could but get a great many Brown Sisters, We wo[ul]d then lay them in one Bed, & [we] w[oul]d sleep on the ground." 33 Instances, such as this one, that demonstrate the close relationship between white and Native American children living together in boarding Anstalten became less frequent after the 17 50s. The Moravians began a shift away from boarding education for their children in the early 1760s, but even before that time Native parents were discovering that, as much as some of their children seemed to like the Anstalten, they were unhealthy places. By the 1750s, the incidence of Native American children dying in Moravian Anstalten could not be ignored. In close quarters where they were

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exposed to diseases against which their bodies lacked resistance, many Native children succumbed to illnesses that European children's immune systems might help them withstand. David and Sara's daughter Wawunochma (or Hanna) died at the Maguntsche school in 1748, and in the next year Rebecca, a Delaware girl aged six or seven, died there as well. The Paugussett Esther lost two of her children living in boarding institutions in 1748. Her son Daniel died at Frederickstown, and her little boy Thomas died at the Bethlehem nursery about a month and a half later. Anna Maria, Nathanael and Zippora's thirteen-year-old daughter, did not live long in the Older Girls' Choir at Bethlehem. Her "little soul" departed in May 1748, the Moravians reported. 34 Increasingly Moravians directed Native children's education to separate mission schools along the borders of the expanding Pennsylvania colony. The incidence of death, which no doubt led Native parents to keep their children at home, was surely a factor in this decision. And by the 1760s, boarding education also was no longer a likely option for Native students because Moravian leaders had decided to limit boarding education to the children of missionaries and to encourage all other parents to raise their children in their own homes. This shift toward the nuclear family and away from choir-based living arrangements occurred over the next decade. The spiraling cost of the Anstalten was a factor in this transition. Although some white parents paid tuition for their children to attend outlying Anstalten, such as at Maguntsche and Germantown, Bethlehem and Nazareth youngsters prior to 1769 received a church-funded education. The cost of educating a child in one of the boarding institutions was approximately £10 to £12 per year. Given that the Moravians provided boarding education for Bethlehem and Nazareth children from as early as eighteen months of age, the costs were considerable. Mabel Haller estimates that in 1750 the Moravians spent at least £4000 to £5000 to educate about four hundred children. Another factor in the shift away from boarding education was a general tendency among the Moravians to try to move closer to the mainstream of American life. From the 1760s into the 1770s, the Moravians increasingly resembled other colonists. Bethlehem historian Joseph Levering writes that the Moravians "began to feel less like a camp of pilgrims amid foreign surroundings and more like a body of citizens with common local attachments, duties and aspirations." Not only did they conform to the nuclear family model, like their non-Moravian neighbors, but they also began to limit female leadership roles that had been a mark of their earlier unconventionality. During the 1760s and in subsequent decades, the Moravians did not abandon the schooling of Native American children; however, increasingly, day schooling in separate mission villages became the primary type of Moravian education available for them. 35 Following the American Revolution, the Moravians entered a new educational phase while they struggled to recover from losses sustained during the war. These losses were both emotional and financial. The housing and industries of the Single Brothers' Choir at Bethlehem had been disrupted during the winter of 1776-1777 and again from September 1777 until April 1778, when the Continental army operated a hospital in the large dormitory where the single men lived. At one point, as many as

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seven hundred ill soldiers were crowded into the building, and the overcrowding contributed to an outbreak of typhus which spread among the Moravians. Revolutionaryera price inflation, the strain of supporting soldiers and refugees, and wartime damage to crops and community industries all wreaked havoc on Moravian economic life. 36 It is evident that educational endeavors after the American Revolution offered one avenue of recovery from wartime setbacks. The decades after the American Revolution saw a burst of interest in academy and seminary building across the country. The Moravians took advantage of this growing demand for education for boys and girls alike. In 1785 Moravian boarding education entered a new era as the Moravians opened the Bethlehem girls' Anstalt to non-Moravian students for the first time. Soon students began to arrive from New York City, Staten Island, Trenton, and Baltimore. At about the same time, the Moravians opened the Nazareth Hall Academy for Boys as an institution for non-Moravian pupils as well as Moravian students who had previously boarded at the Bethlehem boys' Anstalt. Pastor John Andrew Huebner of the Bethlehem congregation announced this transformation of the exclusive, and by now extremely small, Anstalten into academies that would grow with the tuition support from parents of means. In reference to the girls' school, he wrote: "With God's merciful help, girls will be kept in the Bethlehem Seminary from their fifth to their twelfth or sixteenth year, as long as it may please their parents to have them there .... For board and room, light, heat, laundry, supervision, and instruction, the cost for each daughter will be twenty pounds, Pennsylvania currency, and a quarter of this amount five pounds, must be paid in advance." He noted that there would be separate charges for "clothing, laundry, mending, ... bedding, medicine, books, paper, pens, silk, sewing-needles, and the like of which is not supplied by the parents.'m In contrast to the exclusive choir-based Anstalt that had run on church and community finances rather than individual payments, the new Moravian academies depended heavily on tuition. In 1794 the Moravians also opened a school at Lititiz, which accepted non-Moravian students. By 1804, the Lititz girls' school, eventually called Linden Hall Seminary, had fifty-two boarding pupils and seventeen day students. The following year there were eighty-nine boarding students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary. Between 1802 and 1809, 109 boarding pupils enrolled at Nazareth Hall; all but eighteen were non-Moravians. All of these institutions operated under the auspices of the Moravians' Executive Board of the American Province (also known as the Provincial Helpers' Conference). Each institution received a state charterin 1863. 38 Thus, by the nineteenth century Moravian education had joined the nation's educational mainstream. In line with other academies of this era, Moravian academies offered a diverse range of subjects, some with a newly practical orientation. Language study generally included German, English, and French, and in some cases Latin. Greek was also available at Nazareth Hall. Other subjects available for male and female students were mathematics, reading, writing, drawing, and music. Students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary chose from a wide range of offerings, including botany, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, bookkeeping, painting, knitting,

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and embroidery. Religion continued to be an important aspect of the Moravian school day, with morning and evening devotionals, celebrations of religious holidays, and traditional Moravian lovefeasts; however, increasingly it seemed that religious activities and courses on Christian doctrine competed with a wide range of subjects that lacked overt connections to religion. Furthermore, as the Moravians enrolled students from a variety of religious backgrounds, they aimed not to proselytize for their own belief system but rather promoted a generalized nonsectarian Protestantism, though they retained a few special Moravian touches. 39 Moravian schooling had made the transition from Anstalt to academy education. The Anstalt of the early years had a curriculum focused on an overarching, single purpose of serving Christ. In one sense, the Anstalt was a highly exclusive institution because it only enrolled children whose families had adopted a Moravian perspective, but it also was radically open to educating Native American children along with white children at a time when most whites living on colonial frontiers looked with fear and even loathing on Native peoples. The Moravians moved in stages away from this early radicalism; finally, by 1785 the future direction of Moravian schooling was clear. Children of upwardly mobile, prosperous white families were now the targeted population for Moravian boarding institutions. Meanwhile the experiment of educating sizable numbers of Native and white children together was becoming a distant memory. 40

NOTES The author wishes to thank Vernon Nelson of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, for assistance in locating manuscripts for this essay. 1.

2.

3.

"David u. sein Weib kamen u. fragten uns, ob nicht Br. Joseph uns hatte wissen lassen, ob er seinen Knaben bald bringen diirfte? ... sie wiiren betriibt, wei! sies nicht verstiinden, den Knaben zu erziehen u. glaubten, wenn er bei ihnen sterben solte, so wiirde er nicht selig werden: Wenn ihn aber die Gemeine annehme, u. er stiirbe da, so hatten sie gewisse Hoffnung daB er selig wiirde. GnadenhUtten diary, ll and 15 June 1747, item 1, folder I, box 116, reel4 (New Haven, CT: Research Publications, [1970]), Records of the Moravian Mission among the Indians ofNorth America (hereafter RMM), microfilm from original materials at the Archives of the Moravian Church, Bethlehem, PA (hereafter MAB). Translations from German to English are my own, unless otherwise noted. Some of these children's lives and deaths are recorded in William C. Reichel, ed., Memorials of the Moravian Church (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870), 149-51. For a discussion of Native American childrearing as a responsibility of many members of the community, not just parents, see John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (1991; Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876), 116. Margaret Nash, "Academies," in Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States, ed. Linda Eisenmann (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 3-6; Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States (New York: Sci-

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5.

6.

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ence Press, 1929), 330-31; Mabel Haller, "Early Moravian Education in Pennsylvania," in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society (Nazareth, PA: Moravian Historical Society, 1953), 15: 13-32,61-76, 89-97. See Jon Butler's critique of the notion of a "Great Awakening," which Butler considers an example of "interpretive fiction" since the revivals were too disparate to be categorized as a single movement. Jon Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction," Journal of American History 69 (October I 982): 305-25. For comment on Butler's argument, see Frank Lambert, "The First Great Awakening: Whose Interpretive Fiction?" New England Quarterly 68 (December 1995): 650-59. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein, trans., The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States, 1942), I: I 73, 222, 245, 365; Documentary History of the Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States: Proceedings of the Annual Convention from 1748 to 1821 (Philadelphia: Board of Publication of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America, 1898); Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, I607-I783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), chapter 8; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 179-217. There were also some African American children in Moravian Anstalten. Bethlehem diary, 30/31 December I 750, vol 9: Beilage, MAB (microfilm copy); Bethlehem diary, 8 February 1752, vol. 11. Theodore R. Sizer, ed., The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964), 3-4. For examples of the dominant New England orientation in the history of early American education, see James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974); Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, I 750-1820," History of Education Quarterly 33 (Winter 1993): 511-42. Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, I 988), 3-8, 60-61; Joseph Mortimer Levering, A History of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741-1892 ... (Bethlehem, PA.: Times Publishing Co., 1903), 45-46; Vernon H. Nelson, "Peter Boehler's Reminiscences of the Beginnings of Nazareth and Bethlehem," in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society (Nazareth, PA.: Moravian Historical Society, 1992), 27: 6-7, 18; JaneT. Merritt, "Kinship, Community, and Practicing Culture: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Pennsylvania, I 700- I 763" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1995), 26-27; F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, I 965); John Jacob Sessler, Communal Pietism among Early American Moravians (1933; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971), chapters I and 2; John R. Weinlick, "Moravianism in the American Colonies," in Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity, ed. F. Ernest Stoeffler (Grand Rapids, MI.: William B. Eerdmans, 1976); F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 137; John R. Weinlick, Count Zinzendorf (New York: Abingdon Press, I 956), 23-30; J. Taylor Hamilton and Kenneth G. Hamilton, History of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas Fratrum, 1722-1957 (1967; reprint, Bethlehem: Interprovincial Board of Christian Education, Moravian Church in America, I 983), 80-86.

60

Chartered Schools 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 84-85; Smaby, Tramformation of Moravian Bethlehem, I 0-11; Sessler, Communal Pietism, 97-98. Smaby, Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem, 10, 135; GoUin, Moravians in Two Worlds, (quotation), 67. Zinzendorf quoted in Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 290; "wir ... nicht konnten zu frieden seyn, wenn ein Theil, das Haupt oder der Leib, nicht vor den Hid lebte, denn wir wiiren zu einem Leibe geschaffen u. einander zur Hiilfe." Gnadenhutten diary, 3 May 1747, item I, folder 2, box 116, ree14 Hans-Christoph Hahn and Helmut Reichel, Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Briider: Quellen zur Geschichte der Briider-Unitat von 1722 his 1760 (Hamburg: Wittig, 1977), 276 (quotation, my translation). For a discussion of Zinzendorf's writings on children and for children, see Henry H. Meyer, Child Nature and Nurture according to Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (New York: Abingdon Press, 1928). For a discussion of children and original sin in Zinzendorf's thinking, see Craig D. Atwood, "Blood, Sex, and Death: Life and Liturgy in Zinzendorf's Bethlehem" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995), 54-55. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge,: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 61--{)2; Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126, 127-28 (quotation), 156--{)0. Martin H. Jung, Frauen des Pietismus: Zehn Portrats von Johanna Regina Bengel his Erdmuthe Dorothea von Zinzendorf (Giitersloh: Giitersloher Verlaghaus, 1998), 27-31; Sessler, Communal Pietism, 7-8. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 216-18; Smaby, Transformation, 14-17. For examples of religious routines, see Bethlehem Little Children's Diary, 2 February 1747, Kinder Diaria Box, MAB; Nazareth Children's Diary, 6 January 1747, Kinder Diaria Box; Bethlehem Children's Diary, 9 February 1755, Kinder Diaria Box; Nazareth's Children's Diary, June 7118, 1746, Kinder Diaria Box (for description in English of Gemeintag). On Abraham Reincke, see "Index to Edmund de Schweinitz's The Clergy of the American Province of the Unitas Fratrum," p. 107, MAB. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 227-28; Lawrence W. Hartzell, "Joshua, Jr.: Moravian Indian Musician," in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society (Nazareth, PA: [Moravian Historical Society], 1990), 26: 8-11; Diary of the Moravian Congregation of Philadelphia, 21 March 1748, quoted in Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 230; Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 42. Smaby, Transformation, 28-29 (first quotation); Kinder Diarium [Girls' School], Nazareth, 15/26 May 1746, Kinder Diaria Box (second quotation). GoUin, Moravians in Two Worlds, 12 (first quotation); Smaby, Transformation, 28; Kinder Diarium, [Girls' School], Nazareth, 19/30 May 1746, Kinder Diaria Box (second quotation). Levering, History of Bethlehem, 245, 248-49; Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier, The Evacuation of Shekomeko and the Early Moravian Missions to Native North Americans (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), 111 and chapter 5; Sessler, Communal Pietism, 24-25, 62-66; John B. Frantz, "The Awakening of Religion among the German Settlers in the Middle Colonies," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (April1976): 266-88; Pyrlaeus' Report (on his journey to New England and imprisonment), 19 June 1743, item I, folder 4, box Ill, reel I, RMM; "An Account of What Happened in the Indian Affairs at

From Anstalt to Academy

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

61

Schekomeko & Pachgatgock viz. the Arrest/Imprisonment & Examination of Br. Pyrlaeus, Martin Mack & Joseph Shaw at Milford in New England," item 2, folder 4, box 111, reel I, RMM. On the Paugussetts, see Franz Laurens Wojciechowski, Ethnohistory of the Paugussett Tribes: An Exercise in Research Methodology (Amsterdam: De Kiva, 1992), chapter 4. For tribal affiliations of the Moravian converts, see Carl John Fliegel's translation of catalog oflndians (hereafter Catalog), folder 2, box 3191, RMM. Sessler, Communal Pietism, chapter 7; Smaby, Transformation, 28-31. William W. Newcomb, Jr., The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 43-51; Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Woman, Land, and Society: Three Aspects of Aboriginal Delaware Life," Pennsylvania Archaeologist 17 (1947): 6-1 L For an example of reciprocity in marriage, see Isaack de Rasieres to Samuel Blommaert, 1628 (?)," in Narratives of New Netherland, ed. Jameson, 106-107. Adriaen Vander Donck, "Description of the New Netherlands," (1656), in Collections of the New York Historical Society, 2d ser. (New York, 1841) 1: 199. Moravian records indicate that mother-daughter bonds were sometimes particularly strong. For an example of the strength of the mother-daughter relationship, see Gnadenhutten diary, 19 May 1751, item I, folder 2, box 117, reel5; Pachgatgoch diary, 8, 9, 15, 16 June 1751, item 1, folder 3, box 114, reel 3, RMM. For an example of how the Moravians feared that a mother-daughter relationship would supersede loyalty to the mission, see Friedenshiitten diary, 14 February 17 67, item I, folder 4, box 131, reel 7,RMM. Memorandum, item 3 (German version) and item 4, folder 5, box 113, reel 3 RMM; Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 73; William A. Hunter, "Documented Subdivisions of the Delaware Indians," Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey 35 (1978): 20-39 Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 9; Ives Goddard, "Delaware," in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, voL 15; Bruce G. Trigger, ed. Northeast (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), 214. David Zeisberger, "History of the Northern American Indians," ed. Archer Butler Hulbert and William Nathaniel Schwarze, Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, voL 19 (Columbus, 1910), 76. See my discussion of Native American and Moravian concerns about children in " 'What will become of our young people?': Goals for Indian Children in Moravian Missions," History of Education Quarterly 38 (Fall 1998): 268-86. "Abraham u. Sarah redeten ... daB sie aile beide sehr unruhig waren tiber ihr Madgen u. sagten: Sie fiihltens wohl in ihrem Herzen u. sahens auch tag!. daB sie das Kind nicht konnten vor den Hid aufziehen, ... so thate ihr Herz immer weinen u. diichte, wenn sich doch auch die Gemeine tiber ihr Kind erbarmen mochte u. es annehmen": Gnadenhutten, PA, diary, II July 1747, item I, folder I, box 116, ree14. "daB sie das Kind nicht konten aufziehen vor dem Heiland": Gnadenhutten diary, 23 August/3 September 1747, item 1, folder 2, box 116, reel 4. "Er macht iiberhaupt nicht hiibsch mit ihr": Gnadenhutten diary, 5 May 1747, item 1, folder I, box 116; reel4 "Philippus u. Lydia baten mich mit vielen Thranen, ich solte [doch?] ihr Kind annehmen u. es vor den Hland auferziehen, es solte mein eigen seyn: das Kind ware gestern in etwas [hinein?]gekommen u. es hiitte Schliige gekrigt": Gnadenhutten diary, 5 January 1747, item 1, folder 1, box 116, reel4.

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

Hulbert and Schwarze, eds., "David Zeisberger's History," 81; John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876), 115-16. Vander Donck, "Description," 199; Friedenshtitten diary, 7 September 1767, item I, folder 4, box 131, reel 7, RMM; Johann Schmick to Nathanael Seidel, 9 September 1767, item II, folder 10, box 221; reel 29, RMM; Zeisberger to Seidel, 22 September 1765 and 20 October 1765, items 13 and 14, folder 2, box 229, ree132, RMM. "Warum gebt ihr mich denn nicht dem Martin, ihr konnt mich ja doch nicht recht vor den Hland auferziehen": GnadenhUtten diary, 5 January 1747, item I, folder I, box 116, reel4; ibid., 23 February/14 March 1748, item I, folder 3, box 116, ree14. "Kamen sie auf der Zahl 33 auf einer ihren Stuben zusammen, welche mit grUnem Reisicht aus dem Busch Simple u. niedl. ausgeziedert war. Unter dieBen 33 waren auch 5 lndianer Knaben, welche zu disen Fest heute Nachmittags mit Br. Josua von GnadenhUtten gekommen waren .... hielt Br. Nathanael von dem Zweck dieses Festes u. der besondern Connexion des Herzens, die dieses Chor mit dem Hid haben konte u. solte, ... gessegnete Rede welche unser Indianer Br. Josua vor die Indianische Knaben so gleich tibersezte, sie waren auch sehr attent": Bethlehem diary, 8 January I 752, Vol. I I. GnadenhUtten diary, 12 April 1747, item 1, folder 1, box 116, reel 4. GnadenhUtten diary, 12 April 1747, item I, folder 2, box 116, reel 4; ibid., 24 November 1750 and 6 September 1752, item 1, folders I and 3, box 117, reelS. GnadenhUtten diary, I, 21, and 25 February 1747; ibid., 6 April 1748 (quotation); Reichel, ed., Memorials, 150. Levering, History of Bethlehem, 192. Nathanael and Zippora's daughter was probably Anna Maria, baptized I January, 1747, at Nazareth in the girls' Anstalt, Bethlehem diary, 12/23 January 1750, vol. 8. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 162-65, 171-72. On Anna Maria, see Bethlehem diary, 12/23 January 1750, vol. 8. On Thomas, see GnadenhUtten diary, 15/26 February, 1 and 4 March 1748, and 28 June/9 July 1748, item I, folder 3, box 116. On Quatsche1, see Bethlehem Little Children's Diary, 10 January 1747, Kinder Diaria Box; Bethlehem diary, 24 January/4 February 1747 and 25 January/5 February 1747, vol. 5; Machap was baptized and given the new name Martin in 1749. Reichel, ed., Memorials, 150. Martha lived in the Nazareth Anstalt before her transfer to Germantown. Bethlehem diary, 21 February/4 March 1746. Carl John Fliegel, comp., Index to the Records of the Moravian Mission among the Indians of North America (New Haven, CT: Research Publications, 1970), I: 278-79; William C. Reichel and William H. Bigler, A History of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, at Bethlehem, Pa, with a Catalogue of Its Pupils, 1785-1870 (Bethlehem, PA.: The Seminary, 1901), 21-28. Nazareth Children's Diary, 4/15, 5/16,6/17, and 7/18 May 1746, Kinder Diaria Box. On Martha, see #77, Catalog, Haller, "Early Moravian Education," I 72. Maria was also known as Maria Spangenberg. See #78 Catalog. Nazareth Children's Diary, 1 1/22 May 1746. For Hanna (#108 in Catalog), see GnadenhUtten diary, 6 and 7 May I 748, item 1, folder 3, box 116, ree14. Rebecca's information is in the Catalog under #181. On Daniel, see Catalog #106, and GnadenhUtten diary, 6 May 1748, item I, folder 3, box I 16, reel4. On Thomas, see Catalog #91; and Reichel, ed., Memorials, 149. On Anna Maria, see Catalog #93; GnadenhUtten diary, 10 January 1750, item I, folder 7, box 116, reel 4; and Bethlehem diary, 12/23 January 1750, vol. 8.

From Anstalt to Academy 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

63

Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 343-45, 90--91; Smaby, Transformation, 33-34; "Allgemeine Grundsiize der Kinder Erziehung u. Anweisungen flir Eltem, und aile, die mit der Kinder-Erziehung zu thun haben," Results of 1769 Unity Synod, Article 458 (microfilm), MAB; Levering, History of Bethlehem, 426; Beverly Prior Smaby, "Female Piety among Eighteenth Century Moravians," Pennsylvania History 64 (Summer 1997): 160--62. Levering, History of Bethlehem, 453-55, 464-65, 468-70, 474-76; John R. Weinlick, 'The Moravians and the American Revolution: An Overview," in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society (Nazareth, PA: [Moravian Historical Society], 1977), 23: (part 1), 1-7; Daniel R. Gilbert, "Bethlehem and the American Revolution," in ibid., 30-31; Smaby, Tramformation, 40-41. Reichel and Bigler, History of the Moravian Seminary, 30--31, 41-46; Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 23-24, 28, 92-96, 346-47, 349-50; Notice by Brother Andrew Huebner, Pastor of the Bethlehem Congregation, September 2, 1785, quoted in ibid., 22. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 28, 73, 92-94, 349-50. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 238-53; Sizer, Age of the Academies, 5-6. Although this experiment had essentially ended, there was one Mahican student named John Konkaput who enrolled at Nazareth Hall in 1787 and received state government support for his education. Haller, "Early Moravian Education," 69.

"A Triumph of Reason": Female

Education in Academies in the New Republic MARGARET A. NASH

Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested to her that a "triumph of reason over the passions" might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, "I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings . ... In this I can make no distinction of sex." 1 Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that both males and females were rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs. In his introductory essay to The Age of the Academies, Theodore R. Sizer commented on the impossibility of pinpointing a specific curricular model used in academies. The curricula of academies, as opposed to that of the Latin grammar schools, centered around practical education, preparing students for "the business of life," but Sizer articulated well the confusion inherent in determining what topics were thought to be practicaJ.2 For instance, agriculture and surveying clearly were practical topics, but academies also listed as "useful" courses in literature, modem languages, and history, whose practical application to life might be less clear. Sizer summed up the curricula of the academies as being "optimistic and laissez-faire in the extreme ... Anything and everything could be put into a course." In short, academies offered "a wide variety of subjects beyond the rudiments." 3 The increase nationwide in institutions offering higher schooling was especially important for women. Sizer observed that academies were a boon to female education because they, unlike the Latin grammar schools, were not just for boys. 4 He might also have noted the same distinction at the other end of the educational spectrum. For men, academies occupied an ambiguous place between those Latin grammar schools and colleges, while for women the academies held a unique place: academies were open to women, and Latin schools and colleges were not. Thus academy education was the only form of higher schooling available to women in the early republic.

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In this chapter I provide a brief overview of the development of female education, including common rationales for higher schooling for women. Then I discuss curricular offerings in academies, as well as the pedagogical styles most recommended by educational theorists. I argue that in both the curricula and the pedagogical methods employed in academies, there were far more similarities than differences in male and female education. Core subjects were virtually identical; gender differentiation applied to the smaller number of courses related to vocation.

The Development of Female Education As Kim Tolley argues elsewhere in this collection, many of the first schools for females that taught subjects beyond the rudimentary ones of basic reading, writing, and arithmetic were venture schools, which sprang up in virtually every geographic region along the eastern seaboard in the mid-eighteenth century. These were small, private, and often temporary establishments, usually with a single proprietor or a husband and wife team who taught one or more subjects. Some schools accepted only female students, others only male, and still others accepted both. Instructors in venture schools taught music and dancing, drawing and painting, French, Latin, and Greek, fencing, fancy needlework, and just about any other subject for which there might be a market. Some schools provided instruction in English grammar, writing, arithmetic, and literature. These schools, which appeared in larger towns before the Revolution and spread to smaller ones afterward, were the basis for the later female academies. 5 In the late eighteenth century, venture schools increasingly faced competition from academies. Where the venture schools were temporary establishments opened in someone's home for as long as either teacher or students desired and just as quickly closed again, academies aspired to more permanence. In addition to their less ephemeral nature, academies offered a wider range of subjects. Under the venture school system, a teacher offered instruction in one or several subjects. Venture school students might take dance from one teacher and go elsewhere for French lessons, and perhaps hire yet another instructor to come to her home for music lessons. Academy founders, on the other hand, intended to provide a complete range of courses under one roof (although, as we will see, there was no agreement on what constituted a "complete" education). 6 The academy movement represented a shift in thinking about education. In the early eighteenth century, wealthy families hired tutors for their children, preferring home schooling to education in an institutional setting. This education varied widely, ranging from rudimentary to advanced subjects for both girls and boys, and often including college preparatory studies for boys. Those who followed this practice found support for it in the opinions of the highly-influential John Locke, and especially in Locke's view of a young child's mind as a tabula rasa. Locke believed that the purpose of education was primarily moral and religious, and that parents were responsible for inculcating morality. He also argued that young people gathered in groups were bound

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to exert a bad influence on each other. "Vertue [sic] is harder to be got" than book knowledge, Locke wrote, "and if lost in a Young Man is seldom recovered." 7 By the mid and late eighteenth century, however, elite families began to abandon the custom of private home tutoring and chose instead to educate their children in academies. This change may have been prompted in part by an increased emphasis on science, the study of which required apparatus that few families owned. At the same time, educators began to express concern about young people whose parents indulged them far too much at home. Critics especially targeted mothers. A founder of the male Academy of Philadelphia contended in 1750 that "Partiality and Indulgence render them [mothers] unfit to be trusted with the sole Care of the Children's Education." 8 Young people did not need to be coddled, he insisted. They needed to be challenged and corrected. Only an impartial teacher could do this fairly and evenly. Yet few people urged removing students from home altogether. Indeed, whether the students were female or male, most academies in the 1780s and 1790s were day schools and not boarding schools. Students lived at home if they were able, or else lived with relatives or friends near the school. Educators and parents alike were leery of boarding schools. Teachers could exert tight control on students in the classroom, but the time spent out of the classroom was a different situation altogether. Benjamin Rush, like many other writers on education, was strongly against boarding schools, calling them "the gloomy remains of monkish ignorance." Young people needed to be separated from each other when not in school, he believed, thus securing "their morals from a principal source of corruption." 9 After the Revolution, the broad and diffuse discourse of civic republicanism provided additional support for academies as opposed to home tutoring. One common theme in American writing was that collective life was necessary to form good republican citizens. Academies, according to their proponents, provided a mixing of social classes that would be favorable for the republic. Other observers found academies beneficial because of the possibility of forging friendships and connections, both business and marital, in formal school settings. 10 In addition, many citizens in the new republic saw the spirit of competition as a good, and one that could not be arrived at in the small and sheltered world of the family. As one proponent argued, people tutored at home "are apt to form too high an opinion of their own attainments or abilities." Observing first-hand the accomplishments of others would serve to diminish arrogance. 11 Educators harnessed this competitive urge in the pedagogical system of emulation. Academies rhetorically distinguished themselves from colleges by claiming to offer a more practical education. Throughout the colonial era, colleges routinely taught the classical curriculum of Latin and Greek, but critics of this system emerged by the mid-eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, advocated an English course for boys as an alternative to the classical collegiate course. His proposed course of study included English as well as modern languages (which would aid in transatlantic business), along with the practical subjects of navigation, agriculture, and surveying. His ideas were only partially realized in the Philadelphia academy he

"A Triumph of Reason"

67

helped found, which eventually became the University of Pennsylvania. Although the trustees acquiesced to the popular demand for practical subjects, they refused to abandon the classical course. 12 Men's colleges continued to teach classics in the late eighteenth century, but increasingly they faced criticism for doing so. Noah Webster, for instance, thought that only those young men destined for the learned professions should spend much time learning "the dead languages." He especially deplored students spending more time with Latin and Greek than they did acquiring a thorough knowledge of English.13 Webster's 1790 essay "On the Education of Youth in America" called for practical education, arguing that students should study those subjects that had direct relevance to their prospective lines of work. "Why," he asked, "should a merchant trouble himself with the rules of Greek and Roman syntax or a planter puzzle his head with conic sections?'* Leave the colleges to their classics, many seemed to be saying; the academies would teach students what they needed for real life. Yet, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, academies did in fact teach the classics. As historians Theodore Sizer and Robert Church point out, even if the classics were associated with elitism, it was an elite distinction that many young people wanted for themselves. Further, from the point of view of financially strapped academies, instruction in the classics was cheap compared to instruction in subjects that required apparatus for experiments and demonstrations. As a result, academies attended by men were as likely as colleges to teach Latin and Greek. 15 Colleges and academies had much in common, given that they served similar functions to largely the same population. Both offered education beyond the rudiments, primarily taught students who were from fourteen to twenty-five years old, and also accommodated students in the broad age range of ten to forty. Both colleges and academies offered similar courses of study, in spite of the general expectation that academies offered a practical education in contrast to the classical curriculum taught at colleges. 16 There was one significant distinction between colleges and academies, however. While no colleges admitted women until well into the nineteenth century, many academies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were coeducational or female-only. 17 It is impossible to know how many academies were coeducational, or to know what proportion of the total they represented. Academies had much more local appeal than colleges, and so acceptance of women probably varied greatly according to locale. But clearly, coeducational academies abounded. One source documented thirty-four coeducational academies in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine between 1783 and 1805. 18 Connecticut had at least half a dozen coeducational academies during the same time, and many are known to have existed in the South, including at least five in North Carolina alone. 19 This difference may be explained by the ubiquity of academies, which were far more plentiful than colleges. In 1800 there were only twenty-five colleges in the United States, but there were hundreds of academies.20 When colleges entered a period of great proliferation in the mid-nineteenth century, more colleges became coeducationaP 1As long as colleges were set apart for an elite few, women were not admitted.

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Academy founders also tapped into a broad societal concern for women's education. Unlike colleges, which trained men for professions that were not open to women, academies positioned themselves as able to provide meaningful and useful education for women. One set of issues revolved around women's relationships to others, in their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Another set of rationales was more directly tied to women's self-interest. One prime consideration was the nongendered nature of the pleasure of learning. Closely associated with this was the belief that education would improve one's relationship with the divine, and this too applied equally to men and women. A third, and extremely gender-specific, argument for female education related to the supposition that marriage was likely to be more difficult for women than for men, and education would help women survive trying circumstances. Finally, advocates of female education touted the practical benefits that would accrue, such as improved household management and the potential for selfsufficiency. The model republican woman was self-reliant, competent, and confident in her abilities, all qualities that would be fostered by a solid education. 22 Women's education was increasingly important in a culture that believed that women wielded extraordinary power over men. According to this view, women had a civilizing influence on men. 23 A commencement speaker at Columbia College said in 1795 that women had the power to mold men's taste, manners, and conduct, "change their tempers and dispositions," and inspire men to noble deeds. Desirous of winning female approbation, men would become whatever women wanted them to be. Women, "as patriots and philanthropists," could shape men's behavior "conducive to the glory of the country." The author of an advice article published in the American Magazine in 1788 told women of their power: "you polish our manners-correct our vices-and inspire our hearts with a love of virtue." 24 Webster averred that men "have been restrained from a vicious life" by their "attachment to ladies of virtue." Women's sway covered a broad scope, as they made their impress, not only on one or two individual men, but on the whole country. As an essayist for the magazine Universal Asylum put it, women had a powerful influence in "controlling the manners of a nation." 25 One justification for female education, then, was that education would help women use their power for good. Preparation for good motherhood also figured in the arguments of proponents of female education. When Webster discussed female education, he asserted that education should help women teach "virtue, propriety, and dignity" to their children. 26 Benjamin Rush, Revolutionary Army surgeon-general, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and advocate for female education, expressed the idea that women should be educated in order "to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government." 27 While prescriptive literature did discuss the importance of motherhood, historians have probably exaggerated the importance of this issue. 28 Close analysis of Rush's essays reveals that he advocated female education for women's multiple duties and responsibilities. Rush did not see motherhood as women's only, or even their primary, role. He expected women to put their education to use in helping to manage their husbands' businesses, running efficient homes, con-

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tributing thoughtful conversation to social groups, and improving their own health and happiness. Rush's Enlightenment beliefs in science drumming out superstition, as well as his concurrence in prevailing ideas of women's relationship to men, were at the forefront. 29 Nor was Rush the only writer of the era to emphasize nonmatemal female roles. Historians have taken note of this in the past decade, and have challenged the dominance in the historiography of the construct of "republican motherhood." As Ruth H. Bloch contends, "there was far more literature on courtship, marriage, and the social utility of female education than on motherhood." 30 Articles and essays recommending women's education did not exclusively focus on its "social utility," however. Proponents of female education saw justifications beyond increasing women's potential value to men and the country. Writers often extolled the pleasures of learning, for both women and men, and linked learning with happiness. 31 "Education is the groundwork on which the Temple of Happiness may rise," said one orator at a female academy in 1787. 32 In an essay published in 1794, an anonymous New York student gushed, Oh! learning, thou art one of the great blessings mankind can enjoy.... Neither can I conceive that learning was intended merely for the improvement of one sex ... for those who have been the most learned, have been the most happy. 33 A New York Magazine writer advised women in 1790, "If happiness be dear to you, attend to the cultivation of letters." 34 That same magazine published an article in 1795 on the study of arts and sciences in which the author contended that "the desire of knowledge is planted in every human breast; it is as natural to us as reason," and from the study of science "we derive the principal delights of life." 35 These sentiments were expressed privately, as well. Jonathan Steele, a North Carolinian who served as Comptroller to the United States Treasury, wrote to his daughter in 1800, "Go on my dear child, to improve your mind-knowledge is the best resource at that time of life when youthful pleasures fail. It makes man, or woman, in a certain degree independent of circumstances, and affords them consolations where the rational only can seek it with success." 36 Similarly, Joyce Myers wrote to her step-daughters, who later would become well-known teachers in Warrenton, North Carolina, praising them for their progress in school. She urged them to continue, saying, "the pleasure resulting to yourselves and the advantages attendant on Education will no doubt all conspire to impell [sic] you with ardor steadily to pursue this pleasing avocation." 37 The belief that learning would bring women and men a richer understanding of God was also widely held. Studying the natural sciences provided opportunities to "admire the works of God"; through detailed observation of works of nature, students saw "a thousand instances of the perfection of the Deity." Such an improved understanding rendered students "better qualified to obtain the favor of God," and increased the likelihood of their promoting virtue. Education also increased their potential for

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heavenly bliss, because "the more exalted and refined the mind is in this world the more perfect and sublime will be its happiness in Heaven." 38 While some proponents of female education expressed those lofty hopes that education would lead women to God, others more humbly suggested that it might, at the least, prevent dissipation, vice, and despondency. Many writers depicted women's lot in life as lonely, tedious, and filled with distressing circumstances. Education, some thought, would help ameliorate such unpleasantries. It would "often enable them to avoid, and always to bear, the inconveniences of domestic life," and "remove the necessity of resorting to trifling, perhaps criminal amusements" to which women might easily fall prey. 39 One student wrote in 1794 that men have more opportunities to "extricate themselves from misfortune" than do women, who are more prone to slip into dissipation, or give in to "whims of fancy." This problem, she felt, "could be resolved by regular and classical education." 40 Another student that same year maintained that education was more necessary for women than men, because women "lead a more solitary life, and must, unavoidably, sometimes fall into melancholy and dejection if not supported by a good education, which would enable us to pass those pensive hours in contemplation and writing, which would ... sweeten adversity, and soften the cares of life." 41 Although marriage might add greatly to men's happiness, some women expressed the belief that it was not always such a good bargain for females. A Philadelphia female academy student reiterated the pitiable condition of women in a 1794 address. Ann Negus averred that the sufferings of men in battle were nothing compared to the sufferings of women in unhappy marriages. Soldiers, at least, had each others' company and an assortment of amusements, received the applause of their fellow citizens, and had the satisfaction of looking back with pride on their service. Women, however, had none of these rewards to mitigate their sufferings, and nothing "so soon sinks the mind into hopeless despondence, as contemptuous neglect." 42 An anonymous writer for the Lady's Magazine declared that marriage was nothing more than a lottery, and many of the husbands given as prizes were simply "John trots, fond fools, drunken fools, unfaithful fools, ... stupid fools, rich fools, ... old fools, young fools, handsome fools, ugly fools ...." 43 These negative assessments of marriage contributed to the contention that, while education obviously would not ameliorate all the difficulties seemingly inherent in married life, it would make life more palatable. Enriching women's minds and hearts would provide a source of solace during dismal days. In addition to such intangible benefits, many writers also saw practical purposes for women's education. Rather than unfit women for domestic drudgery, as some feared, proponents argued that education would help women fulfill their domestic obligations "with grace and dignity." Lack of education, they argued, not too much education, would interfere with the performance of women's work. Those whose studies "have been confined to Cookery," argued one writer, fight with the servants, "have ruined their health, spoiled their tempers, neglected their persons, laid waste their minds ... and muddled away their time and money in disorderly manage-

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ment." 44 In an argument that would be often repeated in the early nineteenth century, proponents of advanced education insisted that educated women made the best daughters, wives, mothers, and citizens. Within routine household management were many tasks that required literacy and numeracy. Women needed to be able to buy and sell advantageously, keep accounts, compose letters, and be prepared to manage estates in the event of husbands' or fathers' absence through travel, illness, or death. 45 A man's solvency in many ways depended on his wife's regulation of the household economy, especially when she often served "as treasurer of his family." Not only did they need the technical skills of writing and bookkeeping, but they also could benefit from the mental discipline of other subjects. Studying logic and philosophy, for instance, would teach women to think rationally, which, in turn, would aid them in all their tasks. 46 Education had an important purpose for women beyond improving the dispatch of their domestic duties. Education, some argued, could also lead to economic selfsufficiency, either as never-married women or as widows. Judith Sargent Murray essayed the hope that the term "helpless widow" might be rendered inapplicable, and that a recently bereaved woman might be able to "assist as well as weep over her offspring." Women, she argued, ought to be taught to "depend on their own efforts" rather than rely on a husband to support them. Marriages, she and others believed, had a greater chance of success if they were formed for other than pecuniary reasons. 47 An even more compelling reason for women to be self-supporting was their desire for self-determination. Murray argued that "the freeborn mind ... naturally revolts" against dependence, and that this was no less true of women than men. "Aim at making yourselves so far acquainted with some particular branch of business," she told women, that you need not sink into dependence. 48 An anonymous writer in the Monthly Magazine, in an essay that was reprinted in the New York Magazine in 1798, echoed Murray's view. Eschewing the "enfeebling effects" of a system in which women "are uniformly educated" for dependence, this writer promoted the possibility of education for a selfsustaining vocation. Female education, according to this essayist, should include the attainment of a useful trade, by which women might "gain an honest and honorable independence, and be freed from the disgraceful necessity of bartering her person to procure a maintenance." Such professions might involve knowledge of arithmetic and bookkeeping. 49 More women would be likely to need such a trade if they followed the advice literature that cautioned them not to marry hastily, instructing women that no marriage was better than a bad marriage. An anonymous writer in 1792 asserted that many unmarried women "act very prudently in declining entering matrimony with such suitors as they often have." 50 One advice book recommended telling girls about the examples of respectable and "prudent" women who "pass an easy, independent" single life, "as happily as any widow, and assuredly more so than many a married woman." 51 More women would enter the "cult of single blessedness" in the antebellum era, and educational institutions played a part in their ability to achieve self-sufficiency.5 2 Advocates of female education, then, set forth multiple justifications for women's education. Some of those justifications emphasized differences between

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women and men, such as women's civilizing influence on men, women's roles as mothers, and women's need for morally-uplifting distraction from their difficult lives. Other justifications emphasized human traits that theorists believed were the same for women and men. These included the value of knowledge, the pleasure in-and capacity for-learning, the perceived relationship between acquiring knowledge and understanding God, and practical needs for literacy and numeracy. The arena in which advocates of female education advanced their cause was the academy movement of the late eighteenth century. This "movement," however, cannot be defined easily, as there was tremendous variation from school to school. In some senses, academies were for an elite few. Attendance figures for this period are difficult to determine, but one estimate is that even by 1850 only a small minority-about six percent-of the population ever attended, let alone graduated from, an academy. 53 A family had to be wealthy enough to pay tuition as well as to forego a child's earnings during the years he or she might otherwise be employed. However, more young people in higher education attended academies than colleges. By that same date of 1850, academy attendance rates were as much as nine times that of college attendance rates. 54 Colleges prepared men for the "learned professions" of law, medicine, and politics. Academies prepared men for a much wider range of occupations and also provided women with opportunities for learning that otherwise remained closed to them for decades.

Both Useful and Ornamental: Curricula in the Academies Academies taught a wide range of subjects to young women and men, from English to navigation to dance. Essays, addresses, and school circulars often tried to capture this breadth by assuring prospective students and their parents that the curriculum included both "useful and ornamental branches" of education. But what exactly did this phrase mean? Did "ornamental" education apply only to females (as some historians have assumed) and refer to drawing, painting, and music? Did the presence of these "ornamental" subjects suggest that women's education was highly elitist, and/or irredeemably debased? Primary documents suggest that educators and other writers variously described subjects as either useful or ornamental, and that there was no clear agreement on what subjects fell into each category. 55 The author of a 1791 article in the Massachusetts Magazine stated that the "necessary" branches of education were reading and writing, and labeled the subjects of history, geography, and science as "ornamental." 56 Noah Webster believed that arithmetic and geography were useful and necessary subjects, for both men and women. 57 In 1789, a trustee of Poor's Young Ladies' Academy covered all bases and said that reading, writing, history, geography, astronomy, and arithmetic were "not only ornamental," but also "advantageous." Later that same year, another trustee of the same academy referred to the same list of subjects as being usefuJ.5 8 Even when writers agreed on which subjects were ornamental, there was little agreement on whether the ornaments were salutary and for whom. Numerous journal

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articles associated such activities with aristocracy, and deemed them inappropriate in a republic. 59 Others thought, however, that these subjects were beneficial, and so advocated education in the fine arts for women. Maria Edgeworth, a popular author whose two-volume work Practical Education was first published in 1798, spoke of the great restraints under which women must live. Any attempt to further "diminish the number of [women's] employments, therefore, would be cruel." "Every sedentary occupation must be valuable," she wrote, "to those who are to lead sedentary lives." 60 Women, she felt, might find comfort and solace for their otherwise difficult lives through facility in one or more of the arts. Some educational theorists also promoted ornamental education for males. Benjamin Franklin, a spokesperson for practical education, wished that boys could be taught "every Thing that is useful, and every Thing that is ornamenta1." 61 At the opening of Bristol Academy for boys in New Bedford in 1796, Simeon Doggett spoke of his hope that the students would learn "the ornaments of ease and grace of manner." 62 Both winners of the American Philosophical Society's 1797 prize for the best essay on education advocated teaching fine arts, including dance and music, to men in colleges.63 Similarly, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, regarding their sons' education, that she should "make them disdain to be destitute of any ornamental Knowledge or Accomplishment." Abigail linked that which was useful with what was ornamental when she admonished her son John Quincy Adams to "[i]mprove your understanding for acquiring usefull [sic] knowledge, ... such as will render you an ornament to society." 64 It is important, then, not to assume what was meant by "ornamental," as that term was used in various ways. Furthermore, "ornaments" were not necessarily gender-specific subjects in the late eighteenth century; the term was applied to aspects of both male and female education, and sometimes it was applied to subjects that we would term academic. While some people scornfully regarded "ornaments" as frivolous, others regarded them as valuable, humanizing influences on men and women alike. Setting aside the labels of "ornamental" and "useful," then, what actual subjects were taught in academies, and how did they differ for males and females? 65 Virtually every educational institution and educational theorist listed English first and foremost as the subject most important for all students to master. When Benjamin Rush outlined subjects appropriate for females, first on his list was a solid knowledge of English and the ability to read, speak, and write English correctly. 66 The study of English encompassed the acquisition of a range of skills: reading, writing, spelling, orthography, grammar, composition, speaking, and oratory or rhetoric. Not every academy taught all of these branches, although nearly every academy taught reading, writing, and spelling to both sexes. Although these might seem like rudimentary subjects, they were not regarded as such at the time. Students in the all-male colleges also studied English grammar in the mid-eighteenth century. Princeton's curriculum, for instance, included spelling and grammar, and grammar was not relegated to the level of an entrance requirement until 1819. 67

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Likewise, educators viewed orthography and handwriting as important for both sexes, a view that represented a change from earlier in the eighteenth century. Instructors considered spelling and orthography to be different skills, and schools did not necessarily teach them both. Students learned spelling by recitation-the teacher listened as students spelled words out loud. Orthography, however, was a written skill, and schools that emphasized reading over writing did not teach orthography. Colonial town schools, for instance, were more likely to teach girls to read than to write, so while some colonial girls learned spelling, fewer learned orthography. 58 Orthography was an advanced skill compared to reading or spelling, and one that few females learned as a matter of course until the academy movement of the late eighteenth century. Handwriting also was a separate subject, and some "writing masters" advertised the various styles they were qualified to teach. Writing in a good clear hand was key to both good business and to personal communication. Rush, for instance, in advocating this as an appropriate subject for females, discussed the importance in business of legibility and neatness. He opined that few things were "more rude or illiberal than to obtrude a letter upon a person of rank or business which cannot be easily read." 69 In the 1780s, schools offered instruction in composition, or essay-writing, less frequently than they taught reading, writing and spelling. This changed by the early nineteenth century, when academies and seminaries more commonly offered studies in composition, or even required students to write essays. The initial lack of emphasis on composition for females is not surprising given that orthography, a foundation skill for composition, was just gaining in popularity for girls during the 1780s and 1790s. Composition apparently was not part of the original curriculum at Poor's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, but trustees added it in 1788. 70 Nor did Brown's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia originally teach it, although one of the visitors, John Swanwick, appealed in 1787 for it to be taught. 71 Composition began to be taught in coeducational reading schools in 1789 in the Boston Public Schools, and appears in course listings at coeducational academies in the South in the 1790s. 72 Educators thought speaking was an important skill for females as well as males. They did not expect women to make public orations, but they did want women to have proper diction, tone, and pronunciation. Not only would this help create, as Noah Webster promoted, a distinctly American tongue, it would also help distinguish people by class. Further, reading aloud to one's family in the evening was a task (or honor, depending on how one looked at it) that often fell to women. Being able to perform that task in a way that would please listeners was important. A trustee of a Philadelphia female academy encouraged students to learn to read aloud "with propriety and grace," and termed good reading "a charming accomplishment." 73 Schools were less likely, on the other hand, to offer oratory to girls. For boys, rhetoric and speech making might be necessary for future roles as ministers, lawyers, or legislators. These positions were not open to girls, and so learning rhetoric in schools seemed less necessary. There were some exceptions to this curricular pattern. William Woodbridge apparently taught rhetoric at his female academy in New Haven in 1780.74 Poor's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia began offering a prize in

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rhetoric in 1790. 75 In 1792, the valedictorian of that academy justified girls' study of rhetoric, arguing that many subjects undertaken by boys had no specific future use either. For instance, argued Molly Wallace, most boys who learned Latin seldom used it. Most learning, she contended, was useful for the habits and discipline required, rather than for the content itself. 76 Franklin, too, advocated a study of rhetoric, not necessarily to learn how to make speeches, but to learn how to distinguish between emotion-stirring sophistry and well-reasoned argument. 77 To Franklin and many others, this seemed as important for women as for men, and rhetoric became common in female schools after 1800. 78 These English studies were basic subjects, and, with some exceptions, by the early nineteenth century virtually every type of school taught them. After about 1840, when more students received rudimentary education in common schools, academies and seminaries listed spelling, reading, and writing only as preparatory studies, and taught grammar, composition, rhetoric, and belles-lettres as higher branches of English. 79 After English, academies were most likely to advertise courses in arithmetic and geography. Virtually every academy-male, female, or coeducational-taught these subjects, although to what degree is difficult to determine. Arithmetic was important to women who would manage household accounts, and some academies specifically taught bookkeeping to girls. Benjamin Rush, for instance, believed that knowledge of figures and bookkeeping was "absolutely necessary" so that a woman could assist her husband or serve as executrix of his estate should she outlive him. 80 Benjamin Say, a trustee at Poor's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, urged students to apply themselves to arithmetic so that they could "buy or sell advantageously-cast up accounts, and in general [be able] to transact such business as may be found occasionally necessary." 81 Other academies, along with many district schools, taught facets of arithmetic relevant to commercial transactions. Rowson's female academy in Massachusetts around the turn of the nineteenth century taught students how to compute interest, along with rules for establishing relative values of various commodities. 82 Academies taught girls as well as boys, then, arithmetical skills useful in a market economy. At least some people saw this training as potentially vocational. The writer of a 1797 article on female education argued that there were a variety of trades and professions related to the practice of arithmetic and bookkeeping that should be opened to women. 83 Virtually every school also taught geography. What was meant by geography, however, is difficult to discern. Kim Tolley concludes in her work on science education that geography entailed a wide array of subjects. In the late eighteenth century, many subjects were subsumed under the heading of geography, including history, physics, botany, geology, meteorology, medicine, and astronomy. Jedidiah Morse's widely-used textbook Elements of Geography, for instance, included a history of science that introduced students to both ancient and modern figures in science, from Pythagoras to Boyle. 84 By the early nineteenth century, schools taught chemistry and physics as part of a course in natural philosophy, taught zoology, botany, and geology under the rubric of natural history, and offered separate courses in ancient, modem,

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and United States history. In the late eighteenth century, however, all of these were variously taught under the label of geography. Leaders of the new republic looked to education to unify and safeguard the nation, and geography textbook authors were willing to do their part to help. Texts extolled the beauties as well as the natural riches of the land itself, encouraging young people to feel pride in their country. Authors compared the people of other countries unfavorably to those of the United States. Morse, for instance, wrote that the Irish were a "blundering sort of people," the English were "proud and haughty," and Mexicans had "all the bad qualities of the Spaniards ... without [their] courage, firmness and patience."85 Textbooks also compared systems of government, with, of course, republics coming out far ahead of monarchies. 86 These lessons in national pride were intended for young people of both sexes. Morse dedicated his geography text, for instance, "to Young Masters and Misses Throughout the United States." 87 Some academies offered modern and ancient languages, as well. All-female schools frequently offered instruction in French. This was the case at Rowson's in Massachusetts, Brown's in Philadelphia, O'Connor's in South Carolina, and several female schools in North Carolina. The female Boarding School of Salem, North Carolina, offered German in 1807. Some academies offered ancient languages. Blair's private school for girls in the 1790s and Richmond Female Academy around 1800, both in Virginia, taught girls Latin, Greek, and French. 88 A traveler in South Carolina noted that it was "fashionable for the young ladies [there] to be taught the dead languages [and] French and Italian." 89 Academies far more often taught Latin and Greek to males than females in this period, but some schools did teach these languages to women, and the number of such schools increased greatly by the 1820s. Academies customarily offered a number of nonacademic subjects, as well. One of these was needlework, a term that encompassed several different sorts of work. Schools often specified whether they offered plain or fancy (or fine) needlework, or embroidery. Needlework frequently has been dismissed as a frivolous subject, but it can be viewed in the same light as vocational education for men. 90 Plain needlework was essential for nearly all females. As Mary Beth Norton notes, most women "devoted many hours each day to their needles," conducting the seemingly endless and mundane tasks of creating, mending, and altering clothes for themselves and their relations. 91 Jeanne Boydston points out that even women in wealthy urban families did not escape the chores of needlework. 92 Not only was needlework a practical skill that contributed to the domestic economy, it also had wage-earning implications, given that some women supported themselves or contributed to the family's income by sewing. 93 An article in The New England Quarterly Magazine urged young women to learn needlework, which the anonymous author termed an "accomplishment." In this case, an "accomplishment" clearly was not meant to be merely for show, for the author went on to say that through needlework women "may obtain an honest and honorable subsistence." Others, too, advocated needlework as a way "the indigent may most speedily earn bread,"

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or a middle-class "lady, in case of unexpected misfortunes, [may be guarded] from the horrors of dependence." 94 Still, it certainly was not the case that academies universally offered instruction in needlework. Small schools with only a single male teacher did not offer needlework, including the well-known Northern schools for girls run by future Yale University president Timothy Dwight, or by William Woodbridge. Neither Brown's nor Poor's female academies in Philadelphia, both much larger than Dwight's and Woodbridge's, taught any form of needlework. Even when offered, some principals kept needlework in a clearly subordinate position. Sarah Pierce, for instance, did not permit students to enter her school solely to learn to embroider; they were required to also pursue academic subjects. 95 Some academies in this period also offered music. Brown's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia offered vocal music, no doubt influenced by the views of one of its trustees, the physician Benjamin Rush, who advocated singing and dancing for both boys and girls. Vocal music was accessible to all (unlike instrumental music, which required the expense of an instrument) and doctors credited it with several salutary effects. Rush believed that robust singing could defend the lungs from disease, and he asserted that singing civilized the mind and prepared it for the influence of religion and government. 96 Dancing, too, he viewed as promoting health, and not just a frivolous pastime. Educational theorists of the 1780s and I 790s did not endorse teaching instrumental music in schools. Rush discouraged instrumental music not only because of the expense, but also because playing well required too much time for practice, time that "could be better spent acquiring useful ideas," such as learning history or philosophy, or reading poetry or moral essays. 97 Maria Edgeworth argued that there was no real utility in learning to play an instrument, because after marriage few women had the leisure to devote to keeping up their musical skills. 98 In spite of the wellpublicized views of Rush and Edgeworth, academies that taught music were more likely to offer instrumental than vocal music. However, only a minority of schools offered either before 1800. After I 800, a larger proportion of schools offered instrumental music, especially in the South. Edgeworth recommended instruction in drawing rather than music. She suggested that fewer married women abandoned the practice of drawing as it "does not demand such an inordinate quantity of time to keep up the talent.'' 99 Drawing had a practical benefit related to needlework, as well. If a woman could draw her own patterns for her embroidery or sewing, she would not have to buy them or find someone to draw them for her. Even so, drawing was offered only in nine out of twenty-five schools from I 780 to I 810, and five of those nine were in schools that opened after 1800. Other nonacademic subjects that were offered in the antebellum era, such as painting, lace work, and waxwork, were seldom offered in academies in the immediate post-Revolutionary decades. One might expect to see a move from less to more emphasis on academic subjects in curricula for women over time. Or one might

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expect to see an inverse relationship: that as schools added academic subjects or increased the rigor of study, they would drop nonacademic subjects from the curricula. In fact, institutions increased the numbers of both academic and nonacademic subjects over time. Schools added more courses in history, languages, and mathematics, but also added more listings in painting and music. The high rate of schools offering drawing held fairly constant. The exception was needlework, which was offered less often after 1830. 100 The curricula at academies, then, exhibited little gender differentiation. Core subjects were the same for both sexes. Differences occurred most consistently in the area of vocational subjects: navigation and surveying for men, and needlework for women.

Nobly Contending for the Prize: Pedagogical Practices A wide range of writers echoed the belief that education consisted of far more than mere repetition of facts quickly learned and just as quickly forgotten. The ultimate goal of education, according to most of these authors, was to develop a person's reasoning powers, regardless of gender. Elizabeth Hamilton suggested that the function of education was to perfect a person's intellectual and moral powers. As noted in the quotation that began this article, Hamilton saw no distinction between male and female needs for, or their abilities to develop, these powers. 101 The standard mode of education in the colonial era, from primary schools through college, was that of rote memorization and student recitation. This remained the common practice in schools at all levels through much of the nineteenth century. 102 This pedagogic form had its opponents, however, many of whom spoke against its use for both males and females. In his 1798 plan for female education, John Hobson urged teachers to discern whether a student was a "wordy parrot or a reasoning machine." Science, he said, ought to be taught through Socratic dialogue. The point of education, Hobson insisted, was not merely the ability to recite a set of facts; students must give proof of "real knowledge" [italics in original]. 103 Writers and educators encouraged both male and female students to be active, not passive, learners. An article called "Hints on Reading" advised women to read systematically, analyze the books they read, examine an author's arguments, and "consider how far what he says concords with your own opinion and experience." 104 Similarly, Maria Edgeworth wanted women to be so confident of their own judgments that their "powers of reasoning [would be] unawed by authority." 105 Sarah Pierce, founder in 1791 of the successful school later known as the Litchfield Female Academy (attended by Catharine and Harriet Beecher), viewed genuine education as that which disciplined the mind. Pierce believed that mental discipline was equally necessary for girls and boys. 106 The active learning encouraged by these writers and educators-learning that would instill in young people a reliance on their own judgment---could not be a result of mere rote memorization. Instead, teachers asked students to explain the principles behind what they were learning, and not just repeat facts.

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A second popular pedagogic tool of the late eighteenth century also encouraged aggressive learning in young women and men. This was the system of emulationessentially, a form of competition, with prizes generally awarded in public. Teachers encouraged students to emulate the best student: to imitate with the intent to surpass. Emulation became controversial several decades later, as some people thought that it fostered the unchristian iniquities of envy and pride. 107 But in the late eighteenth century, educators widely touted emulation as the best incentive to learning, for girls and boys alike. Male visitors to and teachers at female academies praised the competitive spirit among the students. For instance, Reverend Sproat, a trustee at Poor's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, commended students there who "have nobly disputed every inch of ground." Another trustee applauded students' zeal, telling them, "You have nobly contended for the prize with very formidable and determined opponents, who disputed the ground with you, inch by inch, with praise-worthy perseverance and undaunted fortitude." In a graduation address one student urged on younger students by saying, "With the spirit of enterprise and emulation, push forward your conquest."108 John Swanwick, trustee of Brown's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, referred to the "noble principle of emulation," and stated that this "sense of honor, this desire for fame, is a principle which can never be too much encouraged in every concern of life." Not only did he deem such a spirit of competition to be appropriate for women, Swanwick claimed that it was "implanted by Providence, no doubt, for very valuable purposes." 109

Conclusion Academy education in the early national period was very similar for men and women. Academic subjects were almost exactly the same: the English branches, geography, and arithmetic-including that which was geared toward business-were standard in virtually all of the schools. Historians have pointed to two main subject areas as indicative of a broad gender difference in schools: classics and ornamentals. But in neither case is the difference as significant as historians have supposed. While boys were far more likely to enroll in Latin and Greek, girls were not entirely excluded from these subjects; furthermore, although schools did not routinely offer Latin and Greek to girls, neither did all schools require these subjects of boys. Indeed, although many academies still taught the classics, educators disputed the importance of the "dead languages." In addition, girls studied the classical languages in some academies as early as the 1780s and 1790s, and academies for girls frequently offered these courses in the early nineteenth century. Girls' schools' advertisements of "ornamental" subjects take on new meaning when seen in a broader context. "Ornamental" meant different things to different people, and sometimes meant anything beyond basic literacy. Also, some educators and parents promoted the ornamental studies of music, dance, and art for males as well as females; such subjects signified a class-based sensibility about refinement

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far more than they signified anything about different academic standards for women and men. The biggest difference in school subjects available to males and females related to possible future vocations. Many academies taught specific vocational subjects to boys, such as navigation or surveying. Similarly, many academies taught needlework to girls, either because they would need to know how to use a needle in their own homes, or because they potentially could earn money with this skill. In addition, other subjects could lead to wage-earning positions. Solid English skills, including good handwriting, were useful in business, as was bookkeeping. Nonacademic skills, such as music and drawing, could lead to teaching jobs, as, of course, could the basic subjects of English, geography, and arithmetic. Decades before Catharine Beecher's famous appeal to make teaching an honorable and profitable profession for women, writers in the 1790s already were urging the same. 110 Some portion of the academy population, both male and female, attended school in order to have some vocational training. Some of that training was specific to one gender (navigation for boys and sewing for girls, for instance), while other training was not (English and arithmetic). Educational leaders publicly encouraged instructors to use the same pedagogical styles for both males and females. The styles they recommended were ones that promoted competition and the quest for "fame." Rather than attempting to socialize boys to be aggressive and girls to be demure, these theorists endorsed a teaching style that encouraged all students to succeed, and did so using martial language: students were to fight for academic prizes and to conquer the summit of knowledge. The purposes of education, those of teaching mental discipline and powers of discernment, were goals that educators had for girls as well as boys.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Dublin: H. Colbert, 1801), 15, 28-29; italics in original. Theodore R. Sizer, The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College, 1964), 5-9. Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 28, 11. Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 5, 32. Kim Tolley, "The Rise of the Academies: Continuity or Change?" History of Education Quarterly 41 (Summer 200 I), 225-239. See also Thomas Woody, History of Women's Education in the U.S. (New York: Science Press, 1929), I, 152-154,271,281. Woody, I, ch. 8; Robert Church, Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: The Free Press, 1976), ch. 2. Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 2. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, quoted in Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 54-56. Quoted in Ann Gordon, 'The Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia," in Women of America: A History, Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 77.

"A Triumph of Reason" 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

81

Benjamin Rush, "A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania," in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, Frederick Rudolph, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 16-17. Samuel Knox, "An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education," in Rudolph, 305; Pangle and Pangle, 91. Samuel Knox, "Liberal Education," in Rudolph, 306. Benjamin Franklin, "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensylvania," [1749], 68-76; Sizer, "The Academies: An Interpretation," 5-9; both in Sizer, The Age of the Academies. Noah Webster, "Education of Youth," [1790], in Rudolph, 45. Also see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196-231, for a more detailed discussion of the opposition to the classics. Noah Webster, "On the Education of Youth in America," (Boston, 1790), reprinted in Rudolph, 54. Church, Education in the United States 30-32; Sizer, The Age of the Academics 5-6. Church, Education in the United States, 23-24,30. Church, Education in the United States, 25. Jean Pond, Bradford: A New England Academy (Bradford, MA: Alumnae Association, 1930), 37-38. Woody, I, 299. Henry Barnard suggested that nine times as many students went to academies as to colleges in 1850, Henry Barnard, "Educational Statistics of the United States in 1850," American Journal of Education, I (1855), 368. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, ch. 4. Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 41-43. See Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America"; Signs: Journal ofWomen in Culture and Society 13 (Autumn 1987), 37-58. Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 3'd ser. (October 1987), 689-721; Rosemarie Zagarri, "Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother." American Quarterly 44 (June 1992), 192-215. "Female Influence," New York Magazine (May !795), 297-304; "An Address to the Ladies," American Magazine (March 1788), 446. See also, John Swanwick, Thoughts on Education, Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies'Academy in Philadelphia, October 31, 1787 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, !787); "The Influence of the Female Sex on the Enjoyments of Social Life," Universal Asylum (March 1790), 153-154. Ibid, 69. Ibid, 68. Benjamin Rush, "Thoughts Upon Female Education, Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America" [1787], in Essays on Education in the Early Republic ed. Frederick Rudolph, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 28. Virtually every historical account of this period explains that an ideology of "republican motherhood" fueled the advance of women's education. The claim of "republican motherhood" as the principal justification for female education stems from the passage

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29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

by Rush quoted below. Historians-most notably, Linda Kerber-used this quotation as the springboard for conceiving of a role for women in the new republic that attached political import to motherhood. See Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For further discussion of the limitations of the paradigm of "republican motherhood," see Margaret A. Nash, "Rethinking Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia," Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Summer 1997), 171-192. Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs 13 (Autumn 1987), 46. Jan Lewis rightly notes that Kerber herself, who coined the phrase under discussion, described women's other roles at least as much as she did motherhood. Lewis remarks that the term "republican motherhood" has "taken on a life of its own and is often assumed to say more about motherhood than Kerber herself ever claimed." Lewis suggests that the term ·'republican womanhood" is far more reflective of the rhetoric of the period. See Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly (October 1987), 690, fn 2. For more on this point, see William Casement, "Learning and Pleasure: Early American Perspectives," Educational Theory 40 (Summer 1990), 343-349. For more on this point, see William Casement, "Learning and Pleasure: Early American Perspectives," Educational Theory 40 (Summer 1990), 343-349. "On Female Education," New York Magazine (September 1794), 570. "Reflections on Women, and on the Advantages which they would derive from the Cultivation of Letters," New York Magazine (February 1790), 90. "On the Study of the Arts and Sciences," New York Magazine (June 1795), 363-364. Letter from Jonathan Steele to Ann Steele, 27 December 1800, Steele Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC. Letter from Joyce Myers to Rachel and Ellen Mordecai, 10 December 1796, Jacob Mordecai Papers, Duke University Special Collections. Address by Benjamin Say, 1789, Rise and Progress, 30-37; "Essay on Education," New York Magazine, (January 1790), 40; Address by Dr. Andrews, 1788, in Rise and Progress, 18-21; "Tis education forms the female mind," Massachusetts Magazine (February 1793), 93. George Gregory, "Miscellaneous Observations on the History of the Female Sex," in Essays Historical and Moral (London: J. Johnson, 1785), 162. Valedictory Oration, Ann Negus, 1794, in Neal, Education and Genius of the Female Sex, 35, 36. "On Female Education," New York Magazine (September 1794), 570. Ann Negus, "Oration," in J. A. Neal, An Essay on the Education and Genius of the Female Sex (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1795), 35. "A Plan for a Matrimonial Lottery," Lady's Magazine (1792), 173-174. Hays, "On the Independence and Dignity of the Female Sex," 203. On the naming of Southern women as executors of estates, see Woody, Vol. I., 249, 257. "Female Influence," New York Magazine (May 1795), 300. There are many examples of such arguments for female education. See, for instance, John Hobson, Prospectus of a Plan of Instruction for the young of Both Sexes. Including a Course of Liberal Edu-

"A Triumph of Reason"

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

83

cation for Each (Philadelphia: D. Hogan, 1799); Benjamin Say, "Address," in Rise and Progress, 31-33; Hobson, "Outlines of a Plan of Instruction for the Young of Both Sexes," Weekly Magazine (II August 1798), 37-41. Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner. A Miscellaneous Production. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798) 726-731; emphasis in original. Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner. A Miscellaneous Production. (Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1798) 726-731. "Improvements Suggested in Female Education," Monthly Magazine (March 1797); reprinted in New York Magazine (August 1797), 405-408. "Thoughts on Old Maids," Lady's Magazine (July 1792), 60. Lord Kaims, Loose Hints upon Education, excerpted in "Instructions Preparatory to the Married State," New York Magazine (July 1797), 374. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984). Church, 37-38. Sizer, "The Academies," 12-13. Lynne Templeton Brickley makes a similar point, stating that the term ornamental "has yet to be analyzed properly." She suggests that theorists dichotomized male education into academic and useful, and that classics were considered academic (or ornamental); except for those few going on to college to study for the professions, classics had no real utility and therefore were considered ornamental. Useful subjects for men included bookkeeping, surveying, mensuration, and shorthand. See Lynne Templeton Brickley, "Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, 1792-1833" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), 154-156. Massachusetts Magazine, Jan. 1791, frontispiece. Noah Webster, "On the Education of Youth in America," in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, Frederick Rudolph, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 70. "Address, By the Rev. Doctor Sproat," in The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia: Containing an Account of a Number of Public Examinations & Commencements; The Charter and Bye-Laws; Likewise, A Number of Orations Delivered by the Young Ladies, and Several by the Trustees of Said Institution (Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochran, 1794), 25, 30. See, for instance, "On Family Ambition," Lady's Magazine (August 1792), 121-123. Also see Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 3'd ser, XLIV (October 1987), 689-721; Ruth H. Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978), 117. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (New York: George F. Hopkins, 1801), 117. Benjamin Franklin, "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania[sic]," in Sizer, The Age of the Academies, 70. Simeon Doggett, "Discourse on Education," in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 152. Samuel Smith, "Remarks on Education," in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 217-218; Samuel Knox, "Liberal Education," in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 356. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 28 August 1774; quoted in Edith B. Gelles, Portia: The World ofAbigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 143; quoted in Gelles, Portia, 136.

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Information on curricula comes from the following sources: Laws of the Raleigh Academy: with the Plan of Education Annexed, (Raleigh: Gales & Seaton, 1811); Jacob Mordecai Papers, Duke University Special Collections; Jean Pond, Bradford: A New England Academy (Bradford, MA: Alumnae Association, 1930); John Swanwick, "Thoughts on Education, Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies' Academy in Philadelphia, October 31, 1787," (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787); "Terms and Conditions of the Boarding School for Female Education in Salem, N.C.," Broadside, December 1807, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia: Containing an Account of a Number of Public Examinations & Commencements; The Charter and Bye-Laws; Likewise, A Number of Orations delivered By the Young Ladies, And several by the Trustees of said Institution (Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochran, 1794); "Young Ladies' Boarding-School, Warrenton," Broadside, 19 May 1809, Duke University Special Collections; Emily Vanderpoel, Chronicles of a Pioneer School, from 1792 to I 833 (Cambridge, MA: University Press 1903), and More Chronicles (New York: Cadmus Books 1927); Emory Washburn, History of Leicester Academy (Boston: Phillips, Sampson 1855); Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States Vol. I (New York: The Science Press, 1929), chap. 4-6; North Carolina Minerva and Fayetteville Advertiser, 3 June 1797, 3; 30 June 1798, 3; 7 July 1798, 3; Raleigh Register, 10 September 1813; State Gazette of North Carolina, 22 January 1789, 3; State Gazette of South Carolina, 1 I November 1790, 4; 18 November 1790, 3; 13 January 1791, 2; 7 February 1791, I; 21 April 1791, 1. 66. Benjamin Rush, "Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education," in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 29. 67. Similarly, the University of North Carolina maintained English as part of the formal curriculum until 1795, when it became an entrance requirement; the same was not true for Harvard until 1866. Rollo Laverne Lyman, English Grammar in American Schools Before I850 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 39-43; Edwin C. Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1903), 43. 68. John Teaford, "The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670-1780," in The Social History of American Education ed. B. Edward McClellan and William J. Reese, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 23-38; Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 127. 69. Benjamin Rush, "Thoughts Upon Female Education, Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America" [1787] in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 29. 70. Rise and Progress, 16. 71. John Swanwick, "Thoughts on Education, Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies' Academy in Philadelphia, October 31, 1787 ," (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787), 9. 72. "The System of Public Education, Adopted by the Town of Boston, October 15, 1789," New York Magazine, January 1790, 52; Woody, I, 299. The names "reading school" and "writing school" are misleading: Boston's reading school taught spelling, accent, reading, grammar, and composition, while the writing school taught writing and arithmetic through fractions.

"A Triumph of Reason" 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

85

Samuel Magaw, An Address Delivered in the Young Ladies Academy, at Philadelphia, on February 8'h, 1787. At the Close of a Public Examination (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787), 10. Woody, History of Women's Education I, 340. Rise and Progress, 38. Rise and Progress, 73-75. Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 82. Woody, History of Women's Education I, 412. Ibid. Ibid, 29. Rise and Progress, 32. Woody, History of Women's Education I, 156. For an explanation of the Rule of Three see Church, Education in the United States, 14--15. "Improvements Suggested in Female Education," New York Magazine, Aug. 1797,407. Kimberley F. Higgins Tolley, "The Science Education of American Girls, 1784--1932" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1996), 36. Morse, Geography Made Easy; see John A. Nietz, Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 217-218. Tolley, "The Science Education of American Girls, 1784--1932," 30-31; William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 118. Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 320. Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), 11-12. Rachel Mordecai to Caroline Mordecai, 19 February 1812, Mordecai Family Papers, Duke Special Collections, Duke University. Many thanks to Doris Malkmus for stating this point so clearly in a private conversation. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 23. Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 41. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 24; Boydston, Home and Work, 37. M.F.B., "Answer to a Father's Inquiries Relative to the Education of Daughters," The New England Quarterly Magazine, December 1802, 156; John Cossens Ogden, The Female Guide (Concord, NH: George Hough, 1793), 27; John Swan wick, Thoughts on Education, Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies' Academy in Philadelphia, October 31, 1787 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787), 22. Lynne Templeton Brickley also notes that the practical application of needlework cut across all socioeconomic and class boundaries: poor women earned their livings as seamstresses, middle-class women taught needlework, and wealthy women supervised the creation and maintenance of their household's clothing, linens, and furnishings. See Brickley, "Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy," 160-161. Brickley, "Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy," 163. Rush, "Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools," in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 16.

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Chartered Schools 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

Rush, "Female Education," 34. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, ist Am. ed., (New York: George F. Hopkins, 1801), 118. Edgeworth, 118. Thomas Woody's findings corroborate this pattern. See Woody, Vol. I, 418. Hamilton, Letters on Education, 15,28-29. Church, Education in the United States, 34; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 18,45-46,97. "Outlines of a Plan of Female Education," Weekly Magazine, II Aug. 1798, 39. "Hints on Reading," Lady's Magazine, March 1793, 172. Edgeworth, Practical Education, 143. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 17-18. For examples, see "Female Education," American Journal of Education III (September 1828), 525; "Education of Females," American Journal of Education II (November 1827), 550-551. Rise and Progress, 27, 34,51-52. Swanwick, Thoughts on Education, 7-8. See, for instance, Edgeworth, Practical Education, 141.

Students: Meaning and Culture

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Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860 NANCY BEADlE

On 23 March 1831, while a student at Ontario Female Seminary, Frances C. Smith began keeping a "private diary." In it she recorded her social encounters and correspondence, the state of her health and mind, and the progress of her studies. At the time she began the diary, Ms. Smith was preparing for spring examinations at the academy. Expressing some anxiety over this upcoming performance, she complained when her studies were interrupted by an unwanted visitor, as well as when a teacher scolded her for "not reciting all the if's & and's in my lesson." On Friday, 25 March, however, she also recorded that she had "recited in intellectual philosophy four chapters to my own and my teacher's satisfaction." 1 Frances Smith's diary provides an interesting window onto the culture of academy education in the antebellum period. In particular, it helps shed light on the meaning of academy education to students. One of the ways in which Ms. Smith talked about the meaning of her education was in terms of "improvement." For her and other young, middle-class women of her time, "improvement" referred to disciplined study and self-reflection aimed at ennobling one's mind and character. The word "improvement" had many uses in the nineteenth century, however. At the same time as young women like Frances Smith used it in a very personal sense, to describe what we might call "self-improvement," public leaders used the word "improvement" in a different way, to describe the investment of public resources in works of public benefit. For New York's Governor DeWitt Clinton, for example, as for other public men of the time, the building of the Erie Canal and the development of state systems of funding for academies were both examples of "internal improvements," or what we might call "infrastructure." 2 This chapter examines academy education in the antebellum era with respect to both these ideas of "improvement." Academy education expanded considerably in the period from 1820 to 1860. Both the numbers of institutions and the numbers of students increased relative to the population. Why? What made people organize academies and what made students attend them? Who were these youth and what did academy education mean to them? This chapter explores these questions through an examination of both the structure and the culture of academy education in nineteenth-century New York.

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Issues and Questions Despite the considerable expansion of academy organization and enrollments in the antebellum era, the significance of academies in nineteenth-century society has received little scholarly attention. This lacuna in historical scholarship is the consequence of several conceptual blind spots. The first of these is the emphasis on development of state common school systems that has dominated treatments of the antebellum era in the history of education. As academies charged tuition, they appear antithetical to the definition of "free" public schooling advanced by reformers at the time. Taking this definition as the standard, scholars have treated academies and other independent schools as marginal institutions, even though reformers did not succeed in establishing fully tax-supported common schools in most Northern states until the 1850s or 1860s, or in Southern states until the 1860s and 1870s; and even though academy education expanded simultaneously with common schools, and apparently at a faster rate. A second conceptual obstacle to understanding the significance of academies in antebellum society is the customary distinction between elementary, secondary, and higher education that structures most scholarship on education. Academies were multi-level institutions. They typically enrolled a third or more of their students in elementary subjects even as they also graduated students from courses that most educators regarded as equivalent to two years of college work. As a practical matter, then, academies often escape attempts to organize the historical study of schooling, even though academies were much more numerous than either colleges or high schools until the late nineteenth century, and even though they were the most common means of pursuing formal education beyond the elementary level until the 1880s. A third factor inhibiting appreciation of the social significance of academies is the emphasis on institutions rather than experience that characterizes most histories of education. Academy enrollment was a wholly voluntary matter. Academies had no normative or legal authority to compel attendance, nor did they have the credentialing power enjoyed by colleges or late-nineteenth-century high schools and professional schools. Given this lack of authority either to compel attendance or to confer formal benefits, academies prove resistant to functionalist analyses of the relationship between school and society. Why did students attend academies? This question proves difficult to address without stepping outside the logic of formal institutional structures and into the lives of students themselves. At the same time as scholarship in the history of education is preoccupied with formal institutional structures, mainstream scholarship in American history suffers from an opposite limitation. A fourth factor obscuring the significance of academies is the aversion to institutional history in mainstream historical scholarship. Scholarship on antebellum American society is replete with rich community studies, gender and family studies, and complex analyses of party politics and political alignments. Schools and schooling appear only peripherally in these studies, if at all. This is true even though local school organization (including academy founding) was a central

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community building activity wherever it occurred; even though schools were, together with churches, a primary locus of social affiliation and identity development within and across localities; and even though matters of school funding and regulation constituted the largest and most pervasive assertion of state and local political authority invoked or debated before the Civil War. To address these gaps in our understanding, the present chapter explores the significance of academies in two main ways. It looks at structural conditions in antebellum society that promoted academy organization, and it examines the meaning and experience of academy education from the perspectives of students themselves. In thus exploring simultaneously the supply and demand sides of academy expansion, the chapter poses the question of how we explain the expansion of academy education in antebellum society. What political and economic conditions fostered the organization of academies? Who took the lead in organizing them, and what were their rationales? What sources of support did academies draw upon and which networks and communities did academies serve? As noted above, academies were multi-level institutions, including everything from elementary to collegiate studies. Given this broad range of curriculum, what can the growth and success of academies in the antebellum era tell us about the educational needs and purposes of youth and communities in this period? Who attended academies? How did these students and their parents conceive of education? What role did formal schooling play in education so conceived? Finally, given that academies were not credentialing institutions, what was the value of academy attendance? What difference did academies make in the lives of academy students in the communities and larger society of which they were a part? In order to explore these questions, the present chapter draws on both primary and secondary research. For many of the historiographical reasons identified above, secondary sources are limited. Not all obstacles to assessing the historical significance of academies are conceptual, however. Some are evidentiary. As academies were independent institutions, the evidence necessary to describe and analyze them, though prevalent, is difficult to collect systematically. Much of what has been done on academies focuses on individual institutions that served female students. This includes Lynn Brickley's study of Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Academy, David Allmendinger's study of Mt. Holyoke students, and Anne Firor Scott's study of Troy Female Seminary. It also includes Kathryn Kerns's comparative study of five less well-known institutions in New York State, three coeducational, and two all female. 3 New York had the largest and most elaborate state system of academies in the United States and, as a result, has been the subject of several academy studies. 4 One of the institutions studied by Kerns is an academy that I have also studied as part of a larger community study. 5 In addition, I have conducted a systematic comparative analysis of data on the nearly five hundred Regents academies and high schools that operated in New York State between 1835 and 1890. 6 These studies, combined with documentary materials from a number of individual institutions, students, and teachers, inform a number of the claims that follow. In addition, some analytical leverage is provided by comparisons with high school populations in the mid- to late nineteenth century as

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studied by David Labaree, Reed Ueda, Michael Katz, Carl Kaestle, and Maris Vinovskis. 7 Drawing on these sources, I examine four aspects of the expansion of academy education in the antebellum era: the political economy of academy organization and funding, the social geography of academy locations and student hometowns, the social demography of students' family backgrounds, and the meaning of academy attendance to students themselves.

The Political Economy of Academy Organization and Funding The period of greatest popularity and expansion for academies coincided with a period of great territorial expansion and institution-building for the population in general. In New York State, in particular, the heyday of western migration, road building, town building, and canal building was the heyday of academy building as well. Between 1828 and 1850 the number of academies chartered by the state increased from 34 to 300, of which 250 remained in concurrent operation having become local fixtures in towns throughout every region of the state. 8 A number of factors promoted this growth in incorporated academies in the antebellum era. Among these were the boosterism of town builders in a period of territorial and economic expansion, the organizational power of denominations in the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, and the liberalization of state policies regarding academy incorporation and funding during the Jacksonian era. Virtually all new academies founded in the antebellum era began with a group of local town boosters who solicited pledges from local subscribers to build an educational institution. Pledges of support could take the form of land, labor, and building materials as well as cash. Often leading landholders in the town offered to provide land on which the academy would be sited, while other subscribers supplied the means of constructing and outfitting the academy building. In pledging support for an academy, local townspeople sought many potential benefits. Among these was the opportunity to educate their own children beyond the elementary level and to promote a high standard of schooling for all through the education of future common school teachers. In addition to serving local children, an academy would draw children from other towns as students and could also attract professionals and other cultural leaders to the town as faculty. This in turn could raise land values and stimulate the local economy by increasing demand for room, board, and farm produce; for shops to supply dry goods and services; and for labor to perform the service necessary to operate and maintain the institution and any supporting boarding establishments. Meanwhile, the academy itself could give a town a claim to cultural leadership, providing a locus for cultural activity and entertainment in the form of student and alumnae societies, public lectures, performances, museum cabinets, and annual exhibitions. In pledging support for an academy, local townspeople also put their town in a position to make claims for additional support from outside sources. These outside sources included both state governments and religious denominations. State govern-

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ments had always been involved in promoting and funding higher level schooling to some extent. They became involved in the operation of academies in three main ways: through legal incorporation (chartering), through various forms of state subsidy, and through state regulation. In the early republican period (1787-1828) virtually all states established permanent funds for support of schooling, some portion of which subsidized state-incorporated academies. 9 What happened in the antebellum era ( 1828-1860), was a liberalization of state policies regarding this support. During the earlier period, political leaders concentrated state privileges and resources in a small number of well-established institutions, targeting their funding toward the classical education of future public leaders. In the Jacksonian era, by contrast, political leaders distributed state privileges and resources more widely to less well-established institutions across the state, subsidizing broad educations in English as well as classical studies for both male and female students. This liberalization of state policy encouraged the organization of new academies as weJI as applications for academy charters and state funding by existing independent schools. 10 That academies should have begun receiving state funding in many states before the establishment of state common school systems may seem surprising now, but made sense according to the logic of the time. This logic depended on the assumption that most schooling needs would be met by parental responsibility and local initiative. According to accepted ideas of political economy, the legitimate purpose of central authority and public funding was to finance public works for which individual responsibility and local initiative proved insufficient. In the area of commerce and navigation, this logic justified centralized state investment in projects such as state roads, bridges, and canals. In education, it justified subsidies for urban charity schools, which served poor families who could not afford school fees, and higher schooling, the costs of which were regarded as too high to be borne by tuition fees alone. This policy logic was common to both North and South from the early republican era, and continued to underlie state charters and support for academies in both regions throughout the antebeJium period. 11 The religious revivalism and denominationalism of the antebeiium era also promoted academy building. Church involvement in academy organization was not new. Since the colonial era, local churches and ministers had often been involved in academies and other independent schools, whether as official sponsors, or simply as faculty. During the Second Great Awakening, however, evangelical denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists gained considerable strength in both membership and resources. Led by itinerant, circuit-riding preachers, these denominations specialized in expanding into new territories and integrating new classes and churches into larger regional organizations that transcended particular localities. These translocal organizations in tum had the capacity to raise funds and organize support beyond that available in an individual locality. One of the purposes to which these new evangelical denominations dedicated this power was the establishment of educational institutions. The Methodists in particular pursued a policy of establishing an affiliated academy in each of its conference territories, while the Baptists concentrated more heavily on the

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organization of colleges. Other, smaller denominations, such as Adventists and Quakers, and other missionary organizations such as abolitionists and the National Popular Education Board, also drew on strong trans local membership and funding networks in this period to establish academies, institutes, and other educational institutions with regional, or even national, catchment areas. 12 In their capacity to raise and concentrate resources from a broad geographic region, evangelical denominations began to assemble the kind of organizational power long enjoyed by Catholic institutions. Catholic academies had a long history in North America going back to the 1630s in Montreal, the 1720s in New Orleans, and the 1770s in Maryland. As Catholic migration and immigration in the United States increased in the 1830s and 1840s, the organization of academies by Catholic orders also increased. Reportedly, forty-seven Catholic girls' academies existed in the United States in 1840 and one hundred in 1852, with another forty-seven Catholic male academies existing in the latter year. 13 Often, as in Detroit, New Orleans, and St. Louis, Catholic institutions were among the first formal schools organized in a territory. These institutions typically combined missionary education for poor, Native, and African American children with fee-based schooling for white children of means (in separate classes ). 14 It should be noted that though denominationally-sponsored, these academies were not religiously exclusive or sectarian. Catholic academies in Detroit and elsewhere actively sought the enrollment of Protestant as well as Catholic children, and were regarded as highly desirable by some Protestant elites. Similarly, academies sponsored by evangelical organizations appealed to students from all denominations, if not specifically to Catholics. These relatively ecumenical attitudes may in part have reflected belief in the potential for conversion, but more broadly they reflected the pressure of survival. Academies of any kind simply could not afford to tum paying students away, whether by explicit policy or through religious alienation. Regardless of the start-up capital or operating subsidies provided by local, state, or denominational sources, academies were heavily dependent on tuition for most of their income. 15 As this account suggests, academies depended on multiple sources of financial support and organizational initiative. Though dependent on tuition, academies often owed their size and level of success to funds raised by denominations and missionary organizations. In New York, denominationally-affiliated or missionary supported institutions consistently numbered among the largest and most highly-capitalized academies in the state, even though the vast majority of academies had no such affiliation. Denominational sponsorship was no substitute for local community support, however. The money raised by these organizations was supplemental to local funding, not a replacement for it. Typically, local supporters supplied the means necessary to acquire and/or construct the institution's physical assets-a building and building site-while denominational resources subsidized the institution's operating costs. In addition, some academies received start-up funds and/or operating funds from the state or county. In New York this included the hundreds of Regents academies in oper-

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ation during the antebellum era, all of which received annual subsidies for teacher salaries as well as one-time allotments for library and equipment purchases and some special appropriations. As might be expected, these multiple sources of funding often engendered conflict over ownership and control. As incorporated institutions, academies were governed by boards of trustees. These boards ultimately held title to the institution's property as well as decision-making power over hiring and firing and other governance matters. Typically boards of trustees were self-perpetuating, thereby enjoying the power to select replacements for their own members. At the same time, both formal and informal stipulations often influenced these selections and other governance matters. In some cases, corporate charters specified that some or all of the seats on a board should be reserved for clergy or representatives of a certain denomination, while other charters specified that the board could not be dominated by a single denomination or that multiple denominations should be represented. Whenever denominational or missionary organizations were involved some tension existed between local and denominational influence in governance. Frequently these tensions approached open conflict in the form of petitions, protests, dismissals, resignations, court cases, and/or threats by the denomination to remove the institution or their support to a new location. In addition to conflicts between local and denominational influence, many institutions experienced conflicts among faculty, students, and trustees. In some instances, these tensions could be infused with race, ethnic, and gender conflict as well as conflicts of authority, as when the female principals and faculty of female academies differed with male boards of trustees, when all-white boards of trustees differed with black faculty and/or black students of a denominationallysponsored "colored institute," or, later in the century, when missionary teachers came into conflict with Native American children and their families and/or with government agents. 16 Before we can more fully analyze these patterns of tension and conflict, we need more studies of the range and variation among academies and independent schools. For example, a closer look at the funding and governance arrangements for Catholic institutions would be instructive. It is clear that they, like other academies, relied heavily on tuition for operating funds, though they were much more likely to use this income to subsidize education for poor children than were other schools. But how did capitalization and maintenance funding work in Catholic academies? Did they draw on local community sources in the way that other United States academies did? A comparative examination of school-community relationships across ethnic communities and forms of institutional ownership would also be illuminating. We know, for example, that African American communities in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras often contributed substantial capital and physical resources to the construction and maintenance of independent, missionary, and "public" schools. So far, however, the story of these complex governance and funding arrangements has not been integrated into analyses of funding and governance issues in the many other quasi-public, quasi-private institutions that existed throughout the nineteenth century. More

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broadly, with respect to the question of what conditions promoted academy organization, we need to extend our analysis to include other communities, other contexts, and other times. 17

The Social Geography of Academies and Student Attendance Boosterism, Jacksonianism, and denominationalism are three factors that help explain the increased supply of academies in the antebellum era. A discussion of these factors alone, however, tells us little about the demand side of academy expansion. Not only the number of academies but the number of academy students increased substantially in this period. How do we understand this increasing demand for academy education? One possible explanation is that supply somehow drove demand, but this does not seem to have been the case. In New York State the rate of growth in numbers of academy students exceeded growth in numbers of institutions. 18 In other words, demand for academy education increased faster than supply. What made academy education desirable to youths and their families in the antebellum era? The coincidence of academy expansion with what has variously been called the commercial or market revolution of this period suggests the possibility that the commercialization of society in some way conditioned or caused an increased demand for academy education. Much as Carl Kaestle found with respect to the expansion and systematization of common schooling, however, the link between economic change and educational demand is much easier to suggest than it is to establish or explain. For one thing, as Kim Tolley pointed out earlier in this volume, many academies existed before the commercial revolution. For another, academies appear to have been quite as prevalent in the South as in the North, even though commercial expansion was much less extensive there. Complicating this interpretation further are the facts regarding the location of antebellum academies within regions of the United States. Most academies were not located in cities (as one might expect if commercialization were a primary factor promoting their organization), but in rural areas. Theodore Sizer, in his 1964 essay on "the age of academies" went so far as to declare that the academy was a "fundamentally rural institution." 19 Subsequent studies of the locations of academies and the backgrounds of academy students bear out Sizer's assessment to a considerable extent. Most academies were located in small towns and drew students from other small towns. Of the 156 Regents academies operating in New York State in 1850, 122 or 78 percent were located in towns with populations of less than 5,000 people. 20 Most of these students, moreover, came from farm families. At the New York academies she studied, Kathryn Kerns found that the proportion of students who came from farm families ranged from 52.9 percent to 76.3 percent. 21 Still, it would be a mistake to imagine academies as rustic institutions. As Edward O'Neil has shown, the founding of new academies generally followed the development of new communication and trade routes, including state roads, post offices, canals, and railways. 22 Although more than three-quarters of New York academies were located in

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towns with less than 5,000 people, the majority were located in towns of between 2,500 and 5,000 people. These towns served as entrepots for their surrounding countrysides, not only with respect to transportation, trade, and communication, but also with respect to people. Kerns found that among the larger small-town academies she studied, 65 to 85 percent of the students came from out -of-town. A sampling of populations at other institutions of similar size and location reinforces Kerns's findings. 23 Moreover, the number of different towns represented by an academy's student population could be quite large. Female institutions and academies with denominational affiliations, in particular, could enroll students from hundreds of different towns and dozens of different counties as well as other states. Some nonaffiliated coeducational institutions also drew large numbers of students from geographically dispersed locations.24 Thus, although academies were usually located in small towns and served rural students, they could, in their own way, be rather cosmopolitan. How do we explain this peculiar social geography of academies? Why were academies located in small towns more than cities, and how did they attract students from such broad geographic regions? One important factor to consider with respect to this question is the social geography of the population as a whole. Throughout the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the population lived in rural areas, defined by the census as towns of 2,500 people or less. The ratio of rural to urban populations was lower in the North than in the South in the antebellum era, and declined significantly in the North between 1830 and I 860. Nonetheless, in all but Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the rural proportion of the population remained over 60 percent as late as 1860. 25 Although the predominantly rural character of the population is important to consider, a focus on this factor alone misses some important differences in the school attendance patterns of rural and urban students. There are two issues to consider here: the continuity of school attendance, and the proportion of youth who attended. As is commonly recognized by scholars today and was commonly complained of by educators at the time, school attendance in the antebellum era was often highly sporadic and discontinuous in character, especially for youths over the age of ten. Our student diarist Frances Smith, for example, attended Ontario Female Seminary for just a month or two in 1831, departing in April a month after commencing her diary. Frances spent the rest of the year at home in the town of Caledonia, about twenty miles from the Seminary, and then returned to the academy for a month or two at the beginning of 1832. A third sojourn at the academy occurred eighteen or nineteen months later, in October of 1833. Altogether Frances probably spent a total of six months at the academy over a thirty-six month period. 26 This was not unusual. Youth in the antebellum era commonly attended school for only a month or two at a time. Joseph Kett's anecdotal illustrations of this point suggest that it was rare for more than one-third of students attending an academy in one term to return the nextY Persistence from one year to the next was even more uncommon. The sporadic character of academy attendance is typically explained with reference to seasonal labor patterns. As Kett put it in his discussion of the history of

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adolescence, "The academy provided ... a form of seasonal education to complement seasonal labor patterns in preindustrial American society." 28 This explanation, which Kett articulated in a book that is almost exclusively devoted to the experience of males, works somewhat less well for women, a fact that will be taken up later. Nonetheless, Kett's point is amply illustrated by the experience of one male diarist of the late 1840s and 1850s, who stated straight out "I attend school winters; my assistance being required summers on the farm." In fact this diarist, Eli Rogers, worked on a number of farms, hiring himself to a Mr. Adams in the fall of 1848 at the age of sixteen and to a Mr. Browning the ensuing summer, attending a district school in the winter in between and attending Alfred Academy the fall of 1849. He then taught district school in the winter of 1850, attended the academy in 1851 and taught school again in the winter of 1852, not returning again to Alfred until the fall of 1854. Altogether he spent a total of six months at an academy over a six year period. 29 Episodic attendance patterns such as these were especially common among rural youth. As the historical sociologists Soltow and Stevens demonstrated some time ago, rural youth in the antebellum era attended school for shorter periods at a time than urban youth, but continued to return to school over a much greater span of their lives. The fact that rural youth were less continuous in their attendance did not mean, however, that they attended school at lower rates. As Sol tow and Stevens have also shown, the proportion of youth who attended school was higher in rural areas than in cities. This proved especially true at the higher educationallevels. 30 As Maris Vinovskis has shown in detail for Massachusetts high schools, the proportion of local youth who enrolled in higher schooling for some period of time in their lives was higher for small towns than it was for larger towns and cities. Calculating attendance rates for all towns in Essex County in 1860, Vinovskis found that towns with less than 2,500 people that had a high school enrolled 47.5 percent of youth aged ten to nineteen at some time in their lives. Meanwhile high school towns above 2,500 in size but below 15,000 enrolled about 25 percent of their youth in high school. For cities over 15,000 the proportion dropped to 11.7 percent. 31 Given that academies tended to serve small towns more than cities, the Vinovskis data raise the possibility that attendance rates at antebellum academies may also have been high. Academy enrollments differed from high school enrollments in that academies often enrolled large populations of out-of-town students. After subtracting these out-of-town students from academy enrollments, some reasonable comparisons between local attendance rates at academies and high schools can be made. These calculations suggest that local attendance rates at academies equaled or exceeded those at New England public high schools in towns of similar size. When Vinovskis's method for estimating attendance rates is used to calculate rates for one small-town academy in upstate New York, for example, the result shows that as many as 49.6 percent of local youth aged ten to nineteen in 1850 attended the academy at some time. 32 Statewide figures for New York support this conclusion as well. Antebellum academy attendance in New York State appears to have been comparable to that in public high schools in Massachusetts in the 1860s. 33

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This analysis suggests that the social geography of academy locations may be explained in part by the geography of student demand. The fact that academies thrived in small town settings reflects the fact that a higher proportion of youth sought higher schooling in rural areas, albeit on an episodic basis. This conclusion makes further sense when we consider the chronology of academy expansion in relation to that of common schools. According to Carl Kaestle, the greatest period of expansion in common schooling occurred in rural areas before the period of common school reform. In the Northeast, common school attendance had reached 65 percent in rural areas by 1825, while urban attendance rates hovered around 26 percent. 34 This early growth in attendance at rural common schools in tum helps explain the higher rates of growth in the antebellum era for attendance at academies. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, for example, the number of students attending public common and primary school in New York State increased by 34 percent between 1840 and 1850, while the number of academy students increased by 42-47 percent. (Meanwhile, the number of youths ages five to twenty years increased just 18 percent. )35 Altogether, the evidence on common school attendance suggests that the increased demand for academy education in the antebellum period depended on earlier increases in demand for common schooling during the early republican period, specifically in rural areas. To more fully explore the relationship between social geography and academy attendance, however, we need more comparative study of academy locations and attendance patterns in different regions of the country. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that many Southern academies, like Northern institutions, existed in small towns, no systematic analysis of the distribution of academies in Southern states has been conducted. The more sparsely settled character of many areas of the South may have created a different social geography of institution building. Where exactly did the numerous academies in Alabama end up being founded, for example? What explains the locations of academies in that state? Explicit state policy (a decision to establish an academy in every county seat, for example) may have been more important than student demand in explaining the pattern of academy expansion in some states. Similarly, the apparently different pattern of common school development in the South suggests a different logic of academy expansion. What exactly were the rates of school attendance in the towns of North Carolina and Georgia that had common schools before the Civil War? How did school organization and attendance in these towns relate to the distribution of academies in those states? Is it possible that more commonalities existed between Northern and Southern school cultures than has previously been recognized? The fact that academies thrived in both the North and the South suggests that in the future, answers to these questions must be more argued than assumed.

The Social Demography of Academy Students The fact that small town academies enrolled close to 50 percent of local youth at some point in their lives suggests those academies may also have enrolled a relatively broad cross-section of the population. Tuition costs, opportunity costs, and the culture of

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schooling would certainly have been obstacles for youth from families who were poor and without property. Nonetheless, tuition or "rate bill" charges to parents were the norm in New York State even at the common school level until the 1850s and 1860s. Such fees supplemented district, local, and state tax funds in most districts until the state prohibited rate bills in 1864. Moreover, tuition fees for basic academic subjects were modest at many academies throughout the antebellum era, averaging $3-4 a term for common subjects, $4-6 a term for higher English studies, and $5-7 for classical studies from 1840 to 1850. By way of comparison, average monthly wages for employees in the mechanical and manufacturing sectors of the economy were $20.54 in New York State in 1850. Many academies further offered special rates to students who could only attend for half a term. In some instances, moreover, students could exchange labor for tuition or board costs or acquire tuition waivers or financial aid in exchange for commitments to serve as common school teachers. 36 Given these accommodations and the opportunity to alternate academy attendance with seasonal labor or other forms of episodic paid work, academy attendance was within the realm of possibility for some students of limited means. But who really attended academies? What can we say about the sex, social class backgrounds, and identities of academy students? With respect to sex the answer is straightforward. Both male and female students attended incorporated academies, including coeducational institutions, as early as the 1780s and 1790s. From then on the female presence in academies increased. By at least 1850 in New York, female students outnumbered male students. Also in New York, the vast majority (90 percent) of institutions were coeducational throughout the nineteenth centuryY With respect to social class, however, the evidence is more complicated. Social class is particularly difficult to analyze with respect to academies because most existing social classification systems focus on urban settings. Accordingly, they either exclude farmers from analysis or treat them as anomalies. 38 In his 1988 study of the Central High School of Philadelphia, for example, David Labaree used four class categories to analyze the social backgrounds of students: (1) the proprietary or "old" middle class of self-employed shopkeepers, manufacturers, and professionals; (2) the employed or "new" middle class of white-color wage-earners; (3) the skilled working class including skilled craftsmen; and (4) the semi-skilled and unskilled working class. 39 Other scholars use somewhat different classification systems, but similarly define the middle class to include professionals, proprietors, and other "white collar" workers, which generally means employees involved in non-manual labor. Under these systems, farmers, when they appear at all, are either lumped in with "other white collar" occupations, as in Reed Ueda's study of Sommerville High School, or with craftsmen, as in Katz's classification system for Hamilton, Ontario. 40 While these compromises are fine for settings in which farmers constitute only a tiny fraction of the relevant populations, they are obviously inadequate for analyzing contexts in which farming is the single-most prevalent occupation. There are two main problems here. In a small town many of the strongest social divisions lay between those who lived in town and those who did not-in other words, between

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farmers and non-farmers. To put farmers in the same category as craftsmen or professionals is thus to obscure the very distinctions that a social classification system is meant to illuminate. A second problem is that the term "farmer" covered a wide range of relationships to the means of production. Most farmers were farmer-proprietors who operated their farms primarily with their own labor and with that of other members of their own family and their immediate household, including children and some hired laborers. A few were effectively "gentlemen" farmers for whom virtually all the labor of farming was done by tenants and employees outside their immediate households. And finally, a number of people who identified themselves as farmers had no real property of their own, but worked as tenants or laborers on other people's land, or owned such small amounts of land that they were unable to support their household by farming their own property. To be useful for the small town populations served by academies, a social classification system must take farmers into account and be able to distinguish among them. As a working definition, I suggest that in the small-town context, the middle class consisted of property owners who relied on their own household labor for production. Given this definition, academy students were solidly middle class. The vast majority came from proprietors' households. 41 Not all families sending children to academies were substantial property owners, however. Among the local students at one small-town academy in 1850, 9 percent came from households that reported owning no real property, 57 percent came from households with property values below the mean for the town as a whole, and 36 percent came from households with property values below the median. Thus, although local student populations came primarily from propertied households, these households represented a range of levels of property ownership. 42 Whether a simple statement of students' relationship to property and means of production is enough to make them "middle class" depends on how one theorizes the meaning of the term. In his sensitive study of the emergence of middle class social structures and culture, Stuart Blumin focused specifically on the middle-class as an urban phenomenon. Following the etymology of the term's usage as well as the practice of many social historians, Blumin defined the concept in essentially occupational terms, as comprising increasing numbers of non-manual wage earners-what we call white collar employees. Also as part of his inquiry into use of the term, Blumin noted that some contemporary writers applied the term "middle class" to rural rather than urban populations. One journal defined the middle classes in 1830 as that large body of rural citizens, including both "the farmer and the moderate proprietor," who "possessed both education and employment," and lived neither in poverty nor in wealth. 43 What I want to suggest is that the data on academy students gives some substance to this idea of a rural, or small town, middle class. Beyond simply using the term "middle class" to say that academy students came primarily from propertied households, however, I want to claim that academies actively contributed to the formation of middle-class networks and culture by bringing youth of geographically dispersed populations together in one place. 44 In her study of antebellum Utica, New

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York, Mary Ryan identified the evangelicalism of the 1820s and 1830s and the voluntary organizations of the 1840s and 1850s as agencies in the formation of a new middle-class structure and culture. In her account, the theology and experience of evangelical revivalism, which cultivated and dramatized the individual conversion experience, effectively freed youth from a strictly patriarchal system of inherited identity and status, and justified the construction of new self-identities through voluntary associations focused on self-improvement. Boarding houses and young men's improvement societies figure prominently among these associations in Ryan's account of Utica. Other historians have also contributed to this account, with considerable attention to upstate New York as an area of the country particularly stimulated by evangelicalism and commercial development in the antebellum era. 45 To a considerable extent, however, this literature focuses on urban environments and ignores schools as agencies of identity. Academies, as much or more than temperance and moral reform societies, were important agencies of peer association, culture, and identity formation. In addition, some had boarding houses, and many depended on other independent boarding establishments for housing some or all of their resident students. In the Utica-Whitesboro area studied by Ryan, at least three well-established academies operated throughout the antebellum period, though they get no mention in her analysis. 46 Meeting together in the literary clubs, recitation rooms, and rooming houses that characterized academy life, students had the opportunity to make connections with youth from similar households and backgrounds. That academy students actually made such connections is illustrated by students' letters and diaries.

The Culture of Academy Attendance What did academy attendance really mean to students in this period? With what purposes and expectations did students enroll in academies, and what did they make of their academy experiences once they were there? One way of investigating the meaning of academy education in the antebellum era is to explore its instrumental value as a means of economic mobility. To what extent did academy education actually serve as a way of improving a youth's employment prospects and opportunities for advancement? Although little systematic analysis of the relationship between academy attendance and employment has been done, some evidence suggests that academy attendance facilitated certain kinds of occupational mobility. Probably the largest group of students for whom academy study had instrumental value consisted of those who sought to improve their prospects as teachers. The experience of Clarissa Pengra is one example of this general pattern. Clarissa attended an academy over a period of three years, from 1834 to 1836. There she studied principles of teaching, among other subjects, becoming an assistant teacher at the academy in 1837. After leaving the academy, Clarissa taught school for a year in her hometown in 1839. She then went on in 1840 to teach in the new city schools of Syracuse, New York. As a woman in her twenties who already had teaching experience and two to three years of academy edu-

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cation, Clarissa at that time already exceeded the qualifications of the vast majority of common school teachers, especially in rural areas. For her, the move to a city school represented occupational as well as geographic mobility. 47 This story of education and mobility in the life of Clarissa Pengra is echoed in the life histories of many other nineteenth-century teachers about whom scholars have been collecting evidence. 48 Although much less evidence has been collected on connections between school and career in other fields, it is likely that academy attendance helped students improve their prospects in other occupations as well, especially as clerks in stores, merchant houses, banks and land offices, and as navigators and surveyors. The experience of Sidney Roby is suggestive of the possibilities. At the age of fourteen, Sidney began attending an academy in the town of Brockport, New York. While there, he studied a typical array of "higher" subjects, including Latin and English grammar, and math and sciences, continuing at the school for most of three years. Sidney eventually left the academy in 1846 and took a position as a clerk in a saddlery store in New York City. Although this position probably came to Sidney through a family connection, his relatively steady attendance at the academy for three years distinguished him from most academy students, not to mention most youth of his age. In effect, his attendance at the academy helped qualify him for the New York apprenticeship that provided his real education in business. In 1853 Sidney concluded his training in New York City, returning to upstate New York to establish himself in business. 49 As Sidney's experience begins to suggest, a combination of academy study and work experience may have been more important than academy education itself for occupational advancement. In this respect, the flexibility with which academies accommodated students' discontinuous attendance patterns may have facilitated mobility. In a letter to an academy friend, a former academy student named William Graves made the value of this flexibility explicit. "Why in hell don't you go into a store or office or something of the kind?" Graves wrote his friend A. J. Warner in May, I 838. "Don't always be going to school." Speaking from his own current position as a bank clerk, Graves explained that school attendance was most useful when interspersed with work. "After you have been in a store for a year or two," he advised, "you can then go to school and learn more than you have before." 50 The instrumental value of academy attendance as a means of occupational mobility was only one dimension of academy experience, however. The diaries and correspondence of academy students reveal that for students themselves academy attendance proved valuable in other ways as well. Another important dimension of academy attendance from the student perspective was social. Letters sent by academy students to each other are filled with references to mutual friends and acquaintances in other places. "And you are once more at Phipps Union?" a former female academy student named Hattie wrote to her friend Mary at Phipps Union Seminary. "I wish I was placed in the same position, but no, I don't think I shall ever come back to school ... Has Minnie Mitchell returned to school? ... She intended to have returned this year ... " and "Do you know where Georgia is this year?" 51

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Correspondence like this provides qualitative evidence of the ways academies helped students forge translocal friendships and identities. Student diaries in tum provide evidence of the significance of such friendships in students' lives. Even when Frances Smith was living at home, away from school, her life included visits from or trips to see friends whom she knew through the academy. Some of these social occasions appear to have been major events in her life and to have substantially broadened her worldly experience and exposure to society. On one occasion, for example, Frances met up with academy friends at a nearby sulfur springs. In her diary she used phrases such as "fine sport" and "high glee" to describe the time the young women spent together, expressing a degree of pleasure and exhilaration found nowhere else in the diary. 5 2 Similarly, on more than one occasion Clarissa Pengra returned to the academy she had attended to visit friends who were still students and teachers there, and to attend social events. Tn one instance she concluded a description of such a visit with a statement about the value of friendship. "Who are willing to think themselves friendless in this changing life? Surely no one in their senses." 53 In both these episodes from the lives of Frances Smith and Clarissa Pengra, visits with academy friends involved not only time spent with female companions but with male friends and acquaintances as well. These encounters suggest that academy attendance could play a role in mediating not only friendship but courtship. Historian Kathryn Kerns found that among alumni of one coeducational academy, marriages between former fellow students were not uncommon. It is possible that some students attended academies with such an end in mind. "How do you like Lima?" one young woman asked her sister, Betsy DisBrow, regarding the town where the latter attended an academy. "Do you & Em think you'll have a chance to come home double? What's the prospect? Let me know; if it's pretty good I may come out a term or two." 54 Beyond courting a fellow student, academy attendance could also broaden a young person's courtship opportunities through exposure to new social networks. Through the spate of social visiting often associated with academy attendance, students were introduced to friends of friends in other localities. Academy attendance was not simply a social event, however. Although the evidence suggests that the consequences of academy attendance included the formation of social networks and marriage partnerships, such sociological results don't provide a full description of how students themselves understood or thought about their academy experience. Beyond contributing to vocational advancement and the formation of social networks, academies made a greater contribution to students' moral and intellectual development than has often been recognized. Scholars have often assumed that the experience of attending an academy lacked academic seriousness. In his comments on the significance of academy education, for example, Sizer suggested that the academy "fit the American ideal" in that it provided a "a veneer of education." 55 Other scholars have reinforced this characterization by calling attention to the contradiction between the course rosters and attendance records of academies. On the one hand are the elaborate multi-year courses of studies advertised in most annual bulletins; on the other hand are the highly erratic attendance

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patterns of most academy students. As Kett put the issue in his study of adolescence, "few students appear to have remained long enough in a given academy to have benefited from whatever advantages such sequences [of graded curriculum] offered." 56 This observation calls into question the educational value of academy attendance. To paraphrase historian Maris Vinovskis: Why were parents so willing to enroll their children in higher schooling, but then seemingly so indifferent to having them complete that education? What were the attitudes of adolescents toward entering and staying in such schools? 57 Several passages in Frances Smith's diary are suggestive in this regard. Each in its own way challenges scholars' assumption that the sporadic student attendance common in the antebellum period represented a lack of academic seriousness on the part of students and their families. For starters, the evidence suggests that the fact that parents withdrew their children from school did not necessarily mean they were indifferent to their children continuing and/or completing their educations. On at least two different occasions in Frances Smith's case, the family employed a tutor to instruct Frances on a private basis in between periods of attendance at the academy. In one case the instructor appears to have been a live-in governess hired on a long-term basis to provide supervision and instruction for all children in the family. In the second instance, by contrast, a tutor was hired on a limited, short-term basis specifically to prepare Frances to resume her studies at the academy. Explaining the first situation in a letter to a friend, Frances wrote that she would not be able to return to the academy in the fall of 1831 as she would like. "The instructress which I have is competent to instruct me in any of the higher branches I should wish to pursue, and she will probably remain with us a year, so you see all hope is precluded." Far from being indifferent to the continuance of their daughter's education, in other words, the parents in this case made special arrangements to ensure its continuance. 58 Frances' case further suggests that students who attended school only sporadically did not necessarily cease pursuing the academy's course of study. In at least three instances Frances directed her studies at home with the formal curriculum of the academy in mind. When, as Frances explained to her friend, she had the option of being instructed at home "in any of the higher branches of education which I should wish to pursue," Frances chose to continue studying the branches of education she had been studying when she left the academy: intellectual philosophy, mathematics (in this case geometry), and music. A year and a half later, when she was no longer under formal tutelage by any instructor, Frances noted in her diary that she had been "looking over Paley's theology," a standard component of the curricula for female academies, and recorded her intention to "make it a study" that summer. Finally, with the help of a second special tutor later in 1833, Frances prepared to return to the Seminary by "reviewing" studies she expected to be examined upon when she arrived there. Upon her successful examination she went on to study new subjects-Algebra, Astronomy, and Rhetoric. 59 These references to self-directed pursuit of an academy's course of study put a somewhat different slant on the academic seriousness of academies and academy

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students. Viewed from the perspective of Frances Smith's diary, the elaborate courses of study published by academies appear to complement rather than contradict student attendance patterns. Given that most students only attended school for a couple of months at a time, and given that periods of academy attendance were often separated by a year or more, the existence of published curricula could help students bridge the gap in their school experience through independent study. Evidence of the practice of supplementing academy education with independent study appears in the writing of other female diarists and correspondents as well. In her diary, for example, Clarissa Pengra recorded her intent to pursue a plan for independent study that had been recommended to her by a faculty member at the academy she once attended. "Professor Seager marked out a course of history for me to read," she noted in June, 1839. "I hope I shall be able to do it with persevering industry." Similarly, Laura Hurt Randall, a young Southern woman forced to cease her formal schooling at the age of seventeen, declared her intention, nonetheless, of continuing her intellectual pursuits on her own. "My bed is at this minute covered with charts, historical geographical and biographical, with books of all sizes and descriptions," she wrote to a friend in 1820. 60 Other young women expressed similarly serious intentions with respect to both formal and informal study, as both Margaret Nash and Kathryn Walbert describe elsewhere in the present volume. 61 This evidence from female diaries and correspondence reminds us that academy attendance may have meant different things to different students. 62 For students from families with little real property or from households that depended directly on the market for their livelihoods, the primary significance of academy attendance may have derived from its practical, vocational value. 63 For other students, however, the social or intellectual dimensions of academy attendance may have been more significant. In particular, evidence suggests the possibility that a serious approach to academy study may have been particularly pronounced among some female students. 64 Without imputing too much to the selective evidence provided by a comparison of individual diaries, it is worth noting how the attitude toward academy study expressed in Frances Smith's diary differs from that expressed by a male diarist of the same age. The diary of Eli Rogers is filled with accounts of the work he did: drawing wood and loads of hay, repairing sleighs and skidding logs, shelling and milling corn, tapping the sugarbush, grinding axes, killing and dressing hogs, plowing and hoeing, chopping fallow, sawing firewood, repairing cradles and scythes, cutting wheat, and laying foundation for a corn crib. In this context, school attendance and school keeping appear as bits of work like any other-or rather, as bits of pleasure (more than once Eli commented that he spent a "pleasant" day in school)-in a schedule of outwardly defined activities that left little time or need for reflection. In Eli's diary, short periods of attendance at an academy, away from home and work, come across as withdrawals or reprieves from ordinary life. They were a kind of lark. "Hurrah for Alfred again!" Eli wrote as he arrived back at the academy in August, 1854. "Yes indeed," he joked, "I have got back to Alfred again for the purpose of studying and getting an 'edikashun'!" (emphasis original). 65

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By comparison, Frances Smith's comments regarding her studies both at home and at school are full of serious contemplation. Beyond recording anxiety about upcoming recitations and examinations, Frances expressed a conception of reading and study as a form of self-improvement. In April, 1833, for example, Frances declared her intent to read and take notes on the whole of Charles Rollin's ten-volume ancient history. "I intend to improve every leisure moment I can command in reading some useful book," she wrote, explaining "I become every day more and more convinced of the importance of time, and of the necessity of improving every leisure moment." 66 By the mid- to late nineteenth century, a growing mass media aimed specifically at women would popularize this ethic of female self-improvement, effectively creating a Victorian culture of self-directed study and character development. According to historian Louise Stevenson, self-appointed "reading advisers" promoted the idea in popular media that readers should "dominate their books" and "take control of the reading process by choosing serious books and reading them seriously." These advisers further articulated the idea that "in a serious world, books helped people develop their individuality."6 7 Although Stevenson was writing about the immediate postbellum era, her description captures well the attitude toward academy and home study expressed by Frances Smith and other female diarists in the antebellum era. This evidence suggests that for some middle-class women, academy attendance was part of a larger project of self-definition that had both moral and intellectual dimensions. This project was no doubt predicated on a condition of relative leisure, as Frances Smith suggests. It was also an attitude toward study and learning that was educational in the classical sense-that is, aimed at knowledge and virtue rather than at the instrumental ends promoted by credentialism. In the future, comparative research across ethnic as well as gender lines may reveal additional ways in which students and their families conceived of the value of academy education. In her study of the Catholic Institution of New Orleans, for example, reprinted in the present volume, Mary Mitchell found that part of the value of academy attendance for Creole youth lay in the political education it provided-specifically, an education in alternatives to the racial oppression of Southern society just prior to the Civil War. A close comparative look at the language students and parents used to talk about education in these and other distinctive institutions can help us further understand how the structural conditions of academy education have shaped its meaning in different places and communities.

Conclusion The expansion of academy education in the nineteenth century was part of a broader expansion of the role of formal schooling in the life experiences of youth and the organization of American society. Since Bernard Bailyn highlighted this change in culture in 1960, a generation of sociologically-minded historians has elaborated accounts of how and why the transformation occurred. 68 According to this now classic line of sociohistorical analysis, formal schooling in the nineteenth century effectively

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replaced real wealth as a form of inheritance for a new white-collar middle class. Increasingly dependent on a volatile cash and wage economy for their livelihoods, aspiring parents turned to formal education as a strategy for settling economic and social status on their children, and for providing them with the resources necessary to overcome unexpected challenges and grasp new opportunities. Beyond serving as a strategy for material advancement, however, formal schooling promoted a general culture of merit, industry, and competition that justified social advancement once achieved, and offered the hope of future improvement in difficult times. Through education, a youth became a "self-made man," someone who depended on his own industry and economy, rather than on direct inheritance, to make his way in the world. 69 The basic logic of this account has proved resilient through many permutations. It seems to explain well the culture of educational aspiration that took hold in American society in the nineteenth century. It also fits well the details of specific cases. In the case of Sidney Roby, for example, the land speculation and homesteading efforts of his father ended in failure. Joseph died in debt soon after his son had completed his schooling and moved to New York, leaving Sidney quite literally with his academy education and a clerk's apprenticeship as an inheritance. More interesting than the fact of this occurrence, however, is how his father's experience of financial failure shaped the meaning of education he tried to convey to his son. Admonishing his son by letter to apply himself to his studies, Joseph Roby warned Sidney that he needed to prepare himself "to battle with the world-its snares, its vices, its troubles, its evilsall of which you will have to experience." Given the great instability of society, Joseph explained, Sidney would have to be better prepared than he himself had been to deal with a world "where those who today are wealthy, respected and happy-are tomorrow destitute and left alone to grapple with poverty and distress." 70 The rationale for academy study offered here by Roby's father gives vibrancy and specificity to the reigning scholarly account of educational expansion in the nineteenth century. In Joseph Roby's words, the economic instability experienced by families, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, is made tangible, and the connection between economic change and the increasing demand for higher schooling is made explicit. This connection existed not only in the experiences of families and individuals, however, but also in the political philosophies and policies of public leaders and state governments in the antebellum era. Drawing vaguely, but nonetheless strongly, on the presumed connection between commerce, virtue, and knowledge articulated in the Scottish Enlightenment and promoted in republican ideology, public leaders like DeWitt Clinton simultaneously promoted the development of systems of internal navigation and systems for promoting the spread of elementary schooling, the organization of literary institutions, and the improvement of the "useful arts." 71 By liberalizing incorporation, capitalization, and funding policies not only for academies, but for banks, manufacturers, and other enterprises, state governments succeeded in integrating the various geographic regions and economic sectors of the state with each other. They also achieved the unintentional outcome of making individuals, communities, and corporate entities more susceptible to the kind of financial crisis typified by the Panic of 1837. In this way, the economic instability experienced by families like the

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Roby's was effectively created by the policies of economic development and internal improvement pursued by public leaders like DeWitt Clinton and his Jacksonian successors. The culture of economic expansion and the culture of school expansion in this way were mutually reinforcing. Given this account of the connections between economic change and school expansion in the antebellum era, what does a focus on academies, in particular, contribute to our understanding of nineteenth-century society? For starters, the social geography of academies and academy students encourages a reconceptualization of the direction of both economic and educational change in the antebellum era. Although the eventual outcome of the social mobility and economic development of the period may have been an increasingly urban concentration of wealth, population, and institutions, the impetus for this change seems to have come from the countryside rather than from the city. This analysis fits the growing literature in economic history on the rural origins of economic change and capitalist transformation. 72 Nonetheless, despite the clear evidence that historian Carl Kaestle and others have provided of the rural origins of the expansion of common schooling, and thus of the culture of education expansion, most in-depth studies of the social dynamics of this cultural change and the formation of middle-class culture focus on urban settings. The study of academies and the social milieu in which they thrived suggests that more attention and more sophisticated analysis needs to be focused on rural and small town settings. In addition to redirecting our attention to rural and small-town settings, the study of academies refocuses our attention on female experience. Despite the now accepted fact that common school attendance and literacy rates were roughly equal among men and women by 1820, at least in the North, and despite roots of much of the accepted theorization of middle-class culture in gender studies, the reigning account of social and economic change in this period still explains the logic of the increased significance of formal schooling primarily from the male perspective. In this account, education is primarily of instrumental value and primarily applies to males. It is a means by which sons improved their prospects for white-collar or mercantile careers. This analysis ignores the fact that the greatest increase in school attendance at all levels occurred among female students. By 1850 the majority of academy students in New York were female, a proportion that continued to increase in subsequent years. As the scholarship on the feminization of teaching in this era makes clear, the instrumental value of schooling applied to many women as well as men. Moreover, as the accounts of the experiences of individual female teachers illustrate, the experience of financial crisis and economic instability shaped the significance of education for females as well as for males. For women like Susan Hutchison and Sophia Sawyer, whose stories are told elsewhere in this volume, academy education proved no less valuable an inheritance than it did for Sidney Roby. 73 But that is not all. At the same time as many women made use of their educations to widen their opportunities and provide for their financial and social security, they also articulated a vision of education as a form of moral and intellectual improvement. In this way the meaning of academy education also lay in the alternative it represented to the culture of material self-advancement that social historians have described as "middle class."

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NOTES I.

"Diary of Frances Connor Smith [Wells]," 1831-37. Box 10, William H. Emerson Family papers, 1758-1953, University of Rochester Library, Special Collections. 2. See for example the 1816 speech by DeWitt Clinton quoted in Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People: Aspects of Economic Development in New York State during the Canal Period, 1792-1838 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press for the American Historical Association, 1962), 42. 3. Lynne Templeton Brickley, "Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, 1792-1833," (Ed.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985); David F. Allmendinger, "Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 1837-1850" History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring \979):27-46; Anne Firor Scott, "The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values From the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-72," ibid., 3-25; and Kathryn Kerns, "Antebellum Higher Education for Women in Western New York State" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993). 4. See, for example, George Frederick Miller, The Academy System of the State of New York (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1922) and Edward Herring O'Neil, "Private Schools and Public Vision: A History of Academies in Upstate New York" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1984). 5. Nancy Beadie, "Defining the Public: Congregation, Commerce and Social Economy in the Formation of the Educational System, 1790-1840" (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1989). In this study I looked at the social demography and culture of schooling at all levels (including common schools, an academy, and a college) in the town of Lima, New York during the early republican and antebellum eras. 6. The comparative study has been published in a series of articles: Nancy Beadie, "Female Students and Denominational Afftliation: Sources of Success among NineteenthCentury Academies." American Journal of Education 107 (February 1999): 75-115; "From Student Markets to Credential Markets: The Creation of the Regents Examination System in New York State, 1864-1890," History of Education Quarterly 39 (Spring \999): \-30; and "Market-Based Policies of School Funding: Lessons from the History of the New York Academy System," Educational Policy \3 (May 1999): 296-317. 7. David Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 40; Reed Ueda, Avenues ofAdulthood:The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 45; Michael B. Katz, "Occupational Classification in History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972):63-88; and Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 8. These figures include both academies incorporated under the Regents and academies incorporated without Regents status. Figures compiled from The Official Index to the Unconsolidated Laws, Being the Special, Private and Local Statues of the State ofNew York, 1778-December 31, 1919 (Albany: J.B. Lyons, & Co., 1920); "Acts of Incorporation," April 13, Laws of New York, Chapter 202, Section 10-Academies, 563; "Acts of Incorporation, Section I, Academies," Revised Statues of the State of New York, Vol. Ill (Albany: The State of New York, 1829-30), 529-30; and Miller The New York Academy System, pp. 64-73.

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10. II. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

I 8.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

Ill

On permanent school funds in this period see Nancy Beadie, "The Limits of Standardization and the Importance of Constituencies: Historical Tensions in the Relationship between State Authority and Local Control," in Neil Theobald and Betty Malen, eds. Balancing Local Control and State Responsibility for K-12 Education: 2000 Yearbook of the American Education Finance Association (Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education, for the American Education Finance Association, 2000). On liberalization of state incorporation and funding policies in the Jacksonian period see Beadie, "The Limits of Standardization," and Beadie, "Market-Based Policies." Beadie, "The Limits of Standardization." Beadie, "Female Students and Denominational Affiliation." Mary J. Oates, "Catholic Female Academies on the Frontier, U.S. Catholic Historian 12 (Fall 1994): 121-36 and Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860-1920 (Chicago: Loyola University, 1967). See JoEllen McNergney Vinyard, For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-I925 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998); Nikola Baumgarten, "Education and Democracy in Frontier St. Louis: The Society of the Sacred Heart," History of Education Quarterly 34:2 (Summer, 1994): 171-92; and Clark Robenstein, "French Colonial Policy and the Education of Women and Minorities: Louisiana in the Early Eighteenth Century," History of Education Quarterly 32:2 (Summer 1992), 193-211. For an analysis of academies' capitalization, income, and operating budgets, see Beadie, "Market-Based Policies." See, for example, the events described in Linda Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, I865-I902 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987); Teri Castelow, '"Creating an Educational Interest,"' in this volume, and David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, I875-I928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). See, for example, the chapter on black academies in Reconstruction Mississippi by Chris Span in this volume; James Anderson The Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Vanessa Siddle Walker, To Their Highest Potential: An African-American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Between 1840 and 1850, for example, the number of Regents academies increased by 3 I percent and the number of students attending them increased by 42-47 percent. Meanwhile, the population of youth between the ages of ten and twenty increased by just 18 percent. Sizer, "The Academies," 40. Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York (Albany: The State of New York, I 851 ). To determine town size, town names for individual academies in the Regents report were matched with census population figures published in Manual for the Use of the Leigslature of the State of New York (Albany: New York State Department of State, 1855). Kerns, "Antebellum Higher Education," 155-192. On the social geography of academies see Edward Herring O'Neil, "Private Schools and Public Vision: A History of Academies in Upstate New York" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1984). Kerns, "Antebellum Higher Education," 155-192. For comparison I refer also to "Annual Catalogue of Phipps Union Seminary, 1855," Phipps Union Seminary Collection, Swann

112

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

Chartered Schools Library, Albion, New York; "Catalogue of Delaware Literary Institute for the Academic Year 1860-61," New York State Library, Albany, New York. For further discussion of the factors contributing to the relative size and success of different academies, see Beadie, "Female Students and Denominational Affiliation." For a graphic, state-by-state and decade by decade comparison of urban populations in the antebellum North and the South, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988): 72-75. "Diary of Frances Connors Smith," passim. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America: 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977): 19. Kett, Rites of Passage, 19. "Diary of Eli Rogers," Library, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York. Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). Maris Vinovskis, "Have We Underestimated the Extent of Antebellum High School Attendance?" History of Education Quarterly 28:4 (Winter 1988): 551-67. As Vinovskis has emphasized, annual enrollment figures are not an accurate reflection of the total share of a given age cohort who ever received high school or academy instruction. To determine the proportion of youth aged ten to nineteen in 1850 who ever attended higher institutions, one must take into account not only all the students actually enrolled in 1850, but the eleven-year-olds who in 1850 had not yet attended a high school or academy, as well as seventeen-year-aids who, like Eli Rogers, attended in 1849 and 1851 but not in 1850. In his study, Vinvoskis developed a method for making such determinations. Here I have used Vinovskis's method to estimate local attendance rates at Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, based on annual attendance of local students at the academy in 1850. Using Vinovskis's method I estimate that 13.3 percent of all New York State youth aged ten to nineteen in 1860 attended a Regents academy at some time in their lives. This included youth who lived in towns that did not have Regents academies as well as youth who lived in towns that did. Similarly, Vinovskis estimated that 14.6 percent of all Essex County, MA youth aged ten to nineteen in 1860 attended a public high school at some time in their lives. Again, this included towns without high schools as well as towns with high schools. For a full discussion of these state-wide comparisons, see Beadie, "From Student Markets to Credentials Markets." Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 24, 60. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States (1850) (Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of the Census, 1854). For more detailed analysis of academy student population figures, see Beadie, "Market-Based Policies" and "From Student Markets to Credential Markets." For data on tuition rates and policies see Beadie, "Market-Based Policies" and "Emma Willard's Idea Put to the Test." Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York (Albany, 1851). My assessments of academy student enrollments and the number and kind of academies

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39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

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in operation state-wide are drawn from an analysis of data drawn from the Report of the Regents at five year intervals from 1835 to 1890. David Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 40; Reed Ueda, Avenues of Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 45; Michael B. Katz, "Occupational Classification in History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972):63-88. David Labaree, The Making of an American High School, 40. Reed Ueda, Avenues of Adulthood, 45 and Katz, "Occupational Classification." Kerns, "Antebellum Higher Education," 194-95. These figures are based on an analysis of local student households as compared with those of all local households in the town of Lima, New York (the location of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary) as recorded in the U.S. Census of 1850. Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), 245. In this way we could imagine that academies effectively institutionalized the "organizing process" that Donald Mathews long ago identified as an essential dynamic of Protestant evangelicalism in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Donald Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis," American Quarterly 21 (1969):23-43. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millenium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); CaroB Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-72 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). The longest lived and most well-established were Utica Academy ( 1814), Whitestown Seminary (1828), Clinton Liberal Institute ( 1831 ), and Utica Female Academy (1837), but a number of others existed as well. "Livingston and Onondaga County woman's diary, 1838-1842," microfilm copy, Cornell University Division of Rare Books and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. Holder of original material, Chris Densmore, University of Buffalo Archives. I have identified the woman as Clarissa Pengra and reconstructed some of her academy experience through the records of the academy she attended, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary of Lima, New York. Victoria-Maria McDonald, 'The Paradox of Bureaucratization: New Views on Progressive Era Teachers and the Development of a Woman's Profession," History of Education Quarterly 39:4 (Winter 1999): 427-453. David Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). James K. Somerville, "Homesick in Upstate New York: The Saga of Sidney Roby, 1843-47," New York History 72:2 (April, 1991): 179-96. William Graves to A.J. Warner, May 1838, Warner Papers, Lima Historical Society, Tenny Burton Museum, Lima, New York.

114 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

6!. 62. 63.

64.

Chartered Schools Letter from "Hattie" in Waverly to "Mary'" at Albion, New York dated 6 October, 1863. Phipps Union Seminary Collection, Swan Library, Albion, New York. "Diary of Frances Connors Smith," 30 July, 183!. "Livingston and Onondaga County Woman's Diary," 12 April, 1839. Transcript of Letter to Betsy Mariann DisBrow, 30 September 1861, from "Dear Sister: A Compilation of Letters of the DisBrow Family of Yates County, New York, ca. 1860--1864," compiled by Marvin A. Minton, Cordova, Tennessee, a record of which is held by the Lima Historical Society, Lima, New York. Sizer, "The Academies," 15. Kett, Rites of Passage, 19 Vinvoskis, "Have We Underestimated ... ?" 567. "Diary of Frances Connor Smith," 5 June, 183!. Ibid. 10 October, 1833 and 7 and 8 February, 1834. "Livingston and Onondaga County Woman's Diary," 26 June, 1839; and Anya labour, "'It Will Never Do For Me to Be Married': The Life of Laura Wirt Randall, 1803-33," Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Summer, 1997): 193-236. In addition, Louise Stevenson refers to a number of statements of similar tenor in female diaries and correspondence in her book on Victorian culture, noted below. For a fascinating account of young women continuing their formal educations by effectively conducting a correspondence course with each other see Clare Putala," 'Reading and Writing Ourselves into BeingThen What?': The Literacy of Certain Nineteenth-Century Young Women" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1997). Margaret Nash, "'A Triumph of Reason'" and Kathryn Walbert, "'Endeavor to Improve Yourself,' " in this volume. I would like to thank Julie Reuben for suggesting this way of framing the interpretive issues that follow. On the question of class, Kerns has found that female students at coeducational academies were more involved in paid work and more likely to continue involvement in paid work after marriage than were female students at female academies. In the cases of these women, who seem to have expected to contribute to their own support in much the same way as male students did, academy attendance may have had much the same relationship to work as it did for male students. For one thing, female academies and the female departments of coed academies appear to have been much more concerned about elaborating full courses of study for their female students than they were for their male students. One scholar has found, for example, that of the sixty-two Connecticut academies whose catalogs he analyzed for the period before 1860, only three advertised systematic, sequential programs of study, and two of these three were female academies. At the same time, female academies constituted only 15 percent of the total number of academies he studied. Harvey S. Reed, "The Period of the Academy in Connecticut," (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1942):77-79. In addition, academy bulletins sometimes printed statements admonishing parents for failing to allow their daughters to pursue a "full" and "entire" course of instruction. (See, for example, "Bulletin of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary," 1836, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection Syracuse University Archives, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse, New York; "Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Phipps Union Seminary, 1851 ," Swan Library, Albion, New York.) By mid-century, moreover, the desires of educators seem to have been granted, as women

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65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

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increasingly enrolled in higher schooling and completed courses of study at higher rates than men. "Diary of Eli Rogers," 18 August 1854. "Diary of Frances Connors Smith," 21 Aprill833. Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860-1880 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991): 30-47; quotations from p.33. Joan Jacobs Brumberg also refers to a culture of concern with character development in the diaries of nineteenth-century young women in her study of female adolescence. Unfortunately for us, however, her focus on how this culture changed in the twentieth century led her to provide few quotations or specific references from the earlier period, even though she apparently did collect the diaries that would have allowed her to do so. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vantage, I 998). Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Formation of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, I 960). Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 165-79. Somerville, "Homesick in Upstate New York," I 90. On DeWitt Clinton see Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People: Aspects of Economic Development in New York State during the Canal Period, 1792-1838 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1962, and Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769-1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, I 998). Also, see J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); David Hume, Writings on Economics, Eugene Rotwein, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955); and Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). Some leading works in this tradition include: Alan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1992); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Stephen Hahn and Jonathan Prude The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Thomas Dublin Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Margaret Nash and Kim Tolley, "Leaving Home to Teach" and Teri Castelow, "Creating an Educational Interest," in this volume.

"Endeavor to Improve Yourself': The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South KATHRYN WALBERT

In 1845, Reverend and Mrs. Drury Lacy sent their only daughter, Bessie, to Edgeworth Seminary in Greensboro, North Carolina, trusting her to the care of Dr. and Mrs. Morgan who ran the academy. There, Bessie's education included instruction in math, science, Latin, literature, and music. While the Lacys surely hoped that the education they were providing would prove rewarding and useful-Mrs. Lacy wrote to her daughter that Bessie should "endeavor to improve yourself'-they could not have predicted that it would one day provide the foundation for part-time teaching, or for the entry of Bessie's own daughter into full-time professional life. 1 Bessie Lacy was educated on the cusp of a new kind of white Southern womanhood-schooled in antebellum expectations, but destined to face a society almost completely foreign to her a scarce fifteen years later. The serious expectations that she and her parents held for her education in the 1840s, however, would allow Bessie to adapt to the changes that would confront her during the Civil War and Reconstruction and would enable her to convey to her own daughter a set of expectations for female behavior that was substantially different from that offered by the antebellum culture into which she was born. On the surface, white women's educational experiences in the antebellum South seem contradictory. While Southern school girls followed a rigorous curriculum, neither they nor their parents intended for that education to be applied to any public purpose. Scholars have often characterized the system of education available to young women in the South prior to the Civil War as dramatically inferior to that afforded either to Southern men or to Northern women and have assumed that Southern school girls approached their education less seriously than their counterparts in the North. Even the new scholarship that attests to the rigor of women's academies, generally arguing that their curricula bore a striking resemblance to that for men, assumes that Southern white women continued to adhere to the mystique of the Southern belle, taking educational opportunities far less seriously than expectations of marriage and cultural notions of the Southern lady. The experience of women like Bessie Lacy suggests that Southern schools in fact prepared young women for a broad range of quite unexpected experiences and that many young women, particularly those of a middle or town class, took their educational 116

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opportunities quite seriously. In large part, their dedication to education stemmed from neither the expectations of the Southern belle stereotype nor from the assumption that they would enter public work as a result of their schooling. Rather, many antebellum Southern women saw education as an end in itself, valuing a life of the mind for its own sake over the trappings of femininity or a position in the public sphere. 2 To understand women's education in the changing postwar South, however, we must first understand the historical background of Southern education. Formal education itself has been generally regarded by historians and educational theorists as far less important to the culture of the colonial South than knowledge of agriculture or social roles. The educational opportunities that did exist in this early period were exclusively "extended to the elite to prepare men to become gentlemen." 3 In colonial society, one historian of education noted, the "increasing wealth, consequent leisure, and the greater stability of society" of the South led men "to regard women as playthings rather than helpmeets" and therefore to believe that "they should be educated for show rather than trained in domestic duties." So while boys were taught "substantial subjects," girls were taught "accomplishments" that would help them become good wives and companions to men. 4 Overall, one study concluded, the colonial "education of girls in the South was 'conditioned' by their social status" with girls receiving private tutoring if their parents could afford it and perhaps a short period of formal schooling at an estate school or boarding school. Little emphasis, however, was placed on an advanced and rigorous program of education for women. 5 The American Revolution changed women's roles within American society and provided a new justification for their education. Linda Kerber has argued that in "the early Republic a consensus developed around the idea that a mother, committed to the service of her family and to the state, might serve a political purpose." That purpose was a limited one, however, and women were expected to put their political interests to work within the confines of home and family. 6 Ultimately, their new notion of women's political role served as a compromise that "allowed the socialization of women into 'true womanhood' in lieu of their participation in politics and, even more specifically, agitation for women's rights." 7 This compromise had significant ramifications for women's education; many Americans believed that the young nation's future rested on the need for generation upon generation of educated male citizens with a moral character suited to a republican form of government. Since children learned their first moral lessons in the home, it was essential that women be educated for the task. At the same time, the growth of a print culture in America made illiteracy a handicap even for women, and families became more and more interested in the education of their daughters. 8 This ideal of "republican motherhood" clearly played a role in Thomas Jefferson's thinking on women's education, and his comments on the subject demonstrate the ways in which many elite parents failed to see beyond the "republican mother" role for their daughters. Jefferson had a long-standing interest in education and wrote extensively on the subject, but he confessed to having little interest in the education of women. "A plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic thought

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with me," he told a friend in 1824, "it has occupied my attention only so far as the education of my own daughters occasionally required." 9 His apparent lack of curiosity on the subject is interesting, for if Jefferson, near the end of his life, had not considered a given subject, he probably had made a special point of not considering it, given the breadth of his interests. His ignorance suggests that he, and other men of his time, considered women's education to be mostly irrelevant to the course of public affairs. Jefferson, however, did concern himself with the education of his own daughters. He worried that their placement in a "country situation" deprived them of educational opportunities that would be more readily available in urban areas, leading Jefferson to conclude that it was "essential to give them a solid education which would enable them to become mothers to educate their own daughters & even to direct the course of sons should their fathers be lost or incapable or inattentive." 10 The purpose of a woman's education, in Jefferson's mind, was to ensure that future generations would grow to be well-educated citizens of the national democracy. Jefferson blamed women themselves for the difficulties he perceived in the their schooling. "A great obstacle to good education," Jefferson wrote, "is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels & the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind it destroys the tone & revolts it against wholesome reading." Jefferson regarded novel reading as a predominantly female vice, the deplorable result of which was that "Reason & (illeg.) plain and unadorned are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figment of fancy & nothing so bedecked come amiss .... The result is a bloated imagination sickly judgment & disgust towards all the real business of life," he concluded. Jefferson viewed verse with similar caution. "For a like reason too much poetry should not be indulged"; he wrote, although, "some is useful for forming style & taste." 11 In addition to avoiding the vices of novels and poetry, Jefferson urged instruction in French on the grounds that "the French language [has] become that of the general intercourse of nations" and that the language, "now the repository of all science[,] is an indispensable part of education for both sexes." Jefferson also paid particular attention to the ornamental arts, those "for a female [being] dancing, drawing, & music." He noted that dancing "is a healthy exercise, elegant & very attractive for young people. Every affectionate parent should be pleased to see his daughter qualified to participate with her companions & without awkwardness at least in the circles of festivity of which she occasionally becomes a part." Presumably revealing grace on the dance floor in the appropriate social circles would lead to an advantageous marriage. In arguing for instruction in art and music, Jefferson wrote that, "Drawing is ... [an] engaging amusement often useful & a qualification not to be neglected when one ... is to become a mother & instructor." Drawing was important not because of art's inherent value to women, but rather as preparation for motherhood. Similarly, Jefferson argued that music, "where a person has an ear," could prove "a delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the care of Day & lasts us thro' life. The taste of this country calls for this accomplishment more thoroughly than either of

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the others." On plantations separated by long distances, families prized women's ability to entertain and bring a bit of the fine arts into daily life. 12 In addition to his proposed formal curriculum, French and the arts, Jefferson included a commentary on necessary domestic skills. "I need say nothing," he wrote, "of household economy in which the mothers of our country are generally skilled & generally useful to instruct their daughters." He continued, "We all know its value," adding that, "diligence and dexterity in all its principle are inestimable treasures." In Jefferson's view, "The order & economy of a house are as honorable to the mistress as those of the farm to the master & if either be neglected ruin follows, & children are destitute of the means of living." By including household skills as an essential part of his discussion of the proper course for women's education, even if he expected this part of women's educational experience to be learned informally, Jefferson clearly placed domesticity at the core of women's identity and preparation for future motherhood at the core of women's educational aims. 13 The limited and largely ornamental education for women that Jefferson envisioned did not hold sway for long, however, if indeed it ever did. Margaret Nash, in her study of Benjamin Rush's Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia, has suggested that historians may have broadly overemphasized the role of republican motherhood in dictating female education. Indeed, while Jefferson and Rush both looked to women to shepherd the next generation of citizens and prove adequate helpers to their husbands, the academy Rush founded offered "reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, and geography." While some public figures eagerly talked about women's education as a stepping stone toward maternal responsibilities, the young women who attended the academy, too, "urged the continuation and expansion of female education" and welcomed the chance to learn, not out of a desire to become good mothers but rather because of the intrinsic value they placed on learning. 14 At the end of the eighteenth century, in-home education gave way, for those whites who could afford tuition, to women's academies like the one in Philadelphia. Day schools and boarding schools opened in Southern towns and along major routes between population centers. Teachers within such schools were most often men, widows, or young women from the North. 15 One of the earliest Southern academies, Salem Academy, opened in North Carolina in 1802, offering a four-year preparatory program, a four-year academic program, and a postgraduate program that was individualized to meet the interests and needs of the scholar. Between 1800 and 1860, scores of other institutions opened their doors throughout the South, including twenty-one academies for girls and sixty-six coeducational academies between 1830 and 1860 in Alabama alone. By 1860, all of the future Confederate states boasted significant numbers of academies for the daughters of those wealthy enough to afford tuition. 16 Historians have generally assumed that the education available to Southern women at these academies was limited at best. Anne Scott's work on the Southern lady argued that a young woman in this period was reared to be "a submissive wife whose reason for being was to love, honor, obey and occasionally amuse her husband, to bring up his children and manage his household." 17 Since that landmark work, few

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historians have questioned the assumption that Southern women's educational opportunities were poor and that women took little interest in intellectual pursuits. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese pointed out that Southern academies were different from those of the North because, while Northern schools had departed from the emphasis on republican motherhood to prepare teachers for teaching careers, Southern schools continued to be dominated by older ways of thinking about women's education. She concluded that "uniformly ... they were intended to strengthen a young woman's family ties, including social position and responsibility, and her sense of having special religious duties." She concedes that women did know that they would need "at least a smattering of intellectual culture" as plantation mistresses and that some may have developed "a deep love of the intellectual life," but ultimately she concludes that few women attended academies for an extended length of time or "valued systemic learning" and that they pursued education only in order to fulfill their roles as Southern ladies. 18 Catherine Clinton's work on the plantation mistress also concludes that the curriculum in academies served, primarily, to prepare elite young women for their eventual roles as wives and mothers on plantations. Reading and writing were taught as ways of facilitating familial correspondence, with teachers supervising letters home as part of the curriculum. Religious studies figured prominently as a means of preparing women for pious adulthood. Young women learned arithmetic, but only "to aid them in their household accounts, or to better their understanding of plantation ledgers" as an aid to their future husbands. In addition, academies offered courses in languages, French being the most important, and natural history, which included courses ranging from astronomy to botany to chemistry. Clinton ultimately concludes that time spent at academies constituted a "brief exposure to intellectual freedom," after which "intellectual development would most likely wane with marriage, decline with housekeeping, dwindle at motherhood, and at no time result in any measure of social recognition." 19 In contrast to the work of the many historians who argue that women's academies in the South were vastly inferior to counterparts in the North, in large part because they did not prepare women for careers in teaching, Christie Farnham's study of higher education for antebellum Southern women argues that the South was actually quite innovative in terms of women's education and concludes that the education offered to white women in the South's academies and seminaries was more academically rigorous than historians have previously assumed. Often run by Northern transplants, Southern women's colleges and seminaries created a curriculum that was similar to that for men and similar to that offered in Northern institutions. 2° For instance, Edgeworth Seminary in Greensboro, where Bessie Lacy attended school reshaped its curriculum to a collegiate course of study when it was taken over in 1845 by the Reverend and Mrs. Morgan, a couple from NewYork. 21 The Edgeworth curriculum, divided over four years, was indeed as rigorous as Farnham suggests. First-year students studied arithmetic, English, Latin, Greek, spelling, geography, United States history, mythology, philosophy, foreign languages,

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and one of the "ornamental branches," which included art, music, or wax work. Secondyear students advanced to algebra, geometry, rhetoric, botany, natural theology, ancient and modem history, and astronomy, with no specific mention in the curriculum guide of an ornamental course. Third-year students studied natural philosophy, the English language, logic, stellar geography, natural history, anatomy and physiology, and Alexander's Evidences. Fourth-year students studied philosophy of mind, astronomy, Kames's Elements of Criticism, Milton, Shakespeare, the American Constitution, principles of interpretation, moral philosophy, civilization, analogy, and lectures on the harmony of truth. In addition to this standard course of study, students had the option of taking piano, guitar, drawing, painting, additional languages, shell work, or silk and worsted work for additional charges. 22 At the end of the first term, students participated in exams before a "committee of visitors," and final exams at the end of the second term were open to the public.23 The Edgeworth catalog, of course, only reveals a partial view of the educational opportunities afforded by the school-to fully compare the academy's course of study to that available for men or to Northern women, historians would need to evaluate not only the course offerings but also the texts and pedagogies employed. Nonetheless, the Edgeworth curriculum went beyond the minimal expectations for literacy, rudimentary mathematics, geography, and French described by Clinton and other historians of the Old South. Instead, it offered wide-ranging courses in classical language, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and other branches of knowledge most often associated with male education in the period. Farnham has suggested, however, that despite the rigor of this academic curriculum, the expectations of the Southern belle still won out over intellectual development in the minds of most students. She concludes that Northern teachers and their Southern charges differed in the value they assigned to academic subjects versus matters of social standing. Elite Southern schoolgirls created for themselves a mediated educational culture in which sociability, fashion, and hierarchy retained critical importance, preventing them from fully embracing their educational opportunities. Northern schoolgirls, in contrast, were encouraged toward moral duty and professional activity that made them more serious students. 24 Since young Southern women had no reason to expect to use their education beyond the domestic sphere, they had no compelling reason to emphasize academic pursuits over the trappings of femininity expected of them by their society. The diaries of some antebellum schoolgirls reveal sentiments in keeping with Farnham's assertions that young Southern women placed sociability above intellectual pursuits in their school experiences. Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, for example, wrote frequently in her journal that she missed recitations in order to spend time with friends and she spoke far more enthusiastically about her bonds with her classmates than about her course work. A deeper look at Thomas's education, however, reveals that elite young women's attitudes about education in the antebellum South may actually have reflected religious passions more than disinterest in the curriculum. Gertrude was born in Columbia County, Georgia in 1834, the daughter of Turner and Mary Clanton. Theirs was one of the wealthiest agricultural operations in Georgia, with multiple plantation holdings and a total estate valued at two and a half

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million Confederate dollars in 1864. Gertrude attended a local school run by Reverend W. J. Hard until 1849 when the family sent her to Wesleyan Female College in Macon where she stayed for three years before graduating at the end of 1851. 25 The curriculum at Wesleyan was demanding. Gertrude mentioned taking classes in mental philosophy, astronomy, and natural philosophy, and an 1842-1843 circular from the school mentioned that the founders of the college aimed "to give our daughters as good a disciplinary education as was afforded by the best colleges for our sons." 26 But Gertrude's diary does not suggest that she placed any great significance on the rigorous lessons to be learned in Wesleyan's classrooms and often only notes the courses and instructors in her life by way of mentioning her failure to attend their lectures. For example, on 4 April 1851, she admitted, "I was talking with Anna Jeffers and did not prepare the Astronomy so I stayed away from recitation and from 11 to 12 was in Fannie Floyd's room talking to her." Gertrude wrote extensively of her relationships with her schoolmates, clothing, and other subjects one might expect from a "Southern belle." 27 Gertrude's distractions from class, however, stemmed not simply from her desire for purely social interaction with schoolmates like Anna and Fannie, but also from the religious culture of the Methodist-run school. Her apparent lack of interest in a good many lectures stands in stark contrast to her fervent interest in her own spiritual growth and that of her classmates. While Gertrude was hesitant about going away to school at first, three weeks into her experience, she wrote, "But now Thank Heaven I am glad I did come as it has been the means perhaps of my conversion. Oh how happy I am now." She elaborated, "On Monday evening down stairs in the Chapel I was co[n]verted and made to feel how good God is. We have had a prayer meeting every night since." Several of her friends were converted around the same time, and Gertrude wrote of reading her Bible and spending time with her new friends, remarking, "Oh my heart is so much changed." 28 Despite her quick conversion upon arriving at Wesleyan as a sophomore, Gertrude worried as a senior in 1851 that she no longer experienced the same strong, personal feelings during religious meetings. On I 0 April, she described a prayer meeting in the parlor with Bishop William Capers, writing that despite the absence of one of the school leaders, "[n]evertheless we had a blessed and glorious conversion of souls for God" with many girls kneeling to show that they "from that night intended living for God." As the girls knelt many were swept up in emotion and Mollie Capers, the daughter of the bishop and a classmate of Gertrude's, "grew happy and shouted the praises of her maker." Even though Gertrude's diary reveals that she was excited by the conversions of her classmates who "had found a Saviour for the first time" and the renewed faith of other "reclaimed sheep which had strayed from the fold of the 'Good Shepperd,' " she did not enjoy a rush of religious feeling herself. Instead, she "felt cold and distant.'' 29 She reflected that on that day, "I felt that although I had repented my sins I was still unpardoned. In fact, I did not feel certain with reference to the state of my feelings. I doubted." But the following day, her conversion seemed, once again, complete. She wrote, "Now thank Heaven I feel certain of my acceptance

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with God. How divine. What a change. Can I ever doubt the goodness of my God, of my Saviour?" Gertrude also shared the happiness of her friends who had found conversion, writing that ten friends "all obtained religion" and that "Cousin Emma, too, thinks she has obtained the 'Pearl of great price.' " 30 Gertrude expressed her concern for her friends and their spiritual well-being in her diary. She worried that her classmates Joe Freeman and Ella Pierce "do not feel their sins forgiven" and noted that she was "so anxious for their conversion." The same day, after talking about religion with classmate Mary Tucker after dinner, Gertrude wrote, "How interested I feel for her. How anxious I am with reference to her spiritual welfare." 31 The conversion experience was not only an individual milestone in the lives of the girls at Wesleyan, it was also a subject of great interest for the whole student body, something prayed for and celebrated by Gertrude's entire cohort of friends. 32 Conversion experiences and outpourings of religious enthusiasm did not confine themselves to the chapel, religion classes, or formal prayer meetings of Wesleyan Female College. They often spilled into the dormitories and daily lives of students, serving as community events where the girls shared their faith and encouraged one another. For example, Gertrude was finishing her writing for the evening in April 1851 when she heard someone shouting. She found that it was Sue Evans who "had obtained religion in the recitation room." When Gertrude got there, several girls were "shouting together" in the room and attention soon focused on two girls, Joe and Ella, as Ella tried to convince Joe to kneel in acceptance of God, going so far as to say that if Joe would not kneel, she was prepared to "give up her search for religion." Joe did eventually kneel but, in Gertrude's opinion, did so only "impelled by the wish to oblige Ella." Still, the rest of the girls in attendance were "very much excited" and commenced "shouting and praying and making a good deal of noise.'m The scene was quickly broken up when a school official came down the hall and asked the girls to return to their rooms, but this spontaneous outpouring of religious sentiment, in the absence of an adult school official or religious leader, suggests that girls fully incorporated evangelical culture into their private lives and also demonstrates the thrilling sense of power and authority that girls could enjoy in these moments of evangelical joy. When Ella stood before the large group of girls, already excited by Sue Evans's conversion, and placed her ultimatum before Joe, she took on the authority of a religious leader, placing the powers of her own prayers up against Joe's disbelief. In this highly dramatic moment, schoolgirls of fifteen and sixteen years of age could be the inspiration for a lifelong relationship with God, could pose a highly public challenge with extremely high stakes, and could be the judges of one another's spiritual success or shortcomings. In an antebellum world in which Southern white women's roles were so carefully scripted, such moments must have been intoxicating. The personal conversion experience that Gertrude and her classmates underwent was encouraged by the broader culture of evangelical Christianity in the Old South. Evangelicals valued the emotional and personal relationship between the believer,

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God, and the church. During conversions, believers underwent an "entire transformation of personality through an intense religious experience," rather than through a rational consideration of faith or scripture, placing value on the wisdom of the heart over that of the head. The experience allowed evangelicals to feel a personal and direct relationship to God and to share that relationship "with people who cared for them and gave them a sense of belonging." As individuals underwent this evangelical rite of passage, "[s]ocial rank, learning, intelligence-most of the bases for making individual distinctions among people-were cast aside." For women, religious conversion held particular meaning because, as an individual experience, it could sometimes allow them to defy their husbands' wishes on religious grounds and continually provide them with both a theology and a community of fellow believers from which to draw support-sometimes even in disputes with husbands or fathers. Both the conversion experience and the predominantly female religious networks women joined after conversion encouraged self-confidence and provided arenas in which women could participate in the world beyond the confines of their family. 34 Jean Friedman's work on Southern women and evangelical life suggests that conversion and entry into a church community had both positive and negative effects for women-the "[a]cceptance of personal limits, social integration, and the inner detachment from social constraint through identification with the Divine" was a positive part of growth for young women, but the conformity to traditional sex-roles and limitations on personal freedom signified by joining the community of adult Christian women could also prove disadvantageous. 35 But as Gertrude and her friends at Wesleyan took their first steps toward membership in that community in 1851, their experience seems to have been overwhelmingly positive, binding them to one another in a spirit of joy and a sense of power that stemmed from religious enthusiasm. In this context, Gertrude's failures to attend class can be seen not simply as the actions of a frivolous Southern belle, but rather those of a concerned member of a Christian community of young women whose obligation to the spiritual development of her classmates overrode her sense of obligation to attend a specific lecture or recitation. When she wrote that she was talking to one friend or another rather than attending class, she could have been referring to a discussion of the latest fashionsclothing interested Clanton and her friends too-but she could also have been engaging in a debate about scripture, expressing her concerns over the spiritual life of a classmate, or sharing her own religious rapture. Faced with the choice of attending one of many lectures for a course in which she and her friends would be called to task for their knowledge of a lesson on mental philosophy or astronomy, or meeting with members of her religious community, with whom she might experience the surge of self-confidence, spiritual power, and mutual support that evangelical religion could bring, it is not surprising that Gertrude occasionally chose the latter. To say that Gertrude sometimes chose personal interactions or religious activities over in-class learning is not to say that she completely eschewed intellectual pursuits. Sometimes, Gertrude's decision not to go to class seems calculated to provide additional time to write. Her senior paper, for instance, was the source of some anxi-

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ety. After writing a class paper entitled, "The Pulpit the Press and Schoolroom, Efficient Agents for Moral People," she was relieved that "[i]t is the last composition I had to write this term until my graduating composition." Of that, she commented, "I have not selected a subject for it yet." Over the next several days, she mentioned writing quite frequently. While the writing project that engaged her is unnamed, she discussed her writing with a sense of duty that suggests that she was not merely writing letters home or writing in her journal to record the daily events of her life, but rather composing an academic treatise. On one April day, she expressed relief that her lack of preparation was not revealed in class, "I had not read over my lesson," she wrote, "[but the instructor] did not come to our bench." Gertrude continued, "After we had recited I asked to be excused and came up and commenced writing again." 36 A few days later, she wrote that she "did not attend Dr. Ellison's recitation in Astronomy or Mr. Stone's recitation in Natural Philosophy" but was "writing after four o'clock." Her father came for a visit later in the day and Gertrude wrote, "Of course no more writing was done that evening." 37 A week later, Gertrude handed in a list of possible topics for her senior paper to M. Myers. She considered such topics as "What subject should a young lady write on when she graduates?," "Adversity favourable to the development of Genius," "The source of all great thoughts is sadness," and "The keystone of thy mind, to give thy thoughts solidity-To bind them as in rock, to fix them as a world in its sphere is to learn from the word of the Lord, to drink from the fountain of his wisdom." The commencement program of 11 July 1851 reveals that she chose the latter topic. Her paper was entitled, "Learn from the Book of the Lord; drink from the well of his wisdom." 38 Her absence from class recitations, then, may have been less the product of apathy than a choice to devote her energies to a more independent style of learning. Gertrude also devoted a good deal of her time to the independent intellectual pursuit of reading. Even before attending Wesleyan, Gertrude was an avid reader. As a fourteen year old, she read voraciously, asking for several issues of Graham's magazine, reading ladies' newspapers her father brought home from town for her, and borrowing magazines and novels from a friend, Mrs. Berry, all during the first week of October in 1848. 39 In her first year at Wesleyan, she recorded thirty-nine books in her journal, all of which, along with numerous magazines, were read the year before she enrolled. She also listed several books and Shakespeare plays she read once she arrived at the College. Of her reading, Gertrude wrote, "I borrowed most of them, eagerly read anything and only regret that my reading had not been directed by someone." 40 Gertrude clearly loved reading, but her longing for a mentor suggests that she knew reading experiences could also be sources of self-improvement and intellectual advancement. Gertrude's attention to writing and reading and, in particular, her feeling that her reading should have a kind of plan designed for self-improvement demonstrate just how much intellectual pursuits did appeal to her, even as they competed with religion and other more secular teenage interests. Much of Gertrude's learning at this critical time in her life, both spiritual and intellectual, seemed to come from outside the classroom rather than from within it. As Gertrude looked ahead to graduation, just a few

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months away, on her seventeenth birthday, she wondered about her future. "How will all this end[?] To what end am I destined[?]," she wrote, "Surely for something else than to waste the precious moments of existence." 41 Seeking a sense of usefulness in her future life, Gertrude Clanton graduated from Wesleyan Female College in 1851, taking away not only lessons learned in class, but those gained in conversions and in her private course of independent study. The education of Bessie Lacy, the daughter of a minister and teacher from Raleigh, also complicates our understanding of women's education in the antebellum South. Many of the early letters she exchanged with her family reveal an attention to appearance, deportment, and ladylike behavior that the literature on antebellum Southern women would predict. Soon after her arrival at Edgeworth, Bessie's mother, Willeana Lacy, instructed her daughter, "You will commence music lessons immediately--do try & find the time to practice the pieces you already know." She went on to remind Bessie to "Ask Mrs. Potter to make you sing and open your mouth," and to "Wear your bonnet, disappoint the freckles, clean your teeth." 42 Clearly, cleanliness, appearance, and the social graces did hold some sway with the Lacy family. Her father, in fact, wrote early in her career that he aspired for his daughter to be "an elegant linguist, accomplished pianist, & of all things a dutiful, affectionate, & pious daughter & sister."43 While few letters survive from Bessie herself, letters from her parents reveal that she often asked for new dresses, hairpins, and other items of personal adornment. 44 Bessie Lacy's parents, though, had more serious reasons for sending their daughter to school than these references to music and elegance suggest. Soon after Bessie arrived at Edgeworth, her mother wrote that, "we who love you so much & study to find out what it is for your good think it is best to send you," [where you can] "endeavor to improve yourself." Mrs. Lacy went on to explain that, "at home you would not have half the helps and inducements to study that you have at schooL We are constantly interrupted in various ways-I am a poor example for my own daughter! I am a poor scholar too & unable to impart all the instruction you need." While she suggested that it was a sacrifice for her to be away from her only daughter, Mrs. Lacy reminded Bessie that, "If you were at home now, you could not find many moments for study and however comfortable it might be to me I must, while I live, study your best interest & deny myself to promote it." 45 Far from suggesting that the time at Edgeworth should be spent perfecting the graces of ladyhood, Mrs. Lacy refers directly to scholarship in all of her letters. She was especially anxious that Bessie master Latin, a subject that both Clinton and FoxGenovese conclude was primarily a male field of study undertaken only rarely by women and often actively discouraged. 46 Farnham concludes that classical language classes "were offered, but few students availed themselves of the opportunity to take them," and that Latin and Greek were generally considered elective subjects. 47 Both Drury and Willeana Lacy, however, considered the subject essentiaL Bessie's father's attempts to teach her Latin at home had been a complete failure. Mrs. Lacy lamented, "months-years passed and rendered up their account of what? of days idled away of weeks misspent." 48

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Despite her early enthusiasm for Bessie's music lessons, Mrs. Lacy quickly changed her mind when she feared that Bessie's more academic subjects might be neglected in favor of the guitar. She wrote: I do not like attempting too much at once, it is like that "Jack of all trades who was good at none." I am perfectly willing ... for you to take lessons on the guitar next session and as much knowledge as you can gain this, with regard to it, may be acquired, provided it does not interfere with your other lessons. My impression is, that you must be somewhat pushed in your class now ... and that you have as much as you can do to keep a good stand-if so you had better put off the regular business of guitaring till next session. 49 Mrs. Lacy, then, hoped that her daughter would become an accomplished musician and proper lady, but when those goals came into conflict with Bessie's more academic pursuits, Latin and other studies were clearly to be given the higher priority. Bessie's father was concerned not only about the courses she studied, but with the pedagogy through which she learned them. In particular, he worried that Bessie's preparation in Latin had left her ill-equipped for advanced study at Edgeworth and questioned the movement away from drilling and rote learning since the days of his own schooling. His mid-nineteenth century back-to-basics critique of Bessie's early Latin education may sound familiar to modern educators: The fault I find with the teaching of the present day is that there is not half drilling enough. For instance, I should have greatly preferred your being drilled at least 2 years in reading Caesar & Sallustfrom lid to lid, & select portions of Ovid, and writing out & out Main's Introduction-turning English into Latin and vice versa ... before you opened Virgil at all. Mr. Lacy resolved to "hope for the best," but asserted that he preferred "the old fashioned method of teaching to the present 'hop, skip, & a jump' plan." The older style, he wrote, "was sure to make thorough scholars," while the "modern way of learning language, I am disposed to think, but skims the surface.'' 50 Bessie's parents were not the only ones concerned over her academic performance. While she did write home about more social subjects, the letters that survive show a young woman who, while homesick, was determined to live up to the high expectations of her parents. When her brother Willie was ill, she worried that her concern for him would have a negative impact on her studies, "If I try to study I see his little large eyes looking up in that beseeching manner." The school session was drawing to a close, and she assured her parents that, "I am getting on very well both in my studies and my health .... All I dread at the examinations," she wrote, "is Arithmetic & compositions." 51 What, however, was to be the aim of the education that Bessie pursued? Teaching was certainly not the stated aim for her instruction. While students in the North

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could attain professional training as teachers for the common schools, this motivation for education was absent in the South. The South lagged behind New England in the development of a system of common schools and so there was no large demand for teachers driving women's education toward teacher training. 52 In this context, becoming a teacher would have caused a woman of the elite class to lose social standing and to bring disgrace to her family, since the assumption would have been that if she needed to work, her father was somehow inadequate as a provider. 5 3 As a result, even elites who offered their daughters an education "appropriate to their station," discouraged any desires for that education to result in professional activity. As Elizabeth FoxGenovese has argued, teaching was "not a fit occupation for a lady." 54 The Lacy family tended to be vague about the purpose of their daughter's education. While they expressed no explicit professional aspirations for Bessie, neither did they mention marriage or motherhood. Her mother did, however, suggest that the decision to send Bessie to Edgeworth was made after she "became alarmed lest you should not acquire such an education as would make you useful in life." It was this concern that led the Lacys to send Bessie to "Mrs. Morgan in whom we had confidence whom we knew to be a good scholar and a Christian" and from whom they hoped Bessie would receive "justice ... and thorough instruction." 55 In another letter, Bessie's mother wrote that, "you have abilities and sense enough to ensure success in your undertakings if they are prosecuted with industry and care." 56 Don Mathews has explored the role of usefulness in Old South ideals for evangelical womanhood, stressing that evangelical women were supposed to "establish themselves as persistent reminders to the whole Christian community that life was to be based on eternal principles" through their "personal example and good works." Indeed, the Lacys' designs for Bessie resonated with the beliefs of evangelical Christians who "wanted women to be more than a 'belle' or an adornment" and "demanded serious commitment to Christ and his work." 57 Bessie was not necessarily supposed to put her education to use in paid work, but it was clear that she was to apply it to some worthwhile and Christian purpose, even if her parents were vague about what that purpose might be. If Bessie's parents did not suggest that she undertake any specifically professional activity, neither did they suggest that she aspire to the behavior of the Southern belles in their community. In part, this may be due to their class position-while the family was comfortable and did own slaves, Bessie's father was not an elite planter and may not have been capable of providing his daughter with all of the trappings of wealth that some of the other girls at Edgeworth enjoyed. In their correspondence with their daughter, the Lacys, and particularly Bessie's mother, were frequently critical of young women they considered frivolous, and often cautioned their daughter against following their unscholarly examples. Presumably responding to a now-lost letter from Bessie that remarked on the other girls' attire, Bessie's mother wrote to her, "you must learn not to desire everything that you see other girls have-They may have more clothes or nicer ones than you, but do not mind that." While she conceded that, "there is certainly no merit in going shabbily dressed nor is it a sign of smartness to be careless of appearance," she reminded Bessie, "do not my dear set your heart on

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these things-you go to Edgeworth to study, your internal appearance is most important."58 Willeana went so far in decrying the importance of physical appearance as to remark, "I am uneasy about your hair. It is so troublesome combing it that I fear it will put you back many a morning, and cause you to be marked tardy. If you were at home again I think I should cut it off rather than be so annoyed by it." 59 Bessie's mother made a particular example of a Mrs. Robertson, a former school friend, who visited the family in Raleigh while Bessie was away at Edgeworth. Mrs. Lacy described her guest as, "a dashing widow with 2 children, a fashionable woman of the world, used to high life, dress & company." While she conceded that her friend was "still very handsome and very attractive," she commented that her attributes were "too much in bold relief" The danger in these immediate and outward signs of grace and beauty, Mrs. Lacy cautioned, was that they "occupy the forefront of the picture, present at first sight, and dazzle a little, but after examination there is no hidden beauty to reveal, no sparkling gem to be found under the surface, exciting that quick unintentional admiration that an unexpected good is sure to call forth." 60 She was so concerned that Bessie might pick up this kind of superficiality among the girls at Edgeworth that she wrote: I would almost as soon throw you into the Atlantic, and expect you to swim safely to shore, as place you among a parcel of girls in a boarding school when all dispositions, ages, and tempers are indiscriminately mixed together, and expect you to act prudently, without the oversight and management of a superior who would admonish reprove and correct you. Indeed I had much rather do the first. I had rather have a dead child, buried in the bottom of the sea, than to have one living, acquiring bad principles, bad habits, growing in vice, as she grew in years and preparing herself with all possible diligence for misery in this life and perdition in the next. 61 Bessie's mother frequently peppered her letters to her daughter with similarly melodramatic admonitions against the lack of seriousness and purpose that she perceived in many elite women, old and young alike. While never urging Bessie toward a specific path in life, Mrs. Lacy's instructions to her daughter were clear: Study hard, apply yourself to a useful, Christian purpose, and avoid becoming one of the frivolous, unserious young women who reflect poorly on their families. In Leasburg, North Carolina, the Lea family attended to the education of their daughter, Wilhelmina (Willie), with similar solemnity. This was due in part to the fact that they were teachers themselves. Willie Lea's father, Solomon Lea was born in Leasburg, North Carolina, in 1807. 62 He worked on his family's farm and received his primary education in Leasburg, later attending the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he received a master's degree in 1833. He became a Methodist minister and teacher, beginning his career in Warrenton, North Carolina. 63 While teaching school in Warrenton, Solomon met Sophia Aignes, an English woman who had come to Warren County from Philadelphia where she, too, had been a schoolteacher. They

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married in 1837 after a brief courtship and both continued to teach in Virginia, notably at Randolph-Macon Female College in Boydton and at Farmville Female School. 64 He served as president of Greensboro Female College briefly in 1846, but in 1847, Lea moved his family, now including six children, home to Leasburg and built his own women's school, the Somerville Institute, in 1847. 65 Solomon Lea named his school after Mary Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and astronomer whom he greatly admired. By 1850, fourteen young women had enrolled, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty. They came from North Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi. While at Somerville, young women learned "French, Latin Greek, music, drawing, art, fancy needlework, wax work, universal and U.S. History, English grammar, arithmetic, geography, chemistry, physiology, algebra, and composition." The curriculum was similar to that at Edgeworth, including many courses at the core of the curriculum of schools for men. Many of the students boarded with the Lea family and were taught by Mrs. Lea and her daughters, and so as a teenager, Willie had the opportunity to interact with dozens of intelligent women her own age. 66 No letters survive that document Willie's experiences as a student at Somerville, but it is clear that her education there was similarly rigorous to Lacy's and that her parents clearly valued it very highly. Moreover, because her mother was a teacher in the institute, Willie Lea, perhaps more than other antebellum Southern schoolgirls, had a ready model for adulthood that was markedly different from the expectations of the Southern belle described by many historians. The disparity between the educational values of the Lacy and Lea families and those generally described by historians may be largely a function of class and location. Most historical scholarship on white women in the antebellum South has focused on the wealthy rural planter elite, not on daughters of ministers or teachers living in towns and cities. While Gertrude Clanton, a planter's daughter, seldom wrote about in-class learning and focused on spiritual activities and intellectual pursuits outside the classroom, Bessie Lacy and Wilhelmina Lea paid more careful attention to the curriculum. The Lacys and Leas were both financially comfortable, but neither was wealthy enough to compete with planters like the Clantons economically. 67 If, as historians have argued, the planter elite placed very little emphasis on women's education beyond the intellectual development necessary for women to fulfill their roles as Southern ladies, then perhaps families with fewer economic resources held to a different notion of the mission of women's education. Location may also have played a role in these two families' concerns over female education. The Lacy family lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, an established urban area, and the Leas in Leasburg, North Carolina, a thriving town. By the nineteenth century, Leasburg still relied on agriculture as the basis of its economy, but also boasted "taverns, blacksmith shops, general stores, tobacco factories ... a tannery, saddler shop, a cabinet maker, schools, a post office ... a carriagemaker, cotton gins, a tailor, a dressmaker, brickyard, and on the nearby creeks were gristmills." 68 Historians have noted that generalizations about Southern culture based on a rural plantation elite fail to explain antebellum life in cities and towns, where closer proximity to

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neighbors, a stronger merchant class, and access to travel and travelers subverted the hierarchies of plantation culture. 69 Lisa Tolbert, moreover, discovered that towns afforded women an opportunity to travel about independently, act as consumers, take part in educational opportunities, abandon certain kinds of household labor or supervision, and participate in literary and intellectual discussions with one another. 70 In this kind of environment, Bessie Lacy and Willie Lea acquired educational values that emphasized usefulness and a more serious approach to a rigorous curriculum than that of many of their elite rural counterparts. But it was not only town-based families in the second or third tier of Southern wealth who explicitly valued education for women beyond preparation for lives as wives and mothers. Marcus Cicero Stephens, a wealthy planter who owned several plantations in North Carolina and Florida, wrote to his granddaughter, Mary Ann Primrose in 1841, "As you are the only daughter of your parents it follows as a natural consequence that they are more anxious for your improvement, and your letter to me affords the assurance that you will not neglect the opportunity now presented." Mary Ann was studying at Peace College where Stephens hoped she would "render herself interesting and agreeable to others and moreover possess internal resources of pleasure and amusement in those moments of listlessness and apathy to which we are all more or less subjected." He hoped that his granddaughter would be a source of amusement and interest to her friends and also to a future mate and family, but he went further to encourage her not to "neglect the higher branches of education." Stephens hoped that studying "History, Geography, and some ofthe best Ethical writers with care and attention," would do more than make her an ornamental addition to parties and social gatherings. Such study, he wrote, "will greatly add to your stock of ideas and enable you when occasion serves to take part in a rational conversation." 71 Stephens, like the Lacys, was critical of the Southern belle image. He railed against the "insipid" young women he had encountered: they have been asked to sing and play some instrument or to exhibit their drawings to the visitors after doing which they retire to their seats and sit mumchanced until some dandy of a beau sidles up to them and talks of the weather or last ball or some such frivolities. While he valued rational conversation, Stephens viewed idle sociability and the search for a potential mate with disgust rather than as the highest goal to which his granddaughter might aspire.7 2 Moreover, Stephens indicted society as a whole, rather than women themselves for such failings: Generally speaking, the women have not been treated with Justice by the male sex. It is true the rougher walks of life have very properly been destined to man, and the knowledge necessary for such purposes is also the peculiar study of man. But if woman is inferior to the man in bodily

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strength, her mind is equally vigorous as his. The records of ancient and modem History set this matter beyond doubt and I have known several instances in private life where women have exhibited full as much courage, prudence and strong sense as any man in like circumstances. Resonating with modem feminist critiques, Stephens incriminated men in an out-andout conspiracy to keep women uneducated and under their control: The fact appears to be this, the men have entered into a kind of conspiracy to keep the women in the background-a prejudice that has been excited against their improvement beyond a certain limit-the women have been cowed if I may so term it-for should she in her remarks on any subject of conversation show any superiority of intellect, she is instantly denounced as a bas bleu or blue stocking, and is avoided in a measure by both men and women. How ungenerous! He concluded that his granddaughter should not be put off by society's seeming disdain for educated women and advised her to "store your mind well with useful knowledge and in such knowledge as prudence and discretion." He suggested that she continue her education beyond the doors of the academy: "don't imagine that when you quit school, your improvement is finished, far from it-you then become your own instructress-the discipline of the Academy teaches you the use of the toolspoints out the different routes of knowledge-from that moment all depends on your own industry and discretion." In his view, education for women should not only be serious, it should also be a lifelong pursuit, a belief that runs quite contrary to historians' assumption that upper-class men viewed women's education as a brief period of intellectual life eventually abandoned for the daily work of a plantation mistress. 73 Despite his pro-education stance, however, Stephens could not resist cautioning his granddaughter against showing off her education: "A man may possess great bodily strength but it would be folly in him to rush into the streets and throw down everyone he might meet, merely to show his strength." By cautioning his granddaughter not to show off her education, he hoped to preserve her marriagability and thereby give her what he perceived to be the best of both worlds-a challenging intellectual life, and also the domestic role expected of her.7 4 The educational experiences and attitudes of young women from families like the Clantons, Lacys, Leas, and Stephens suggest that historians may need to revise our understanding of women's intellectual lives in the antebellum South. The emphasis we have placed on the Southern belle image underestimates the seriousness of women like Bessie Lacy and Wilhelmina Lea. The educational experience of planters' daughters like Gertrude Clanton indicate that even in that elite group, young women may have had reasons other than an obsession with the Southern belle image or a lack of intellectual seriousness for their failure to fully engage themselves in classroom experiences. The comments of Marcus Cicero Stephens suggest that even some

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wealthy white men saw a need for women's education to go well beyond the ornamental and largely irrelevant schooling described in the historical literature. Women who became teachers during and after the Civil War were disproportionately likely to have come from families that placed a high value on academic instruction, which should come as no surprise. The academic interests that many of these young women expressed as teenagers later translated into either temporary or long-term teaching careers. The education that these young women received at academies and colleges in the antebellum period provided a strong academic background, as well as an opportunity to experiment with ideas about womanhood that went beyond simple finishing-school charms to advance a far more serious and active sense of Christian usefulness. Bessie explored that role through teaching in the 1850s, as did her own daughter in the 1870s. Willie Lea taught in numerous schools throughout the South in the 1870s before returning to Leasburg to teach music and to write in the 1880s. Gertrude Clanton married and took up teaching after the Civil War to support her large family. As teaching became an increasingly acceptable occupation for Southern white women after the Civil War, such women could expand the serious, scholarly definition of Southern femininity that they had explored in their own school experience in even more dramatic ways by living independently, earning their own incomes, acting publicly, and developing networks of active and intelligent teachers.

NOTES I.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 2 January 1846, Drury Lacy Papers, The Southern Historical Collection (SHC), The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Margaret Nash's dissertation on antebellum education finds that women throughout the United States took their educational opportunities more seriously than previous scholarship has assumed and that antebellum curriculum for women was more similar than most scholars have suggested. Margaret Nash, "Higher Education for Women in the United States, 1780--1840" (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin, 2000). Dickson A. Mungazi, The Evolution of Educational Theory in the United States, (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), 55. Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, Volume I; Science and Education: A Series of Volumes for the Promotion of Scientific Research and Educational Progress, ed. J. McKeen Cattell, Volume IV Book I, (New York and Lancaster, PA: The Science Press, 1929), 244. Elene Wilson Farello, A History of the Education of Women in the United States (New York and Washington: Vantage Press, 1970), 104. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 283; 285-287. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 124. Kerber, 99-200. Robert M.S. McDonald, a friend and Jefferson scholar, helped me think about Jefferson's comments on education in the context of his life and interests.

134 10.

I 1. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Chartered Schools Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Hartwell Cocke, 14 March 1820. Earl Swem Library, Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, The College of William and Mary. On microfilm as a part of the Southern Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth Century Series. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Margaret A. Nash, "Rethinking Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia,"Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997), 171-191. Quotations are from 182; 184. Clinton, 127-129. Miss I. M. E. Blandin, History of Higher Education of Women in the South Prior to I 860 (Washington, D.C.: Zenger Publishing Co. Inc., 1975, reprint of a 1909 edition), 31;75; Woody, 380-394. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 4; 7. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 256; 257-259. Clinton, 130-132; 138. Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 1-3. Lillian Weatherly, "Edgeworth Female Seminary," The College Message, 7 (May 1897), 129-131; Blandin, 233. Weatherly, 130-131. Blandin, 234. Historians' focus on the role of sociability in Southern women's in comparison to the North may not only overstate the centrality of social life to Southern academy students, but also understate the importance of sociability in the lives of Northern students. As Nancy Beadie's chapter in this volume points out, social occasions could be quite central to Northern education as well. Farnham, 4. Nell Irvin Painter, "Introduction: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas: An Educated White Woman in the Eras of Slavery, War, and Reconstruction," in Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 3-4. Information on Reverend Hard is from note 22, Burr, 78. "Circular of Georgia Female College, 1842-1843," quoted in Farnham, 17. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 5 April 1851, in Burr, 84. See Burr, 82-92 for more information on Clanton's class attendance. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, I February 1849, in Burr, 82. Information about Clanton's status as a sophomore in her first year comes from note 31, Burr, 82. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 10 April 1851, in Burr, 86-87. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 12 [II] Aprill851, in Burr, 87. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 12 [II] April 1851, in Burr, 87. Gertrude urged her friend Joe to be prayed for at church on 9 May 1851. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, in Burr, 91-92. Christie Farnham also describes this scene, 172-174.

"Endeavor to Improve Yourself" 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

135

Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 16 [15] April 1851, in Burr, 87-88. Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 12-13; 104-110. Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 12 [11] April1851, in Burr, 87. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 17 April 1851 in Burr, 88-89. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 24 April 1851 in Burr, 90. Information on the graduation program is from note 41, Burr, 90. Gertrude Clanton, diary entries 2 Oct. 1848; 3 October 1848; and 9 October 1848, in Burr, 74-75. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 6 February 1849, in Burr, 83. Gertrude Clanton, diary entry, 4Apri11851, in Burr, 84. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 13 June 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, The Southern Historical Collection (SHC), The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Drury Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 8 August 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Bessie's letters are often quite short, but some appear in the Lacy papers for 1845-1846. Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 2 January 1846, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Clinton, 132; Fox-Genovese, 257. Farnham, 72-73. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 28 November 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 28 July 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Drury Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 8 August 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Bessie Lacy to Willeana Lacy, 23 September 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 182-217. Farnham, 32; 68. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 46. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 28 November 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy's postscript to a letter from Horace Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 23 August 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Mathews, 115; 123. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, I 0 July 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 26 November 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy's postscript in a letter from Horace Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 23 August 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. Willeana Lacy to Bessie Lacy, 30 August 1845, Drury Lacy Papers, SHC. The town of Leasburg was named after Willie's ancestors. In her family history, Willie writes, "There have been numerous traditions about the Lea family. One was-which has been believed by some Leas but not by me-that there were three brothers who came from England-that one of them changed his name to Lee and became the head of the noted Virginia Lees; another changed his name to Leigh, while our family retained the original name." Dubious connections to the F.F.V. Lees aside, brothers James, John, and William Lea came from Virginia and settled the town in 1752. When it was incorporated, it took their name. Solomon Lea was the grandson of town founder James Lea.

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Lea, "Reminiscences," I. Jeanine D. Whitlow, ed., The Heritage of Caswell County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem: Caswell County Historical Association with Hunter Publishing Company, 1985) 32-33; 35!. 63. Whitlow, Heritage 354. 64. "Reminiscences of Willie Lea," Lea Family Papers. SHC; Whitlow, 354. 65. Charles Lee Raper, The Church and Private Schools of North Carolina (Greensboro: Joseph J. Stone, Book and Job Publisher, 1898), 204-205; Lea, "Reminiscences," Lea Family Papers SHC, 5-6; Whitlow, 33. 66. William S. Powell, When the Past Refused to Die: A History of Caswell County, North Carolina 1777-1977. (Durham: Moore Publishing Company, 1977), 371-372. Willie Lea often mentions the women who boarded in her home while attending Somerville. Lea Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection. 67. Indeed, Christie Anne Farnham refers to the Lacy family in her study of education for "Southern belles," suggesting that she considered their financial standing to be prominent enough for inclusion in the elite category. See Farnham, 60; 140-142; 156; 158-159; 161; 166; 17!. 68. Whitlow, 33. 69. For example, Peter Kolchin notes that "many slaveholders viewed cities with deep suspicion as places likely to corrupt, and undermine the subservience of, their slaves." Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 177. 70. Lisa C. Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Rural Tennessee (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 123-152. 7!. Marcus Cicero Stephens Noble to Mary Ann Primrose, 7 November 1841, Marcus Cicero Stephens Papers, SHC. 72. Stephens to Noble, SHC. 73. Stephens to Noble, SHC. 74. Stephens to Noble, SHC.

"A Good and Delicious Country": Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana 1 MARY NIALL MITCHELL

In 1862, a free boy of color named Lucien Lamaniere, age fourteen, wrote a letter addressed to Tampico, Mexico. After describing a trip he took to Europe he explained to this friend: "I am going next year and I invite you to come we will go to Paris together before coming back to New Orleans, we will go and visit that fine country called Hayti and if you are not satisfied of those two countries, we will go and visit Mexico the finest country after Paris." Not only was this an "imagined" letter (which I will explain) but it was also a rather fanciful one, since Lucien had planned an impossible voyage around the Atlantic. This impossibility becomes clear at the foot of his letter. As a postscript Lucien wrote, "since the blockade I have not heard from you." 2 Indeed, federal troops were just off the coast of Louisiana, and a few months later the Union army had occupied the city of New Orleans. Lucien was a student in New Orleans at the Societe Catholique pour !'instruction des orphelins dans !'indigence (or Catholic Institution), a school for free children of color, and his letter was a composition-an assignment-written for English class. The letter was an imaginary one because its destination was imagined (as all destinations are, in some way, imagined) and because there is no clear evidence that this letter or most of the letters of his classmates, were ever sent. Yet these compositions offer us the rare chance to study the political education of free children of color in the antebellum South, and how and why these children used their imaginations to envision the Atlantic World. By studying their letters we can also better understand the ways in which free children of color, in a time of great upheaval in the United States, developed their own understandings of race, nation, and citizenship. The geographical perspective of the students at the Catholic Institution meant that they could well-envision the places to which they directed their correspondence. Growing up in New Orleans, they watched steamers pull in from across the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and the comings and goings of traffic on the Mississippi River. The city's largest newspaper, the New Orleans Daily Picayune ran daily reports of the steamships that had docked the day before, printing the names of captains and their next port-of-call for those who wanted to book passage. Newspapers also devoted 137

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front-page space to political events in Central America, the Antilles, and Europe, a sign of the importance of Atlantic shipping and commerce to the city's livelihood. The students' awareness of other places and peoples around the Atlantic Ocean was encouraged, as well, by what they learned in the classroom. The teachers and supporters of the Catholic Institution were among the leading French-speaking AfroCreole intellectuals and writers in Louisiana. With ideas inspired by the French and Haitian revolutions as well as the work of contemporary French writers, they developed a radical agenda aimed at securing civil and political rights for people of color in the Americas. 3 The war over slavery, in their view, was not a struggle to preserve the Union, but rather a means of establishing a republic in which color was no longer a barrier to equality. After the war, many of the teachers at the Institution became leaders in Louisiana's Reconstruction government and in 1868 helped to create what was perhaps the most radical new state Constitution in the South, which among other things mandated an integrated public school system. 4 The cornerstone of the AfroCreoles' political work was the Catholic Institution-perhaps the first free school for children of color, funded in part by the state government, in the Deep South-a place which one pair of historians later dubbed "the nursery for revolution in Louisiana." 5 Though it had been founded as a free school for orphans of color, the institution accepted non-orphans as well, and drew the children of artisans and tradesmen from the city's large free black population. 6 At the Catholic Institution the students received an education both practical and political. Their teachers instructed them in mathematics and oratory, and emphasized the importance of learning a trade and making business connections. (Most of the children were expected to enter an apprenticeship with an artisan or tradesman at the end of their schooling. Trades such as tailor, grocer, or shoemaker had long been dominated by free people of color in New Orleans,f According to the school's prospectus, every student would receive "une education pratique, morale, et religieuse" regardless of his or her economic status or future profession; the directors also stressed that the students would be able to apply what they learned "to industrial enterprises, to commerce, and to the arts." The curriculum was designed to offer "invaluable advantage to the students who are only able to give a limited time to their instruction," particularly children of the poorest classes who might only be able to devote a year or a few months to their education. 8 In addition, their teachers also encouraged in the students a political awareness and a sense of allegiance to other free people of color in the Atlantic World. Such an education, the leaders of the Catholic Institution hoped, would help sustain these children in the increasingly harsh racial environment of the Deep South in the years before the Civil War. As we will see, the letters composed by the students reflect both the practical and political concerns of the school's directors. While these assignments trained the children in the art of letter writing and in the proper maintenance of business relations, they also required the students to think about racial identity, nationality, and citizenship within the broad bounds of the African Diaspora, rather than in the narrow confines of the Deep South.

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In the late 1850s, the students directed their thoughts to two places in particular: the Republics of Mexico and Haiti. Both countries were the focus of emigration movements led by free black people in the period just prior to the Civil War. In order to understand the significance of the letters to and about Mexico and Haiti, we must recall the political context in which the students were writing, that is, the context of increasing repression of free people of color living in the South. Indeed, the idea of colonization to escape these restrictions came to the fore again in the 1850s, after several decades of disinterest. 9 Free people of color in New Orleans had enjoyed a form of "quasi-citizenship" since the colonial period. They could testify against a white person in court, sell and hold property in their own names, enter into contracts, and initiate legal disputes. But throughout the 1850s, the state legislature and the city of New Orleans steadily dismantled the legal divisions between slaves and free blacks. New laws forbid free people of color to own coffee houses and billiard halls where liquor was sold, and a city ordinance outlawed the assembly of people of color, free or slave. Noting the exodus of free black families to Haiti in 1859, the New Orleans Daily Delta suggested that though free passage and tracts of land induced many to emigrate, "stringent laws" recently passed by the state legislature regarding free people of color also played a large part in the group's decision to leave Louisiana. 10 Indeed, absurdly enough, by 1859, a state law allowed free people of color to choose their masters and become slaves for life. 11 Perhaps the most significant attempt to uphold slavery and induce the submission of the free black population in the Southern states was the Dred Scott decision, handed down by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. In Scott v. Sanford, when a slave sued for his freedom after his master had taken him into free territory, the nation's highest court ruled that people of African descent in the United States were not citizens and therefore could not bring a suit to court. Though the decision apparently did not strip free people of color in New Orleans of their legal rights, Dred Scott made clear the strength of proslavery forces not just in the South, but in the North as well. The verdict almost certainly helped fuel the migration efforts of free people of color in the North and South to countries outside of the United States. 12 Though we lack any comprehensive figures on migration to either Haiti or Mexico, at least one estimate suggests that between 1820 and 1862 no fewer than 10,000 free people of color fled the United States bound for Haiti. 13 Whereas the Haitian migration drew free people of color from the North and the South, emigration to Mexico seems to have been limited to free blacks along the Gulf coast. But a large portion of these migrants were native to Louisiana, and it is in this local context that we can best understand the significance of free black emigration in the antebellum South. As the children's letters demonstrate, these antebellum migrations were ideologically and politically significant both for the few who emigrated and the many who did not. Indeed, though efforts at free black colonization to Haiti and Mexico "failed," both countries became well-worn places on the children's imagined map of the Atlantic World. What we learn from the letters the students wrote about these countries is that the Civil War did not mark the first time these young free people of color

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anticipated the possibility of racial equality and freedom. For in the late 1850s and early 1860s, on the pages of their letterbooks, these children had already begun to search for a country where they might be free from constraints-economic and political-placed upon them because of their race. We will see, too, that freedom was a notion the students learned to define for themselves and that its contours shifted over time as the students followed the news of emigration, and considered the prospect of life in Mexico and Haiti. Their ideas, however, developed not only from consideration of emigration's possibilities, but also out of their experience as free people of color in the late antebellum South. All of the letter writers were boys between twelve and seventeen years of age. 14 Though this leaves us to wonder about girls' interpretations of colonization, boys may have played the most visible role in free black emigration in the antebellum period because of the skills they were expected to learn in order to become tailors, grocers, caulkers, or farmers. Most people emigrated with their families, which suggests that women's work was considered equally vital to the success of a colony; but those who promoted and encouraged emigration to Mexico and Haiti placed a decided emphasis on men's labor. 15 Free black people from Louisiana had begun migrating to Mexico in 1855, but it was not until two years later that an official agreement was signed between the Mexican republic, the proprietors of a large hacienda in the state of Veracruz, and Louis Nelson Fouche, a supporter of the Catholic Institution, to establish a colony named Eureka outside of Tampico. 16 The Mexican republic may have attracted free blacks from Louisiana, in large part, because of the racial equality that Mexico's leaders promised its colonists, 17 but the lucrative commercial traffic between Veracruz and New Orleans must have also have been of interest to free black merchants, grocers, and dry-goods men. The simplest reading of the children's letters about Mexico is to consider them the product of a teacher's assignment. In doing so, however, it is useful to make the distinction historian Carolyn Steedman has drawn between "the child" (the idea created from adult desires and visions of the political futures) and "children" (individuals with their own experiences and points of view). 18 If we choose to read these letters as reflections of adult concerns about the "the child of color" and his future, then we can see clearly the importance of these children and their education to the politics of free people of color in the late antebellum South. Considering the large number of compositions written about Mexico, for instance, the boys' English teacher must have sought to instill enthusiasm in his students for the creation of a prosperous settlement in Eureka, particularly since Fouche, its sponsor, was a supporter of the school. Indeed, the nature of the students' letters suggest that their teachers encouraged them to think of migration to Mexico in economic terms, rather than racial ones-a way of imagining colonization that differed sharply from the children's letters to Haiti two years later. The education of free children of color in the South of the late 1850s, therefore, was fraught with political implications, implications which surface in the writings of these students. What these children would be

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able to accomplish, their instructors believed, would determine the fate of free people of color in the South. If we interpret the children's letters as simple reflections of adult ideology, we would overlook what the boys themselves thought about colonization and what writing letters to Mexico allowed them to do. 19 (We must ask this question again when we look at Haiti.) In writing about Mexico, the students developed a political consciousness using a pointedly economic narrative that they themselves created and elaborated upon, no doubt with the initial encouragement of their teachers. When they wrote of Tampico, the boys concerned themselves not with politics, but with cultivation and trade. Yet if we read the students' writings about Mexico as part of a series of letters they wrote about trade (to Mexico as well as to "countries" in the North) we see that the children employed a specific kind of black nationalist thinking, guided by the notion that colonization was a vehicle for free black economic empowerment. Through commercial and agricultural narratives about Mexico, therefore, the boys scripted futures for themselves as merchants and planters at a time when opportunities for free people of color in the United States were increasingly uncertain. Using the language of speculation and trade, they charted links between their own lives in Louisiana and the lives of free people of color across the Atlantic and Caribbean. The students began to write letters about Mexico in 1856. The country entered their compositions as part of a story about Nicaragua. "You inform me after you have settled in Mexico," William Green wrote to his brother, "(where you are making a good deal of business) that you have the intention to leave for Nicaragua, where you expect to succeed." William advised him against going to Nicaragua since "something might happen to you, or else you will be taken as a soldier by Walker who wants some. You had better stay where you are." 20 William Walker's filibustering activities in attempts to expand the American empire to Nicaragua were covered extensively by the New Orleans press and William Green no doubt had kept up with events. 21 But his main interest seems to have been Mexico, where he suggested that his brother ought to "try to buy a house for you and your family." He added, "tell me also if there are [sic] any trouble there. I will send you a lot of goods by the next mail. Send me all the news (that) you can if you please." 22 William's letter illuminates the issues that preoccupied the students at the Catholic Institution when they wrote about migration to Mexico. He was keeping an eye on the political situation in Central America and asked his brother to notify him if there was "any trouble" in Mexico as well. His knowledge of Walker and his campaign also suggests that William was reading the New Orleans papers, most especially the Daily Picayune which had its own correspondent there and printed long reports of Walker's activities. 23 (As we will see in the context of Haiti, too, the papers may have been an important part of the students' education.) William's advice to his brother was that he settle in Mexico and "buy a house" for himself and his family, suggesting that William wished his brother's settlement to be permanent. He also planned to send "a lot of goods" and asked for "all the news" in Mexico, thus illustrating the personal, political, and commercial connections between free people of

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color in Louisiana and those living in other places around the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Most of the letters written to Mexico in the years 1856 and 1857 were addressed to the port city of Veracruz or to nearby Tampico. But at the same time the boys were writing letters to Mexico, they were also sending correspondence to cities in the North. The latter concerned commercial deals, often describing the exchange of specie for dry goods and containing promissory notes. The writers detailed the goods involved-for example, "3 boxes of calico, 1000 yds @ 6c, 5 boxes of gloves, 60 pairs @ $1 a pair"-and copied the notes stating the balance outstanding on the exchange. 24 Such letters made good practice not only for business dealings and letter writing but in arithmetic as well. But for these future grocery store owners and dry goodsmen, their letters also created an imagined link, through trade, with the Northeast. Mixed in with the earliest mentions of Mexico, for instance, are letters seeking advice from friends in other "countries" about the best trade to enter and what place might prove the most advantageous for their endeavors. Andre Gregoire wrote: "I wish very much to undertake a trade, but I do not know if I shall keep a grocery store or not. Do you believe that I shall succeed in that enterprise?" He inquired of his friend, living in "Hartford New Haven" whether it was a good place for a grocery trade. "Is not your country better for that undertaking?" he asked. 25 William Green, too, believed he was "about to enter the commercial line." "My intention," he wrote, "is not to inhabit forever a country that offers so little advantage as this. And I am about to prepare seriously to leave by studying, to bid an eternal adieu to my native home." 26 And to his friend in "Boston, Mass." Armand Nicolas revealed that he had "lately won ten thousand dollars" and that he planned to keep "either a dry goods line or a Grocery store, but I do not know to which of these lines I shall give the preference." His brother had also acquired "a good sum" but according to Armand "he says he does not like to have a thing in this country. Tell me if I shall not do better to come to the country where you are now [meaning Boston] or go to Mexico? For I do not think I shall do well to stay here, and be in business.'on The idea of going to Mexico, like learning a trade, it seems, was something the students associated with finishing their studies and entering adulthood. But that the boys would write about Boston, or Hartford, in the same way they wrote about Mexico-as "countries" in which to establish themselves-suggests that what they sought was a place outside of the South where they could become prosperous men of business. Their careful attention to conditions in Veracruz confirms this. As news began to come from Mexico about prospects there, the students soon turned their attention from dry goods to planting. Andre Gregoire explained that he had heard that there was "no work in that country" but it was "a very good place for agriculture." 28 By "work," Gregoire probably meant shoemaking or tailoring, the kind of occupations he and his classmates anticipated undertaking in New Orleans. Life in Mexico, the students learned, was agrarian rather than urban, and it offered them the chance to live like the wealthiest men in the South: planters.

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In a letter addressed to Veracruz, William Green asked his brother "please tell me if the sugar-cane, corn, and other products grow there; and do you think the ground will be good enough to raise some." He added: "I would like better to be a farmer than carry on any other profession, for I can make money by it in the markets." He also inquired about rumors that the Mexican government was granting land "to any one who settles there" and stories he had heard "that the sugar-cane grows there to the height of twelve feet." 29 William's idea of "farming" certainly seems to have been more akin to large-scale production for "the markets," than homesteading. Indeed, the life he and his fellow students envisioned in Veracruz often reads more like a Mexican version of the rural South, with haciendas instead of plantations. Armand Nicolas, for instance, sent a letter "to let you know that I desire to leave this country." He had received word from a friend in Mexico that "he had bought two haciendas and says if I come, I shall have one for sixty dollars." 30 Armand also explained that the nature of labor in Mexico was different than in New Orleans. "The manner of working in Tampico is not the same as here, they work in yards and you would not see anybody working in the streets. You can cultivate your land because the earth is fertile and every field is tilled there." Those who settled in Tampico, it seems, no longer had to ply their trade in city quarters and could assume the life of the landed class. As for labor, Armand explained, "you can get some Mexicans to work for you for five dollars a month and some others for four." 31 The language of free labor and agrarian capitalism is striking in the children's letters about Mexico, and those directed to the North as well. In fact, the boys seem to have been inventing the idea of a free market at the same time they were seeking the meanings of freedom. They were constructing both ideas-capitalism and freedomat a time when the debate over free labor versus slave labor was at its height. 32 Indeed, these letters (and references to paid Mexican labor, in particular) may reflect, in a very direct way their teachers' opposition to slavery. At the same time, these letters reveal a process of discovery on the part of the students, as well as the sense of power and authority they gained through writing these compositions. We see this process even more clearly in a second type of letter the students wrote to Mexico, a letter in which they played the role of merchants writing to their associates in Veracruz who had recently emigrated and were in need of supplies. Armand Nicolas wrote his friend "I have found the implements and garden seed that you told me to buy for you," and he proceeded to list the items he would send-shovels, reaping hooks, bundles of carrot seed-along with their number and cost. Armand concluded his letter stating that "perhaps next week I shall send you the rest, and I believe I shall come myself." 33 William Green told his friend about to depart for Mexico that "if you can not get the materials of farming, send out here, and I will send you them and seeds for the garden also, if you can't get any I will send you some." 34 Andre Gregoire advised his friend, "if you go to that country to be a gardener, I think that you will succeed." He told him to take three thousand dollars with him and that his passage would cost him forty and, he added, "when you will be in that country if you find yourself troubled, just call upon me, I will render you any service that you will ask of me." 35

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Though Andre and his schoolmates were writing these business letters as an exercise, the lines of trade they drew in their compositions also retraced the trajectories of the slave economy, lines etched between North and South (between New Orleans and Hartford) and across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. With their letters, the boys were redirecting the arrows of racial slavery, using the shafts to tie communities together rather than (as slavery and the slave trade had done) to break them apart. Viewed from this perspective, the intentions of the teachers become somewhat clearer. Through the exercise of writing letters-compositions about how to get to Mexico and how to be successful in a new country-the students could begin to understand the value of political and economic ties that bound free people of color together around the Atlantic World. And if, in fact, their instructors believed that economic strength was the key to the survival of free people of color (a notion which would have been quite close to the thinking of many black nationalists in this period) and if opportunities for this in the United States were shrinking, then the boys needed to be prepared to find other places in which to cultivate the soil or to ply a trade. 36 Yet aside from the possible designs of the teachers in assigning the compositions to their students, and even aside from what the students learned from the exercise, the boys succeeded in finding their own use for their "merchant" letters. Using the language of commerce, the students were able to participate in the activity of emigration even though they never sailed to Veracruz themselves. The fate of the free blacks who settled at Eureka and other places near Veracruz is unclear. The threat of Mexican civil war (what the students called "revolution") as well as the death of two "Creole ladies" at Tlacotalpan (possibly of small pox or yellow fever) seemed to dampen the boys' enthusiasm for life in VeracruzY Yet migrations to Mexico apparently continued into 1860, since in January of that year the New Orleans Daily Delta reported that "scarcely a week passes but a large number of free persons of color leave this port for Mexico or Hayti." 38 By 1863, however, a report by the Mexican government had declared Eureka a failure. After several months, according to the report, most of the colonists "se marcharon" (departed). Though the report was not explicit as to why Eureka's inhabitants left, it suggested that many colonies established in Mexico in the 1850s failed after the outbreak of civil war in 1858, which destroyed lines of communication between those isolated colonies and Mexico City, and otherwise impeded the economic success and prosperity of the settlers. 39 Though the students did not write many letters about emigration between 1857 and 1859 when emigrants began leaving for Haiti, their letters suggest that they had begun to rethink the idea of colonization. First, they had realized with the failure of Eureka that successful colonization depended upon a stable political situation, and it is clear that they interpreted the instability in Mexico in racial terms. Leon Dupart, for instance, began expressing his doubts about going to Mexico in 1857 "because I have heard it said that there will be a war between the Mexicans and the Spaniards" and he had been told that "it would be very bad if there would be a revolution in that country."40 Leon linked these unstable conditions to his view of Mexico as an unfamiliar country. This unfamiliarity, however, seems to have been rooted in his sense of con-

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nection to other Caribbean nations and his ideas about the importance of a black majority. Leon inquired of his friend whether "it would be better for us to go to Jamaica or Martinico [Martinique]." "I believe it will be better than to go to a country we don't know," he wrote, "for we can't do what we please there [in Mexico] as you would in any other place but this [New Orleans]." 41 In other words, places populated mostly by people of color-like Jamaica and Martinique-seemed to offer more freedom than either Mexico or the United States. A few days later, Andre Gregoire also directed a letter to a friend in Tampico, explaining that he had been "on the point to leave for that place." But Andre, too, had changed his mind. "I don't believe I shall go there," he wrote. "I have a mind to go to another place." 42 Second, and closely related to the first point, is that as the political situation in the United States became more acute, the students placed less emphasis on the economic prospects of migration and more on settlement in places where black people were in the majority. Indeed, their political consciousness shifted from a self-interested one, rooted in a kind of free-market liberalism, to one concerned with the collective fate of the "colored" race. This shift is difficult to trace because relatively few of the students' letters focus on emigration to Haiti-a silence, I suspect, related to the volatile political situation in the South, which would have prevented free children of color from writing much about the Black Republic. But we can piece together the students' ideas about Haiti using the few mentions the boys made of the country in 1859, and reading them in light of the political situation in New Orleans at the time. In addition, we should consider the perspective the students might have gained from their knowledge of the earlier migration to Mexico. By the time of the Haitian migration, the students had come to understand that free black people's freedom would not be as simple as a lucrative trade or a good plot of ground. In the intervening years between migrations to Mexico and Haiti, for instance, the students learned first-hand about racial discrimination-an evil that had not received comment in any of their letters to Mexico. In 1858, the Catholic Institution was forced to raise its tuition because the state legislature denied the institution its usual funds, and this slight did not escape the attention of the students. A. Frilot noted that "the prejudice against the colored population is very strong in this part of the country." He explained that "the white people have an Institution [a public school] in every district and they are all protected very well. But we, who have but a single one, cannot be protected at all." In his postscript Frilot wrote: "I wish you could send [this]letter to my friend Leon, so he could see how the prejudice is very bad at this moment." 43 Leon Dupart, in turn, wrote that the school's directors had raised the cost of tuition and that "the colored people do not want that." Dupart wrote: "I assure you, my dear friend, that now the price of the pupils is very dear. I know many boys whose mothers say that they are going to take them out of school ..." 44 The worsening injustices against free people of color in the South, brought home by the favoritism shown to white children at black children's expense, may have helped to convince the students that they needed a place belonging to the people of their own race.

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The students soon discovered, as well, that the significance of Haitian colonization for the free black population of Louisiana was markedly different from that of Mexican emigration two years earlier. Though the goal of creating economically viable settlements was shared by the two waves of emigration, the racial and symbolic undertones of free black migrations to Haiti were far stronger than they had been during the settlement of Eureka. After the success of the Haitian revolution, the island had become a powerful symbol-for slaves, free blacks, and slaveholders throughout the Atlantic-of the potential of enslaved blacks to overthrow slavery and white rule, and to establish a nation for people of African descent. 45 Indeed, despite white supremacist attempts to blame Haiti's tumultuous political situation after the revolution on the "inability" of African people to rule themselves, slaves and free blacks throughout the Americas made Haiti, in the words of one historian, "a symbol of African regeneration and of racial equality." 46 In addition, the Afro-Creole leaders of the Catholic Institution also had a particularly strong intellectual affinity for Haiti. Working in the French Romantic tradition, they along with black writers in Haiti, Guadaloupe, and Martinique upheld the ideals of the French and Haitian revolutions, ideals which condemned slavery and promoted democractic revolution, brotherhood, and equality. 47 Though we have no record of what the students at the Catholic Institution learned from their teachers about Haiti, we can gather from the students' letters that they understood Haiti as a place where "colored" people were in charge. The government of Haiti began recruiting emigrants from among the free black population of Louisiana in I 858, when an agent of Emperor Soulouque I offered them free transportation and Haitian citizenship. Following Soulouque's overthrow and the creation of a new republic, Haiti's president Fabre Geffrard again appealed to Louisiana's free people of color, as well as to free blacks from other parts of the United States, both North and South. 48 His campaign must have worked since in 1859 the Daily Picayune noted the departure of two hundred emigrants from New Orleans bound for Haiti. The group was comprised mostly of families headed by men who had been "brought up to a trade or have followed commercial pursuits" and who carried with them in a velvet case "a massive gold medal" inscribed in French to Geffrard "in testimony to their sympathy and admiration from his compatriots in Louisiana." 49 In 1861, Geffrard published an "Invitation" to free people of color in the United States printed as a preface to white abolitionist James Redpath's Guide to Hayti. Both Geffrard and Redpath made strong pleas for the emigration to Haiti in the name of the social and economic advancement of all African-descended people. Geffrard called upon "our black and yellow brethren, scattered through the Antilles and North and South America" to help cultivate "this marvelous soil that our fathers, blessed by God, conquered for us." The work of "regeneration" would allow Haiti to retake "her ancient sceptre as Queen of the Antilles" and would serve as a "formal denial" to those who believed descendents of Africa were incapable of attaining "a high degree of civilization." "Listen, then, all ye negroes and mulattoes who, in the vast Continent of America, suffer from the prejudices of caste," Geffrard wrote, "The Republic calls

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you." 50 Though we do not know for certain that the teachers and students at the Catholic Institution saw these documents, the language in the guide and Geffrard's popularity among free people of color in New Orleans suggests that they probably did. As we have already seen, the economic aspects of colonization were of interest to the students, and presumably to their teachers, as well. Redpath's Guide also provided information on the logistics of colonization, details which make clear the importance of New Orleans as a point of departure for free people of color leaving the South and, in tum, suggest the way in which the students might have experienced the Haitian migration. In a section entitled "How to Go and What to Take," for example, the pamphlet directly addressed free blacks departing from Louisiana, explaining that "vessels will sail as frequently as a sufficient number of passengers are procured from Boston and New Orleans" and that an "Agent of the Govt[.] will be stationed at New Orleans to protect the interests of emigrants."51 It appears, then, that New Orleans was a gathering place for free people of color from other parts of the South who wished to settle in Haiti. There had been a Haitian emigration agent in the city, in fact, since 1858 when Soulouque assigned Emile Desdunes (a native of New Orleans educated in Haiti, and an associate of Nelson Fouche who organized the colony in Mexico) to facilitate emigration from Louisiana to Haiti. 52 Watching the gathering of people and the sailing of ships from New Orleans to Haiti was a crucial part of the boys' education. Like writing their school compositions, witnessing the departure of free black people for Haiti helped them develop their own definitions of race, nation, and citizenship. As Benedict Anderson has noted (borrowing from the work of anthropologists) the coming together of people in order to reach a common destination, as with pilgrimages, inspires a "consciousness of connectedness." Traveling together raises the question: "Why are we ... here ... together?" 53 This display of common purpose by free people of color created an opportunity for the boys to consider the significance of race in the South-indeed, the relationship between citizenship and whiteness-and the ability of people of color to build a nation of their own. At the same time, Haiti itself became a "real" place for the students as they witnessed the flow of free black people from the South to an island that promised them freedom, brotherhood, and equality. 54 Newspaper accounts were another source of information about Haiti available to the students. Benedict Anderson, in his investigations into nationalism, has argued that local or regional newspapers are one means through which people imagine themselves part of a nation state. 55 But newspapers, as purveyors of news and "public opinion," say as much about who is excluded from a nation as they do about who is included. It is worth wondering, then, what the students might have learned about nation and nationalism through white Southerners' response to free black colonization. The children's knowledge of William Walker's campaign in Nicaragua, as we have already seen, suggests that they were reading the Daily Picayune. But even if the students at the Catholic Institution did not read every word printed about emigration to Haiti, the paper's editorials are useful to us here because they can help us better

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reassemble the students' experience, piecing together the things that contributed to their interpretation of events. Haitian emigration drew far more attention from the New Orleans press than had Mexican emigration. Again, this can be attributed both to the increasingly heated conflict between North and South and to the significance of Haiti for both white and free black readers in the mid-nineteenth century. When emigrants first set sail in 1859, the Daily Picayune acknowledged that the migration of free blacks from New Orleans would be a loss for the city. "Some of our best mechanics and artisans are to be found among the free colored men," the Picayune noted. "They form the great majority of our regular settled masons, bricklayers, builders, carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, &c. whose sudden emigration from this community would certainly be attended with some degree of annoyance." 56 After 1859, however, the press response to emigration was largely a racial one: free blacks were an unwelcome and potentially disruptive element in an otherwise "contented" South. "Contact with fanatics and Abolitionists," wrote the Picayune in 1860 "has not been beneficial to blacks; it has improved neither their morals nor their social condition ... As for us in New Orleans, we say let them go and God speed them; we can get along quietly enough with our contented and faithful slaves." 57 According to the Daily Delta, free black emigration would mean "less wrangling and disagreement between our slaves and free colored persons." The paper also assured its readers that Louisiana's slaves enjoyed "more comfortable accommodations" (thanks to the "generous" natures of Southern slaveholders) than free blacks could hope to find in Haiti. 58 The papers' support of free black emigration also meant that they readily supplied potential colonists with information about Haiti and prospects there. In August of 1859, the Picayune reported that some "well informed persons who have recently gone to Hayti" had returned to New Orleans briefly in order to buy farming implements and machinery to take with them for the cultivation of plots. The paper also noted that due to the scarcity of labor in that country, "those who emigrate in families or associations have ... the best chances of success." The Picayune's source suggested that "the class of emigrants to whom most inducements are held out are those who will follow agricultural pursuits" but that "carpenters, builders, tailors, and shoemakers" could "readily find employment in the cities and towns." 59 The students' letters to Haiti were brief, with little detail about activities there. This may have been, in part, because they were real rather than imaginary. And unlike the letters to Mexico, in which the writers had been very explicit about the logistics of colonization and the prospects for success there, the students used vague terms in their few queries about life in Haiti-"you have promised to give me some information on this country," one wrote, while another simply asked for "a full account." 60 In fact, most of the handful of letters they wrote seeking information about Haiti were addressed to "A. Gregoire" and it seems that Andre had been taken out of school in New Orleans and was then living in Port-au-Prince. 61 Though we cannot be certain that Andre received these letters in Port-au-Prince, the teacher seems to have encour-

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aged his pupils to write their classmate asking for a report of life in Haiti. As John Blandin explained in his letter: "as we have heard from our English master, Mr. Constant, that you are employed at the English consul's office, I wish to know if you are glad to live there." "As to ourselves," Blandin revealed, "our situation is growing worse every day." About Haiti, he had heard conflicting stories: "I have often heard it said from people who came from there, that it is a good [country], and others say it is not. We would be very glad to hear something from you on that subject. Do tell us the right truth and let it be very soon." 62 The students' only pointed question about Haiti, in fact, concerned military duties. 63 It is also interesting to note that only in their queries about soldiering did they begin to use the term "Creole," a word which continues to appear in their letters through the early years of the Civil War. 64 Arthur Denis asked Gregoire: "are the creole youngmen who go there obliged to do military service? For I have been told that they make soldiers with them and that the city of Port-au-Prince is not good at all." (Despite his misgivings, however, Arthur also wrote: "I hope that the emigration will soon begin again.") 65 Isidore Toussaint wrote: "Dear Gregoire, will you [tell] me if the Creoles from here are obliged to become soldiers in arriving in Hayti." 66 And John Blandin, who took a more enthusiastic view of the idea of military service, asked: "Are the Creoles of New Orleans required to do military service and are they glad in that beautiful country?" 67 Though it is difficult to say for certain, use of the word "creole" might have denoted two things: one, that the boys, as Creoles, considered themselves part of a select group, one with historical and intellectual ties to the people of Haiti and one that should receive special treatment from the Haitian government; And two, that they were trying to reconcile their sense of identity as Creoles (a people native to Louisiana and a group that did not consider themselves American) with the possibility of a new "Haitian" nationality. In either case, they were imagining Haiti in terms of citizenship rather than economic opportunity, and writing about that citizenship in terms of military service. Because Haiti represented for the students a nation for people of color rather than a business venture (as with Mexico), the students' optimism toward Haiti never disappeared, not even when they learned of the attempted assassination of President Geffrard, resulting in the accidental death of his daughter, which sparked further political turmoil. 68 Expressing his opinion after that event that "there are too many murderers, thieves, etc" in Haiti, Arthur Denis predicted that "war will soon sprang up." "After this," he wrote, "you will see that it will be a good and delicious country. All the people who went there and return[ed] will be obliged to go back." 69 Indeed, Haiti remained a possibility for the students even after the start of the Civil War in the United States. Not long after the South's secession from the Union, several of the students noted the departure of their friend Joseph Lavigne on a schooner bound for Haiti. 70 Lavigne's friend J. Bordenave, who went to the docks to see him off, regretted that he could not join Lavigne in Haiti. Reflecting on his friend's departure he wrote: "I believe he will be better than us for he will be in the country of our color." 71

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The fall after Lavigne left for Haiti, T. Richard wrote to him that he, too, had gone to a new "country," one called "Texas." In what appears to have been an attempt to match Lavigne's good fortune, Richard explained that Texas "is a good city for colored people.'m Nonetheless, by 1861, Richard and Bordenave both understood the appeal of Haiti in racial rather than economic terms, that is, as a good place "for colored people." The students' search for "a good and delicious country" continued, however. With the Civil War, the children at the Catholic Institution once again had to rethink the meaning of nation, citizenship, and freedom, but they brought to the conflict between North and South a complicated notion of what a "delicious" country might be. Though the political language of the Civil War centered on the destruction of slavery and preservation of the Union, the students would find their own meaning in the conflict. Their response to the Civil War in the United States would come not only from their experiences as free people of color in the South, but also from their sense of both the dangers and the possibilities of living in a new nation.

NOTES The author would like to thank Walter Johnson, Meg Mitchell, Cindy Hahamovitch, and the participants at the 1999 meetings of the History of Education Society and the American Historical Association for commenting on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Dr. Charles Nolan, archivist at the archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans for bringing the students' letters to my attention. And finally thanks to Jonathan Zimmerman for his persistence. This essay won the History of Education Society's Barnard Prize for the best essay by a graduate student. 1.

2.

3.

Copyright by History of Education Society. Reprinted by permission. The article first appeared as Mary Niall Mitchell, "'A Good and Delicious Country': Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana," History of Education Quarterly, 40 (Summer 2000): 123-44. L. Lamaniere to J.H. Sauvigne Esq. "Tampico Mco," 14 November 1862. Catholic Institution English Composition Copybook II (hereafter Copybook II), Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans [hereafter AANO], 255. The date of Lucien's admittance to the school is not clear. A Louis Lamaniere, possibly Lucien's brother, entered the Catholic Institution in 1852 at age nine. But this L. Lamaniere would have been nineteen in 1862, and likely too old to be enrolled in school. Journal des Seances de Ia Societe Catholique pour !'instruction des orphelins dans /'indigence commence le 26 de Avril, 1851, 2 Fevrier 1852, p. 58. According to the 1870 Census, a twenty-two-year-old "mulatto male" named Lucien Lamaniere was living in the Seventh Ward and working as a general clerk. This would make Lucien fourteen years old in 1862, closer in age to the other students than his brother would have been in that year. United States Census, 1870, manuscript schedules, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, Seventh Ward, 252, Reel 522. On the Afro-Creoles of Louisiana and their intellectual and political activism see Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997). On the

"A Good and Delicious Country"

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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creation of Afro-Creole culture in the colonial period see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). David C. Rankin, "The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans During Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History 40 (August 1974): 417-440; Cosse Bell Revolution, chapter 7. Donald E. Devore and Joseph P. Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841-1991 (Lafayette, LA: Centerfor Louisiana Studies, 1991 ), 42. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "People of Color in Louisiana, Part II," Journal of Negro History 2 (January 1917), 65. The Catholic Institution was opened in 1852 and had been founded at the bequest of Marie Justin Couvent, a wealthy woman of color. Though ostensibly under the guidance of the Catholic Church, following the terms of Couvent's will, the school admitted children of any denomination and remained a largely secular school. On the Catholic Institution see "History of the Catholic Indigent Orphan Institute," I 9 I 6?, AANO; Marcus B. Christian, "Dream of an African Ex-Slave," The Louisiana Weekly, 12 February 1938; Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History, trans. Sister Dorothea Olga McCants, Daughter of the Cross, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, I 973) [Originally published as Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, (191 I)] 14-22; 101-108; Charles Barthelemy Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937), 43-44; John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 108; Cosse Bell, Revolution, I 23- I 26. In the 1850s, the state granted annual sums to the institution, but for the most part the school was funded through private charitable contributions from wealthy Creoles of color. Cosse Bell, Revolution, 125, 127. In 1867, a legislative report on charitable institutions stated that there were 280 children attending the Catholic Institution, all of them "descendents of the original 'free' colored population" of New Orleans. "Report of the Committee on Charitable Institutions to the Legislature of the State of Louisiana," Documents of the Second Session of the Second Legislature of Louisiana. (New Orleans: J.O. Nixon State Printer, 1867), 6. See Robert C. Reinders, "The Free Negro in the New Orleans Economy, 1850-1860," Louisiana History 6 (Summer 1965): 273-285, and Loren Schweninger, "Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880," American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 40. Prospectus de !'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents Encoignure Grands Hommes et Union Troisieme Municipalite, Nouvelle-Orleans (New Orleans: Maitre Desarzant, 1847), Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Louisiana Collection, Tulane University. The first large-scale, but unsuccessful, migration to Haiti occurred during the administration of President Boyer of Haiti in the 1820s. See Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), viii-ix. Miller suggests a link between the lull in colonization and the growth of a strong biracial abolitionist movement in the Northern states. On Boyer's attempts to attract colonists (especially skilled artisans) see Ludwell LeeMontague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-I938 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 70. "Local intelligence, Emigration to Hayti," New Orleans Daily Delta, 21 July 1859; Marcus Christian WPA Newspaper Transcriptions, Marcus Christian Collection, Special Collections Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans [Hereafter UNO.]

152 II.

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H.E. Sterkx, The Free Negro in Antebellum Louisiana (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), chap. 4; Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 20-21; Robert C. Reinders, "The Decline of the New Orleans Free Negro in the Decade Before the Civil War," Journal of Mississippi History 24 (April 1962), 90. On the cultural and political activities of free black people in colonial Louisiana see Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) esp. her introduction. 12. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 (U.S.) 393 (1857). See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3'd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 267-268. After the Scott verdict, according to the New Orleans Daily Picayune, public opinion favored the revocation of "any political rights" still enjoyed by free persons of color in certain states. "For our part," the editors noted, "we should not at all lament to see such a result brought about" but there appeared to be "no such compulsory effect in the decision of the case." Daily Picayune, 21 March 1857. 13. By the 1840s, antislavery leaders estimated that between seven thousand and ten thousand free blacks migrated to Haiti from the United States. See Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 170; Donald Everett, "Free People of Color in New Orleans, 1830-1865," (M.A. Thesis Tulane University, 1952), 130. The papers in New Orleans reported several voyages offree blacks to Haiti in 1859 and 1860. See the New Orleans Daily Picayune 22 June 1859; I 5 January 1860; II November 1860; New Orleans Daily Delta 21 July 1859; New Orleans Daily Crescent, 21 June 1859; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, 4 May 1859. 14. I determined as many of the boys' ages as possible, using census rolls and records of their admission to the Catholic Institution in the school's Seance Books (which usually contained their ages at the time of entrance, though every student's admission was not recorded). There are few references in the letters themselves to the writer's age or time remaining in school. In the mid-nineteenth century, these students were probably considered "older boys." Yet from reading the students' letters, age (their own and that of other boys) seems to have been much less important to them than the fact that the classmate in question had left school to learn a trade, something which could happen at thirteen or at eighteen. That they were nearing the end of their education and preparing to enter an occupation made it especially important, from their teachers' perspective, to impart to their students a social, political, and racial consciousness that would benefit them outside of the schoolroom. On the ages of apprentices see Hugh Cunningham, Children & Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995), 97-99. As Philippe Aries argued in this classic study of childhood Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Robert Baldick, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1962), 29-30, even after a "vocabulary" for infancy developed (in the nineteenth century) "an ambiguity remained between childhood and adolescence on the one hand and the category of youth on the other. People had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape." Aries believed that "youth" (which came to be equated with adolescence in the twentieth century) did not emerge as a category until the end of World War I, during which "the troops at the front were solidly opposed to the older generations in the rear."

"A Good and Delicious Country" 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

153

This raises questions, which go beyond the scope of this paper, about the role that gender played in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has termed "imagined communities"-that is, whose work was acknowledged as the means for the creation of communities and whose work was not. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). On antebellum colonization see Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality and Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.) Newspaper reports noted that families comprised a large portion of the emigrants traveling to Haiti. See New Orleans Daily Picayune, 22 June 1859. Also, the students made frequent reference in their letters about Mexico to setting up a house for their families. Desdunes, Our People and Our History, 65; Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana, 48; Cosse Bell Revolution, 85-87. In 1855, a wealthy Afro-Creole named Lucien Mansion helped to fund the migration of free people of color from the Attakapas region after they had been threatened by "vigilance committees." According to Rousseve, Mansion contributed funds for migrations to both Mexico and Haiti. Mexico and the United States have markedly different histories of race and racial ideology, particularly with regard to mestizaje, or racial mixture. New Spain was the New World colony in which Africans, Indians, and Europeans were most fully integrated, both biologically and culturally. See Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodriguez 0., The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [ 1980)), introduction. Free black people from New Orleans may have chosen to migrate to Veracruz because it was a part of Mexico with a relatively large population of African descent since the colonial period (to 1820). See Patrick J. Carroll, "Los mexicanos negros, el mestizaje, y Los fundamentos olvidados de Ia 'Raza C6smica': una perspectiva regional," Historia Mexicana 44 (enero-marzo 1995): 403-438. See also idem, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). With the founding of Eureka in 1857, Mexico's president, Ignacio Comonfort, welcomed Louisiana's free people of color, insisting that they would have "the same rights and equality enjoyed by the other inhabitants [of Mexico] without at any time having to feel ashamed of their origin." Memoria de Ia Secretaria de Estado y Del Despacho de Fomento, Colonizacion, Industria y Comercio de Ia Republica Mexicana escrita por el ministro del Ramo C. Manuel Siliceo, para dar cuenta conella al soberano congreso constitutional (Mexico: Imprenta de Vicente Garcia Torres, 1857), 57. See Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Writing Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992), 194. According to Steedman, " 'the child' is a historical construct," the product of adult imagination and projection, whereas "children" are individuals experiencing childhood. My thinking about children's writing, and what writing allows children to do, is influenced by Carolyn Steedman's book The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing (London: Virago, 1982). William Green to Samuel Green, Esq., Monterey, Mexico, 28 November 1856. Catholic Institution English Copybook (Hereafter Copybook 1), AANO, 10. On Walker, his failed adventures, and his popularity among Southern slaveholders in favor of slavery's expansion, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), chap. 4; Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill:

154

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

Chartered Schools University of North Carolina Press, 1980) part 3; and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), II 0-116. William Green to Samuel Green. Esq., Monterey, Mexico, 28 November 1856. Copybook I, AANO, 10. The Picayune's publisher had a network of pony riders to carry the news the Veracruz. From there, steamers could reach New Orleans in just two weeks time. George Black,

The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 5. See for example J.A. Claiborne to John Wallace, Esq., Boston, MA, 5 December 1856 and J.A. Claiborne toP. Dufour Esq., Marseilles, France. 18 December 1856, Copybook I,AANO. A. Gregoire to Joseph Peunel, Esq., Hartford New Haven, 12 December 1856, Copybook I, AANO. Note: The destination on this letter is cited exactly as devised by the student. See also William H. Green to Armand Nicolas, Esq., Galveston, Texas, 15 December 1856 and J.A. Claiborne to John Franklin, Esq., Vicksburg, MS, 15 December 1856, Copybook I, AANO. Wm H. Green to Armand Nicolas, Esq., Grand Lake, LA, 2 February 1857, Copybook I, AANO. A. Nicolas to Wm. Green, Esq., Boston, MA, I 0 December 1856, Copybook I, AANO. A.A. Gregoire to Leon Dupart, Esq., Cincinatti. OH, 5 July 1857, Copybook I, AANO. W.H. Green to John Green, Esq., City of Veracruz, Mexico, 7 May 1857, Copybook I, AANO. Armand Nicolas to M. Lombard, Esq., Puebla, Mexico, 8 May 1857, Copybook I, AANO. Armand Nicolas to L. Posthel, Esq., Cincinatti, OH, 26 June 1857, Copybook I, AANO. On the debate over free labor (and slavery) in the antebellum United States see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War [1970] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. his new introduction. Armand Nicolas to L. Homoca, Esq., Huasacoalca, Mexico, 19 June 1857, Copybook I, AANO. William H.P. Green to Leon Dupart, Esq., Mobile, AL, 20 June 1857, Copybook I, AANO. A. Andre Gregoire to Ernest Lompre, Esq., Paris, France, 26 June 1857, Copybook I, AANO. In his address "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race," delivered in 1854, Martin Delany proclaimed that emigration was the only remedy for "the great political disease" that afflicted black people in America. It was time for all descendents of Africans to confront "the politician, the civil engineer, and skilful economist, who direct and control the machinery which moves forward, with mighty impulse, the nations and powers of the earth" and if possible "to meet them on vantage ground, or, at least, with adequate means for the conflict." Reprinted in Stuckey. The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, 199, 204. On similar ideas expressed by James Theodore Holly concerning Liberia see Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 235. See J. Peunel to A. Gregoire, Esq., Tampico, Mexico, 9 September 1857; L. Armstrong to L. Dupart, Esq., Tampico, Mexico, II September 1857; W.H.P. Green to Armand Nicolas, Esq., Tampico, Mexico, 14 September 1857 and M.L. Dupart to E. Brunetter, Esq., Tlactotalpan, State of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 18 September 1857; Copybook I, AANO.

"A Good and Delicious Country" 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

155

New Orleans Daily Delta, 16 January 1860 cited in Everett, "Free People of Color in New Orleans," 129. Memoria del Ministerio de Fomento, Colonizacion, Industria y Comercio Presenta al Congreso de Ia Union (Mexico: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1863), 102, 99. These memorias were printed annually, but because of the civil war, the government's records are silent for the years between 1857 and 1863, when Eureka and other colonies were in operation in Mexico. The tension between Spain and Mexico to which the writer refers appears to have been a diplomatic squabble blown to great proportions. This reference serves as further evidence that the students were reading the Daily Picayune since the paper followed the story very closely. See, for instance, the Daily Picayune 26 July, 30 July, and 3 August, 1857. Emphasis added. M.L. Dupart to R. Barthelemy, Esq., Tampico Mexico, II September 1857, Copybook I, AANO. Antoine Gregoire to Florville Picou, Esq., Tampico, Mexico, 18 September 1857, Copybook I, AANO. A.F. Frilot to L. Armstrong, Esq., Attakapas, LA, 27 May 1858, Copybook I, AANO. L. Dupart to Wm Green, Esq., Baton Rouge, LA, 28 May 1858, Copybook I, AANO. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, 3; Haiti also had a particular history for the French-speaking population of New Orleans. The city received the majority of St. Domingue's emigres after the Haitian Revolution, including slaveholders (white and mulatto) and the slaves they brought away with them. The emigres at first sought refuge in Cuba, but were forced to resettle New Orleans when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, threatening the safety of French subjects in the Spanish colony. In 1809 alone, some 5,800 of Haiti's emigres arrived from Cuba, and 4,000 of these were free blacks (affranchis). As a result of the influx of Haitian refugees, the number of free people of color in the city doubled, and many of these new arrivals became prominent members of New Orleans' free black community. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "People of Color in Louisiana, Part II," Journal of Negro History 2 (January 1917), 52; Hunt Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, 4, 48; Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, I 63- I 70. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour; and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5. Evidence of Haiti's importance in the creation of black identity and resistance in other parts of the Americas surfaced throughout the nineteenth century. In Rio de Janiero, for example, slaves wore necklaces with the image of Dessalines etched on them just one year after the Haitian leader declared independence for St. Domingue. Joao Jose Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of I835 in Bahia, Arthur Brake!, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 48. Cosse Bell, Revolution, 98-99. Cosse Bell points out that although Creoles of color in Louisiana did not have the freedom of expression of their French counterparts until the I 860s, the French literary movement "served as a vehicle for the expression of some of their feelings and attitudes" in the decades before the Civil War. Sterkx, The Free Negro, 302; Desdunes, Our People and Our History, 112-113; Cosse Bell, Revolution, 86. The original inscription read: "a Fabre Geffrard, temoinage de sympathie at d'admiration des compatriots de Ia Louisiane." On the other side were the words "Union et Fraternire." The group's departure was reported in the Daily Picayune (evening edition) 22 June 1859.

156 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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James Redpath, ed., Guide to Hayti (Boston: Haytien Bureau of Emigration, 1861) Ibid., 168. Cosse Bell, Revolution, 86. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 56. Ibid., 53-54. Ibid., 61-65. "Hayti and Immigration Thither," New Orleans Daily Picayune (afternoon edition), 5 July 1859. 57. New Orleans Daily Picayune, 11 November 1860. 58. "Local Intelligence, Emigration to Hayti," New Orleans Daily Delta, 21 July 1859. 59. New Orleans Daily Picayune, 14 August 1859. The Daily Delta also reported that emigrants had returned from Port-au-Prince because "it didn't suit their fastidious tastes. We presume they are 'highfalutin' folks." Though some did return to New Orleans in the first years of emigration, many of them returned, as the Picayune noted, just long enough to gather supplies and equipment. See Donald Everett, "Free People of Color in New Orleans," 128. 60. L.C. Arthidore to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859 and Celicour Bordenave to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO. 61. Armand Cloud to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 September 1859, Copybook I, AANO. 62. John Blandin to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO. 63. Reprinted in Redpath's Guide to Haiti was a list of queries directed to Geffrard, posed on behalf of "certain blacks and persons of color in the United States and Canada who are desirous of emigrating to Hayti." This letter to Geffrard and his response were dated August of 1859, which suggests that the children may have seen this document before they wrote their letters to Gregoire. (The Guide itself was dated 1861.) The first question read: "Would Emigrants by subject to military duty? If so, how long and what kind of duty?" In the "Reply of the Government," Geffrard states that "the Government, as an evidence of its good intentions in favor of emigration, has resolved to exempt the emigrants from military service. But this exemption shall not extend to their children when they have attained the proscribed age of drawing lots." [Emphasis added.] It is not clear whether children traveling with their parents to Haiti would be considered "emigrants" and therefore exempt from this rule. The boys seem to have wanted very much to know if the rule might pertain to them. Redpath, Guide to Hayti, 93-95. 64. The term "Creole" has a long and intricate history in Louisiana beginning in the early colonial period when the term was used to describe slaves born in the French colony rather than in Africa. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, black, white, and mixed-race native Louisianas called themselves "Creoles" to distinguish themselves from Anglo-Americans. In the 1820s, members of the growing population of free people of Afro-European descent began to claim a racial and ethnic identity distinct from both whites and enslaved blacks by referring to themselves as "Creoles of Color." See Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 157. 65. Arthur Denis to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO. 66. I. Toussaint to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO.

"A Good and Delicious Country" 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

157

John Blandin to A. Gregoire, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 7 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO. As further evidence of the relationship between the school's directors and Haiti, a letter signed "les amis de Geffrard" arrived at the institution with eighteen dollars enclosed, money raised for the Catholic Institution at the church of St. Anne in memory of young Cora Geffrard. Journal des Seances de Ia direction de !'institution Catholique pour !'instruction des Orphelins dans !'indigence commence le 23 de avri/1859, (23 December 1859), 26. Arthur Denis to J. Leonidas, Esq., Alexandrie, LA, 21 October 1859, Copybook I, AANO. As other students had noted, many colonists decided against moving to Haiti. The colonization of Haiti by free people of color from the United States, according to one historian, ultimately failed because the government did not supply the emigrants with sufficient lands and supplies. See Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 245-247. Lavigne must have gone to Haiti with his family, since the school directors hired a "Mr. S. Chezan" to replace "Mr. J. Lavigne" (the younger Lavigne's father or brother) "pour cause de depart" in June of 1861. Seancebook II, I Juin 1861, 53. The students also noted that Lavigne left on the Laura, a ship that regularly sailed to Haiti in that period. See New Orleans Daily Picayune 30 January 1861 also cited in Everett, "Free People of Color," 129. J. Bordenave to A. Frilot, Esq., Metz, France, 22 May 1861, Copybook II, AANO. T. Richard to J. Lavigne, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 2 October 1861, Copybook II, AANO.

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Teachers and Institutions: Challenges and Opportunities

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Leaving Home to Teach: The Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1841

KIM TOLLEY AND MARGARET A. NASH

"After a most affecting parting from my beloved brothers, sisters, and friends," wrote Susan Nye Hutchison in her diary on 22 April 1815, "and before the sun shone upon my dear native hills, [I] bade them farewell, perhaps forever!" 1 On this April morning, the twenty-five year old Hutchison left her parents' farm in the state of New York and traveled for three weeks by sloop, steamer, and stagecoach to her final destination in Raleigh, North Carolina. Like scores of other young Yankee women, she headed south to teach. Because the teaching career of Susan Nye Hutchison illustrates many of the experiences common to the nineteenth-century academy teacher, we have chosen to use her diary as a foil for discussion of several historiographical issues. From 1815 to 1841, Hutchison served as a teacher, preceptress, and principal in a number of academies in the South. On her own initiative, she established a preparatory school in Georgia and two academies in North Carolina. During this time she kept a diary, punctuated by several years for which there are no entries. Thirty-five years ago, historians generally portrayed the teachers in academies as transient and male. Until recently, women's contributions as teachers received little attention in the history and sociology of education. However, working within the broad topic of gender and teaching, scholars from a variety of fields have focused their research in a number of categories during the past several decades, including the ideology of teaching, employment patterns, career and work rewards, teacher preparation, professionalization, the quality of teachers' work lives, teachers and their communities, and biographies of women teachers. As a result of this effort, primarily based on the experiences of female teachers, we now have a somewhat fuller understanding of the lives of those who taught in academies, both men and women. In this chapter, we provide an overview and analysis of recent scholarship on those who taught in academies. Within the particular context of Hutchison's story, we address such general questions as: What ideologies did teachers reference in ascribing meaning to their work? To what extent did female teachers experience freedom or constraint because of contemporary ideological views about women's work? What 161

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was the role of the teacher in his or her community? How pervasive was the influence of local communities over the public work and private lives of teachers? How did teachers conform to community values, and how did they resist them?

Teachers Susan Nye Hutchison was one of a growing number of women who began teaching in higher schools during the nineteenth century. Most of the teachers in colonial academies were men. Apart from the sisters who taught in Catholic institutions established by the various female teaching orders, women taught primarily in dame schools or instructed the youngest children in church and Sunday schools. Scholars who have investigated the colonial social status of teachers have noted a close linkage of teaching with the ministry. Many of the teachers in church schools were members of the clergy. In both colonial and antebellum academies, members of the clergy sat on academy boards of trustees, served as presidents or principals, and also taught Additionally, academy teaching served as a useful short-term occupation for a young man planning to enter the ministry. During the antebellum period, increasing numbers of women began to teach, first in dame and grammar schools, and eventually in academies. 2 During the last several decades, historians have documented the process that has been referred to as "the feminization of teaching." In Massachusetts, women comprised just over 56 percent of the teaching population in 1834 and constituted almost 78 percent of teachers by 1860. Teaching was such a popular profession in those years, that one-fifth of Massachusetts women had taught school at some point in their lives. 3 What was true in Massachusetts may have been true in New England generally. David B. Tyack and Myra H. Strober point out that the flourishing of industrial capitalism in the Northeast contributed to the feminization of teaching there. 4 Why did teaching become feminized') An increased demand for schooling, a low supply of men and a high supply of women willing to teach, the belief that women were particularly suited for working with children, and an evangelical commitment to missionary work, all contributed to the shift from a teaching force that was mostly male in the colonial era to one that was predominantly female by the end of the nineteenth century. 5 Some historians have suggested that the work of teaching fit cultural assumptions about womanhood. In the 1960s and 1970s, women's historians first articulated the paradigm of "separate spheres," a nineteenth-century discourse that assigned public roles to men and the domestic sphere to women. 6 Educational historians applied this paradigm to their explanations of the feminization of teaching. They pointed out that Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and other common school reform leaders used the language of "separate spheres" to argue that women were especially qualified to teach. Indeed, such reformers argued that women were divinely endowed with qualities necessary for teaching, such as nurturance, patience, and other "maternal" attributes.7 Teaching merely extended women's domestic sphere to include caring for children in a classroom as well as in the home.

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In fields outside of education, other historians have challenged and refined the paradigm of "separate spheres" in the last decade. Some scholars have argued that although this ideology was present in prescriptive literature, it did not reflect the reality of women's experiences, and have further concluded that the spheres never were all that separate. 8 Looking for arenas of female activism, these researchers have highlighted, for instance, the grassroots fundraising efforts of Mary Lyon, or the "diffusion of feminist values" that flowed from Troy Female Seminary. They discussed the ways that, regardless of why women first entered the profession, teaching "served as a radicalizing activity" for them. 9 Many women took up the occupation of teaching for economic reasons. Those needing to support themselves or their families had few options other than teaching open to them. 10 Susan Nye Hutchison began teaching as a young self-supporting single woman. After she married, she stopped teaching for a few years, but as with so many women, Hutchison's marriage did not relieve her of financial responsibilities. Hutchison's husband lost all his property when he invested everything in cotton during a period in which cotton prices fell. As a result, the family was destitute, and the only solution they saw was for her to go back to teaching. Hutchison wrote in her diary on I August 1827, "My husband spoke with great feeling about his continued losses and expressed his wish that I should return to town to open a school." 11 Some women viewed teaching as a means of satisfying their desires for mental stimulation and intellectual fulfillment. 12 Her diary provides evidence that Hutchison continued to enjoy learning new subjects long after she had attained a reputation as an exceptional teacher. At the age of forty-eight, after establishing a school in Salisbury, North Carolina, she embarked on the study of algebra. While her primary objective may have been to upgrade her school's curriculum in order to be competitive with other institutions that were beginning to offer higher mathematics to females, 13 she clearly found algebra to be a highly satisfying and stimulating subject. In her diary she recorded the progress she was making in her own studies. "I was much occupied in Algebra," she wrote on 15 January, "I find it an absorbing study and my progress in it gives me much gratification." On 23 January she noted, "I spent the evening in study-principally algebra." The next day she wrote, "I continue to study"; two days later she stated, "I am still much engaged in algebra," and on 29 January she chortled, "I am delighted with algebra." Several days afterward, she "got into equations of the 8'h degree and felt much rejoiced," and a month later she continued to be "very much occupied with algebra.'' 14 In 1839 she embarked on a study of mineralogy, read the Bible books of Exodus and Leviticus, along with the Vicar of Wakefield, in French, began a review of algebra, and took special pleasure in the study of astronomy. 15 Luckily for women like Hutchison, there were many opportunities for teaching. New schools abounded, with higher numbers of youths attending. Along with this growth came a demand for more teachers. Simultaneously, fewer men appeared willing to fill the ranks of the teaching profession than previously. They had many more options for employment, and far more lucrative ones, that directed their attention away from teaching. As Catharine Beecher put it, "it is chimerical to expect, amidst

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the claims, and the honors and the profits of other professions, that a sufficient number of the male sex can be found, to devote themselves to self-denying, toilsome duties, for the scanty pittance allowed to our teachers." 16 Teaching was not as remunerative as other occupations open to men. In addition, schools routinely paid women far less for their work than they paid male teachers. In Massachusetts in the antebellum era, school boards paid women 60 percent less than they paid men. 17 By hiring women, financially strapped school districts could save money on their costliest budget item: salaries. Their desire-or need-to hire the least-costly teachers further increased the demand for female teachers. Although the salary was low compared to what men might earn elsewhere, it was not dramatically lower than that of other occupations open to women, and teaching had the benefit of being perceived as a respectable occupation. Teaching thus provided an avenue toward economic autonomy for women. Several institutions and societies arranged for financial aid for students who intended to become teachers. Troy Female Seminary offered education "on credit" for such women, with the understanding that tuition would be paid later from their salaries. 18 Ipswich Female Academy put a similar system of loans in place informally in 1830, then formalized the system in 1835 with the formation of the Society for the Education of Females. 19 At its inception in 1839, the Rutgers Female Institute offered free tuition and board to six young women each year who planned to enter the teaching profession and who had been recommended by the trustees of the local public schooJ.2° In 1838 the Young Ladies' Association of the New Hampton Female Seminary for the Promotion of Literature and Missions changed its name by adding "and Female Education" to its title. This name change reflected the society's new goal of providing scholarships for "indigent pious young ladies," so that such women's "ardent desire for usefulness [would not be] repressed by the hard hand of penury." 21 These financial aid programs opened up higher schooling to women who otherwise could not afford it. At the same time, such programs served to help fill the teaching ranks with competent professionals, thereby promoting higher standards for teachers and potentially improving their status. In addition, financial aid programs provided opportunities for self-sufficiency for young women. For some women, neither economics nor intellectual fulfillment were the most compelling reasons to enter teaching. Strong evangelical beliefs propelled many women and men into the teaching force. The great religious revivals that began around the tum of the nineteenth century and reached their height in the early 1830s were activist and millenialist. Many doctrinal differences separated evangelicals of various denominations, but what united them were their beliefs in a literal interpretation of the Bible, the need for spiritual rebirth, and acceptance of Jesus as one's personal Savior. 22 Rejecting a Calvinist belief that salvation was foreordained by God, evangelicals argued that not only could people work for their own salvation, they also could influence the salvation of others. Indeed, evangelicals believed that true Christians had an obligation to perform good works as one important manifestation of their salvation, and some of those good works must be attempts to convert nonbelievers so

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that they too could be saved. 23 The work that evangelicals envisioned was far greater than ministers and missionaries could handle, and was not to be engaged in just by professional ministers, but by all Christians. They did not leave this lay ministry work only in the hands of men. If they had, the work surely would have suffered, given that women outnumbered men both in church attendance and in conversion. 24 As the arbiters of sanctity, women had special responsibilities for improving the moral condition of society, thus ushering in God's kingdom. 25 Evangelical Christians promoted advanced education for women based on their affirmation of a moral imperative to save an unenlightened world. Evangelicalism assumed women's moral superiority and their propensity for self-denying labor. Education, advocates argued, was a tool that would better prepare women for their work. According to the rubric of evangelicalism, educated women had several arenas in which to perform their work: within their families, in society at large, and as teachers. The contemporary literature asserted that women had a strong influence on their families-on husbands, children, parents, siblings, and other members of their kinship networks. 26 Writers frequently referred to mothers as the "first teachers" of the next generation. 27 Further, some reformers explicitly paralleled the spiritual work of ministers with that of teachers. Catharine Beecher is perhaps the best-known spokesperson for this view, which she first published in her 1835 An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers, but she was neither the first nor the only advocate of this viewpoint.28 Ipswich Seminary had already been sending graduates out to teach in the West for years when Zilpah Grant wrote a public fundraising letter in 1836 asserting that few clergymen "are doing so much to promote the cause of education and religion" as these female teachers. 29 Evangelicals referred to women who went west to teach as "faithful laborers" who had "a strong missionary spirit" and acted from a "conviction of duty." 30 Men as well as women stressed the impact of women teachers. A circular of the newly founded Oberlin College stated in 1834 that its primary object was the "thorough qualification of Christian teachers, for pulpit and schoo1." 31 Oberlin's statement is noteworthy for its implication of the equal importance of ministerial work and teaching. Evangelical Christians, both male and female, held female teachers in high esteem and believed them to be doing essential work in claiming the West for Protestant Christianity. Hutchison's diary provides an example of one woman's determination on this score. From the beginning of her diary, she expressed concern for her students' salvation. The first record of this is from within a month of her arrival at Raleigh. A student had become ill, and Hutchison, "deeply moved for her soul," prayed with the student. 32 In the fall of 1837 she noted several prayer meetings in her school, and tallied up the number of students who were "professors"-that is, those who professed their Christianity. 33 While her primary incitement to teaching was that of providing financially for her family, she also saw teaching as a place where she could influence souls and encourage young people to think of "eternity." Hutchison's concern for the salvation of others was not limited just to her students. After arriving in Raleigh, she periodically paid visits to the poor to administer comfort and prayer. For example, she

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called on a man who, with his wife and children, had been turned out of his "hovel" and was "without any other shelter than a few boards." She wrote, "Oh wretched man! I talked to him upon religion. He seemed to hear me with attention and even willingness; wished me to read and stay with him." 34 The following month, she complied with the request of a poor women to visit a brothel and pray with the woman's daughter, "a poor abandoned girl." 35 Years later while living in Salisbury, she repeatedly visited a condemned prisoner in an attempt to pray with him and convert him to Christianity before death. 36 Like other evangelical women in the antebellum era, Susan Nye Hutchison attempted to lead a life of benevolence.

Migrations Academy teachers in the antebellum era were a peripatetic lot, and Susan Nye Hutchison was no exception. After traveling from New York to teach in Raleigh, South Carolina, in 1815, she married in 1825 and moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she eventually opened a preparatory school. In 1833, she returned to New York and taught in a district school for a brief period. She returned to North Carolina in 1834, first to teach in Raleigh, then in Salisbury, and finally in CharlotteY Hutchison's journey from New York to South Carolina was part of a larger migration in which approximately 360,000 Northerners moved South before the Civil War. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, relatively large numbers of Northerners moved south to teach in new and established higher schools. Clergymen moved south in search of greater opportunities and opened academies. Young women came south to work as governesses or to teach in the female departments of coeducational academies or in female seminaries. By the 1850s, growing numbers of academies in the North devoted themselves to providing some pedagogical training. For example, New York had incorporated forty academies by 1817, a number that increased over the next two decades. In 1827 the state designated funds for academies to train teachers in special departments, and in the mid-1830s, it mandated an academy with a pedagogical department in each senatorial district. 38 One result of the proliferation in institutions providing teacher training was a surplus of Northern teachers seeking positions in higher schools. 39 By the 1840s and 1850s, large boarding schools appeared in the South that needed to fill faculty positions. Both native-born clergymen as well as Northerners headed such institutions and frequently employed single women educated in Northern seminaries to teach many of the courses. 40 Antebellum teachers migrated for a variety of reasons. They traveled to obtain a teaching position in an area of greater demand, increase their salaries and standard of living, fulfill a sense of missionary zeal, or to enjoy the adventure of travel and life in a different region. 41 Sudden shifts in family fortune or status also impelled teachers to migrate. Such changes had a larger impact on nineteenth-century women than on men, because women had fewer employment opportunities outside the home. For females, teaching provided an alternative to a life as a dependent in the home of relatives.42 Teachers sometimes moved from place to place when the schools in which

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they taught went out of business. During the antebellum era, building schools was an entrepreneurial enterprise, and plans for new academies sometimes arose from the desire of local promoters to increase the property values in their towns. In some cases, these ventures never went far beyond the planning stage. On the frontier, there was no assurance that a town could support a stable school for a sustained period of time. Academies often closed when public funds ran out, leaving the teachers with the choice of continuing the institution as a subscription venture school or leaving to find another teaching position elsewhere. 43 Teachers also moved to improve their work environment and location. Nineteenth-century teachers in higher schools were relatively well educated and in demand; if an individual was displeased with his or her current placement, it was relatively simple to find another, potentially better one. For instance, when Eliza Dunston of Dover, New Hampshire, traveled south to teach in Liberty, Mississippi in the 1850s, she was at first very happy with the pleasant location of Amite Female Seminary and with the warm treatment accorded her by the principal, a Baptist minister. However, several months later she found herself bored and dissatisfied. She disliked the Mississippi weather. The school's recitation rooms were freezing in winter. Soon she wrote to the Rice V. Andrews teacher placement agency in New York City in search of another position. 44 Sources indicate that a smaller percentage of Northern teachers remained permanently in the South than did those who traveled West. The average length of job tenure of 134 students who came from Mount Holyoke to teach in the South was just over three years. 45 Of those teachers from Troy Seminary who eventually married, 57 percent married Southerners and located permanently in the South. In contrast, studies of pioneer teachers who traveled west indicate that the majority of such teachers settled permanently in the West, from Indiana to Oregon and California. 46 Unlike some other Northern teachers, Hutchison ultimately spent close to thirty years in the region, forming new friendships, marrying and raising a family, and teaching scores of pupils in a variety of settings. Hutchison's first journey, from New York to North Carolina, appears to have been motivated by the need to find a teaching position in order to support herself. It is likely that the offer of a position from the Female Department of Raleigh Academy was superior to anything she could find locally. Most of the teaching positions in higher schools were filled by principals, presidents, and members of the boards of trustees who wrote to their friends, contacted their ministers or former college professors, or asked for recommendations from well-known educators. It is not known whether Hutchison received an offer of employment as the result of a recommendation from a well-known educator, minister, or well-placed family friend. She may have responded directly to a newspaper advertisement. In November 1814, Raleigh Academy placed the following notice in local newspapers: A Female Teacher Wanted. The situation of a Female Teacher in the Academy at Raleigh is at present Vacant. A Lady well qualified to teach the Ornamental Branches of Female Education, such as Painting, Drawing,

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Embroidery and plain and fancy work, and who has besides a competent knowledge of Arithmetic, English Grammar, Geography, etc., and whose manners are calculated to inspire respect from the Young Ladies who may be placed under her care, may meet with a comfortable and permanent situation on making immediate application to Joseph Gales, President of the Board of Trustees, at Raleigh, N.C. 48 Although extant sources provide no details concerning her prior training before she came South in 1815, the offer of a position in Raleigh Academy indicates that her academic background and personal references were sufficiently strong to qualify her to teach in an established higher school. Founded in 1800, Raleigh Academy was a respected institution in its community. In hiring her, the Academy's trustees believed they had found an individual capable of taking charge of the Female Department, acting as a preceptress under the supervision of the principal, the Rev. William McPheeters. 49 Unlike some other antebellum teachers who may have been inspired by a sense of adventure, Hutchison expressed regrets about leaving her home and family. In describing her journey on a sloop from Amenia to New York, she wrote, "From the bosom of a tranquil home beneath the protection of the best of parents, I was thrown upon the watery element consigned to the care of strangers." 50 Several days later, after taking up residence in New York while waiting to board the vessel to Raleigh, she was still pining for home: "I believe I was never more unhappy than I have been since my residence in New York; all the elegance, the taste, the splendor I witness, are no more to me than the pebbles of the stream or the trees of the forest when I think of the home I have left or the friends I have forsaken." 51 On 15 May 1815, roughly three weeks after leaving Amenia, Hutchison assumed her duties in the Female Department of Raleigh Academy. Her role required her to provide academic instruction, oversee public school examinations, and assist her students to grow in evangelical faith. At the time of her arrival, the Female Department's published course of study included such subjects as reading, arithmetic, grammar, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, and rhetoric. 52 Hutchison taught reading, literature, arithmetic, and chemistry, among other subjects. Students learned drawing and painting from another female teacher in the department. There are very few extant sources to provide a glimpse into Hutchison's teaching, although she evidently asked her chemistry students to do more than simply read and recite the text. "The experiments made by the Students in Chemistry did honor to Miss Nye," reported an observer at the school examinations on 10 November 1815. 53 Her skills as a teacher received public acknowledgement on various occasions. "Nothing can possibly exceed the zeal of this accomplished instructress," gushed the Raleigh Star in 1815. 54 Six years later, a reporter for the Raleigh Register claimed that her "talents as a Teacher are probably unrivalled." 55 Within several weeks of coming to the academy, she presided over the public examination of her pupils. The Academy conducted examinations in June and

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November. Parents, community members, and reporters for the two local newspapers attended these events, at which students answered their teachers' questions before a "room crowded with spectators." The examinations began on 2 June and lasted for a period of several days. After assembling with ten girls at the Academy, Hutchison and her students marched in style to the State House. There, "The females upon whom the honours of the school were conferred were placed upon a stage elegantly fitted up. Judge Taylor, orator of the day, was with them. The trustees were furnished with seats directly in front of the stage." Unaccustomed to the public eye, Hutchison withdrew to a retired seat during the proceedings when she was not examining her own pupils but was unable to avoid the spotlight for long. The principal of the Academy informed her that the trustees requested that she sit with them. "After a moment's reflection, I came forward, and trembling with unaffected diffidence, took the seat destined for me next to the president." When the trustees took notice of the Academy's teachers, and complimented Hutchison personally in public, she was embarrassed. "I covered my face with my handkerchief and would gladly have shrunk to the smallest corner of the room." 56 Raleigh Academy was Protestant, nonsectarian, and evangelical. Teachers and students attended daily prayer meetings with Rev. William. McPheeters, principal of the Academy. In addition to his position as principal, he received a salary as pastor of the Raleigh Presbyterian Church. 5 7 Both Baptists and Methodists joined in conducting the meetings in the Methodist Meeting House, sometimes alternating roles during the service. "Mr. McP. then arose and gave us the best exhortation I have ever heard him deliver," Hutchison wrote in June. "Mr. Peck, a Baptist, followed with prayer, and Mr. Evans, a Methodist, concluded the meeting." During the period of her stay at the Academy, Hutchison scheduled times of Bible reading, prayer, and meditation with her students. In her diary, she often mused over the spiritual condition of those in her charge. "Oh, when I think of meeting them at the bar of God, how anxious ought I to be to exhort them to faith in Jesus and repentance toward God." 58 Evangelical parents concerned about their children's salvation placed them in institutions like Raleigh Academy, where teachers like Hutchison attended to both the secular and sacred aspects of schooling. After eight years at Raleigh Academy, she resigned her teaching position and married Adam Hutchison in 1825. Hutchison was a widower with three children. The circumstances of her marriage compelled her to move with him to Augusta, Georgia. Although drawing conclusions is always subject to the interpretation of the reader, the marriage appears to have been a very unhappy one. Her husband speculated on the cotton market and lost considerable sums of money. At first he did not openly confide in his wife, but her journal indicates that she suspected the family was facing financial difficulties. For example, in November 1826, she wrote, "When Mr. Hutchison returned he brought news of the fall of cotton and I had reason to fear that he had been a loser." 59 In February of the following year, she wrote, "At night received a letter from Mr. H I perceive from it that his spirits were desponding when he wrote-I see the cotton threatens him with loss," 60 and in March she received troubling news from

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friends: 'Towards evening Mr. And Mrs. S. called and while here informed me of the decline in cotton." 61 A month later, her husband told her about the low price of cotton and his intention of abandoning the business. 62 Several months afterward, she wrote, "Just two years since I first saw our dear children in Scotland. At that time how little did I foresee all that has since befallen us-losses upon losses." 63 Her husband also exhibited a violent temper. In December 1826, she wrote, "Today two years have elapsed since I first saw Mr. H. m, would to God that I could say it was also the last." 64 Although experiences such as Hutchison's rarely have appeared in the scholarly literature on teachers, they were probably not uncommon. As Margaret Nash notes elsewhere in this volume, some antebellum writers who promoted the value of a good education for women expressed the belief that marriage was not always such a good bargain for females. According to their view, a good education might provide, not only the means of earning an independent living through teaching, but a source of solace during dismal days. 65 Susan Hutchison returned to teaching because of the financial difficulties facing her family. She opened a preparatory school in Augusta on I October I 827. 66 Augusta Academy had offered her a teaching position a year earlier, which she had turned down. 67 It is likely she opened her own school in order to secure a potentially higher source of income for her family than could be obtained by teaching in an existing academy. When she chose the more arduous course of opening her own school, she assumed the role of both principal and teacher. A number of scholars have noted the salary differences for male and female teachers throughout the nineteenth century. In 1826, the trustees of Raleigh Academy paid Rev. McPheeters $800 as principal and provided him a house and garden rent free. In the same year, Miss Maria Allen received $500 a year as principal of the Female Academy at Lincolnton, in the same state. 68 Similar salary discrepancies existed in other regions of the country. For example, in Chicago in 1856, the schools set the maximum salary at $1,000 for male teachers, $600 for females, and a male principal could earn up to $1,500. In Madison, Wisconsin, a male superintendent in 1858 earned $I ,000, a male teacher $600, and a female preceptress $300. 69 Contemporaries justified this practice on the grounds that men commonly had more education and experience than women, as well as families to support. In her efforts to promote teaching as a vocation for women, Catharine Beecher argued that among the many advantages women brought to the classroom, women required lower salaries because they "can afford to teach for one-half, or even less, the salary which men would ask, because the female teacher has only herself; she does not look forward to the duty of supporting a family, should she marry; nor has she the ambition to amass a fortune." 70 Widows and married women like Susan Hutchison who needed to support their families appear to have been invisible to those who promoted female teachers on the basis of their cost effectiveness. Although enrollments at the school grew, the Hutchisons' financial problems worsened. In December her husband informed her he had no money, 71 and their debts began to mount. The following month, the grocer's bill came due and Susan Hutchison worried how to pay it; 72 fortunately, several clients paid their tuition bills, tern-

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porarily alleviating the family's situation. 73 She despaired as to their means of making a dependable living: "Often during this day my heart desponded as I thought how is it that we shall find a subsistence when our expenses are so great and our income so small." 74 Although her husband obtained a situation in the local bank that year, his illness led him to resign his position four years later. 75 In spite of their unrelenting indebtedness during these years, she felt that her husband indulged himself in unnecessary luxuries at the family's expense, a continuing source of friction between man and wife. 76 In 1831, local church members were so upset at Mr. Hutchison's treatment of his wife and family that the elders of the their church forbade Mr. Hutchison from partaking of communion. In her journal, Susan wrote, "the whole community both in the church and out of it were excited against him for his conduct toward me whom all regarded as a faithful and an injured and persecuted wife.'m The Hutchisons eventually separated, and Susan Hutchison returned north to her parents' farm. Her children and stepchildren accompanied her. The bouts of anger between husband and wife had not subsided, 78 and the mounting debts of her husband had become a source of overwhelming concern. Members of her church provided charitable funds to finance her trip back to New York. In describing a final visit with her minister before the trip north, Susan wrote, "Mr. Talmadge called ... he said deep feeling was manifested on account of Mr. H treatment of me in regard to requiring of me all I earned to support my family-while he employed his salary to liquidate other debts' Mr. Talmage [sic] said the friends feared their bounty should be apportioned to Mr. H benefit-" 79 Because of low salaries, competition between schools, and the unpredictability of enrollments in any given term, teachers like Hutchison moved frequently, searching for better situations. After arriving in Amenia, New York, in 1833, Hutchison accepted a position in the local district school for fourteen dollars per month plus board. 80 In 1834, she learned of her husband's death from illness. 81 Shortly afterward, she received a letter from Rev. William McPheeters, principal of Raleigh Academy, suggesting several situations in North Carolina where she might be able to start a schoo1. 82 Motivated by the urgent need to support her family, she left her children in the care of relatives and traveled again to the South to open a Female Academy in Raleigh. 83 During the next few years, Hutchison taught in three different schools. The Female Academy in Raleigh did not prosper, possibly because of competition with other schools. 84 After one year in Raleigh, she moved to Salisbury, where she established a school and boarded with a wealthy family. In a letter to her children she wrote, "You must try to learn fast in order that you may help me earn our living." 85 Although Hutchison was able to garner enough community support to obtain subscriptions to charter her school as an academy, 86 she struggled to maintain sufficient enrollments. Her school lost momentum and by 1838, enrollments had fallen to sixteen students. She required sixty to meet institutional expenses and support her children.87 For this reason, the following year she accepted an invitation to teach at the Charlotte Academy. 88 With three of her sons and her sister, Hutchison arrived in Charlotte in October 1839 and began teaching at the Academy the following day.

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The experience of Susan Hutchison exemplifies the difficulties facing a female principal in the antebellum era. Most of the individuals who successfully established their own academies were male. There were some noted exceptions in the South, including Caroline M. Thayer, who headed the female academy in Washington, Mississippi, and published essays on pedagogy in the American Journal of Education, or Sophia Sawyer, principal of Fayetteville Seminary in Arkansas. 89 Nevertheless, by the late antebellum period, when many private venture schools were either disappearing or becoming chartered as academies, it was growing increasingly difficult for women to assume leadership roles at the higher levels. In the South, single women and the wives of the principals and presidents of larger institutions generally were relegated to teaching at the preparatory level. In those unusual cases when a married woman was, in practice, the principal of a school, the school catalog often referred to her as assistant principal and gave the title of principal to her husband, usually a minister who presided as the institution's nominal head. Unlike widows and single women, many ministers who served as principals drew salaries from their positions in local churches. Such supplemental sources of income helped to keep their schools afloat during periods of economic downturn. Men in the ministry also had the advantage of being in a position to influence synods and regional sessions of their denominations to help in the establishment of seminaries and academies. For a fledgling institution, a denomination could provide a focus for the recruitment of students, a source of donations, and the protective cloak of established respectability. Ministers could tap these resources in ways that women could not. 90 The last entry of her diary is dated 1 January 1841. Ultimately, Hutchison spent close to thirty years in the South before journeying North for the last time. Archival sources indicate that she returned to her home in New York and died there on 29 March 1867. 91

Communities Like other nineteenth-century teachers, Susan Nye Hutchison's relationship with the local communities in which she taught was bounded by cultural constraints. In his 1936 study on academic freedom, Howard Beale depicted the relationship between teachers and their communities as one of conformity. According to Beale,"The majority of teachers do not need freedom, because they share the views of the community from which they sprang and in which they live." 92 In his view, the community constrained teachers' roles, restricted religious values, and shaped racial perceptions. 93 Both sociologists and historians have theorized that the close relationship of teaching with the ministry during the colonial period accorded teachers both a special status in the community and a requirement to adhere to community values. Even as teaching became a more secular form of work in the nineteenth century, and more women entered the field, local communities continued to expect teachers to participate in church activities and promote moral virtues in their teaching. 94

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Recently, historians have challenged the view that the life of the teacher is one of conformity to local community values. Using such qualitative methods as biographical or case study research, some scholars have argued that the relations of teachers with their communities have been fraught with contradiction. For instance, in her analysis of female teachers in rural Vermont, Margaret K. Nelson concluded that although teachers were circumscribed by the communities in which they lived, they were also required to act as independent assertive community leaders. 95 Other studies have pointed to cases in which school administrators or teachers resisted community demands. For example, M. W. Homel's study of African American teachers in Chicago found that from the 1880s to the First World War, African American teachers had unrestricted opportunities in Chicago's schools. During this period, school administrators regularly dismissed protests from white parents and students, and defended the presence of African American teachers in the schools. 96 Catholic educators in Protestant areas of the country often resisted the values of the larger community while diplomatically providing enough accommodation to avoid cultural backlash and strife. In her study of the teaching order of the Sacred Heart in frontier Saint Louis, Nikola Baumgarten notes that although the European-based sisters of the Sacred Heart objected to the secular worldliness of some of their patrons, they were careful to give preference to national holidays even when they conflicted with Catholic celebrations. 97 To what extent did Hutchison adapt to the values of Southern culture? Teachers who traveled to different regions of the country sometimes found themselves living in communities with unfamiliar customs or different religious or political views. Additionally, many teachers experienced intense loneliness and homesickness. For example, when teacher Jennie Lines arrived in Georgia from the North, she complained bleakly to her diary, "Georgia, Oh! how different how very different do I find everything. I was prepared to see a change of climate and people but not so great a change as this! I see nothing that reminds me of my Northern home." 98 Similarly, when she first arrived in the region, Susan Nye Hutchison was unprepared for cultural differences and occasionally found herself offended by the lifestyle of the Southerners she met in Raleigh. She was unused to the women's form of evening dress, and after attending an evening wedding party, she wrote, "It was by far the most brilliant party I ever saw, yet I saw many things to reprehend. The vitiated style of dress, oh, surely, the ladies have forgotten that even dress was necessary, or at least that they have anything to conceal. Their backs and bosoms were all uncovered." 99 Other social codes that Southerners deemed appropriate seemed like improprieties to Hutchison. For instance, she attended an oration at the State House, and was considerably pleased with the style. She was unnerved, however, when the speaker concluded with "such a bombastic compliment to the ladies of this city, that I hid my face behind my fan for mere shame. Oh, so gross a compliment ought not to be repeated." 100 Because the state capitol was at Raleigh, she was introduced to many of North Carolina's foremost citizens. Although unused to the gaiety of Southern society, she was also pleasantly surprised by the hospitality she everywhere encountered: "I like the people of Raleigh

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well. They are vastly polite and attentive to strangers." 101 Nevertheless, she clearly missed the familiar ways of the North. Shortly after arriving in Raleigh, she expressed her desire for familiarity: "[I] [w]as introduced to Mr. Newcomb, a young gentleman from New York, who is now a teacher in this department. I shall not tell with half how much pleasure I saw an inhabitant of my own state." 102 Throughout her teaching career, she continually longed to be with friends and family in New York. However, ruminations about the differences between Northern and Southern mores disappeared from her diary during her later years in the South. During her stay in Salisbury and later in Charlotte, Southern customs that had once been novel and shockingly unfamiliar had become, if not fully accepted, at least commonplace. Although she may not have approved wholeheartedly of slavery, to a large extent, Hutchison appears to have accommodated to Southern views on this issue. Southerners seeking to hire Northerners to staff their schools wanted teachers who could upgrade the curricula and instill moral virtues in their students. They did not want Northerners who would openly criticize the culture and customs of the South. While some Northem teachers may have kept their views of slavery private in order to refrain from jeopardizing their teaching positions, Christie Farnham theorizes that the Northern women who taught in the South during the early part of the century were fairly well integrated into Southern culture for two reasons: first, because slavery was not unknown in the North at the time, and second, because the issue of slavery was just beginning to polarize the country. 103 Susan Hutchison's journal indicates discomfort with the institution of slavery. For example, during her journey from New York to Raleigh, she stayed with a slave-owning family in Fayette. In describing their household, she wrote, "Their servants are an exception to the fate of Africans in this land of slaves. Oh, the wretched slaves with which the streets ofW. are constantly filled, ragged, almost naked and hungry! What is man? I, but alas, I do not know even mine own heart." During her years in the South, Hutchison often ministered to African Americans. For example, in 1815, she wrote, "Returning from morning prayer, I called on a poor black woman whose piety I fellowshipped with joy. Oh, that I may be useful !" 104 Several days later she wrote, "I conversed with a poor Negro, who lame and old, nightly limps past our house, with a basket in one hand, a cane in the other while a bunch of sticks, gathered in the woods, weighs down his venerable grey head. He seemed so grateful for my inquiries after the state of his soul, that it really gave me pleasure." 105 When she moved to Georgia, she began to teach African Americans in a small Sunday school, taking a testament to read and pray with them. 106 Such acts seem motivated by the desire to encourage spirituality and intellectual improvement among those she encountered. She was not an abolitionist. Nowhere in her journal is there any indication that she encouraged African Americans to seek their freedom, nor is there any indication that she ever attempted to teach any of her white students about the evils of slavery. Like many other evangelical women in the antebellum era, Hutchison attempted to lead a life of benevolence through acts of prayer and Bible reading. Academy teachers and principals faced enormous pressure to conform to the educational expectations of their local communities. A primary way that communities

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monitored their teachers' effectiveness in the classroom was through school examinations. These were public events in which community members gathered to watch students display what they had learned over the term. As others have pointed out, the examinations were as much of the teachers as of the pupils. 107 Impressive examinations would increase the reputation of an institution and garner more students in the future. Julia Tevis, a teacher in Virginia in about 1820, commented that the public examination of her students gave "entire satisfaction to the community and infinite delight to my patrons." 108 In 1835, the Raleigh Star carried a very flattering account of the examination of Raleigh Female Academy, concluding that "Mrs. Hutchison's qualifications as an Instructress, her zeal, her kindness to her pupils, her untiring diligence, her acquaintance with polite literature, and the [C]hristian tendency and influence of her counsels and example, all conspire to mark her out as not unworthy [of] the continuance of the respectable patronage which she has already received." 109 Behind the scenes, such public examinations inspired terror, not only in the hearts of students, but in the hearts of their teachers and school principals as well. Mediocre or poor performances could damage enrollments. While in charge of her own school in Salisbury, Hutchison wrote with some apprehension on the first day of public examinations, "I feel some excitement and some alarm-near two o'clock-I am mortified-My pupils have spoken too low for any use-" 110 On the second day of the examinations, she again worried, "Now I am here oppressed with fear that my classes have not done so well today-" 111 In spite of these concerns, the examinations closed "with approbation" before a crowded house. While most communities warmly welcomed teachers, they also scrutinized teachers' lives out of school. A teacher's behavior in church, or at a social function, could reflect on her perceived effectiveness as an educator. For instance, when Hutchison opened her own school in Georgia, watchful members of the community commented publicly on her childrearing practices, and warned that her perceived inability to control her children in church did not speak well of her classroom management skills. Hutchison wrote in her diary, "Mrs. Jones called to inform me that some person who had been annoyed by my children in the Church had published some remarks in the paper and that it was said if I would not govern my own children I would not be fit to manage the children of other people." 112 Rumors about teacher actions in and out of school circulated through community networks, potentially causing great damage. Their high visibility as moral agents required teachers to use great tact and diplomacy when interacting with community members of different denominations or sects. Protestant communities expected the teachers and principals of nonsectarian academies to participate in church activities without noticeably favoring one denomination over another. 113 While teaching in Charlotte in 1840, Hutchison faced a crisis when she received an angry anonymous letter "threatening me with the ruin of my school" and accusing her of not letting students attend the Methodist church. Hutchison, "astounded and overwhelmed," wrote to the Methodist minister "disclaiming any attempt in any shape to hinder the girls." The minister, for his part, read the

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anonymous letter along with Hutchison's response to his congregation the following Sunday, with Hutchison in attendance. That ended the matter. 114 As the principal of her own school, both in Georgia and North Carolina, Hutchison had pressing reasons to accommodate to the values and wishes of the local community. Those who founded academies were absolutely dependent on their local communities for support. Community members served on boards of trustees, helped to raise needed funds, and participated in all-important informal networks to recruit and retain both prospective students and teachers. Institutions without endowments were extremely vulnerable to shifts in public opinion, and principals therefore attended keenly to any gossip that might prove damaging to their school's reputation. Every aspect of one's school was subject to public scrutiny and comment. Shortly after opening her school in Georgia, Hutchison wrote, "Mrs. Jones called to see me and told me that people complained of my hand writing." 115 Several days later she noted, "Mrs. Jones called in the kindness of her heart to inform me of the unkind remarks made by some of our patrons respecting the school." 116 In her efforts to please her patrons, Hutchison sometimes admitted to frustration: 'Teaching is a trying employment-the effort you make to satisfy one parent is almost certain to disoblige another." 117 Given the financial necessity of supporting her family through teaching, it is highly unlikely that Hutchison would have sought to challenge or undermine the customs and values of her Southern students.

Conclusions Susan Nye Hutchison turned to teaching for multiple reasons, and for reasons that would have been familiar to thousands of other young women. Teaching represented a respectable way for a middle-class woman to earn her own living and to contribute to the income of her family. It also appealed to her evangelical sensibilities, offering, as it did, a way to reach the hearts and souls, as well as the minds, of young people. Further, teaching gave her a ready-made way to expand her own intellectual horizons, as she continued to study on her own long after she had already established herself as an accomplished teacher. Researchers have debated whether men and women took up teaching for ideological, economic, or personal reasons. Such debates have sometimes obscured our ability to understand how these influences interplayed in important ways. A number of motivating factors impelled antebellum men and women to teach in higher schools, and several facilitating factors eased their entry into the occupation. Among the motivating factors, three stand out from the research on antebellum teachers and from the diary of Susan Nye Hutchison: material benefits, service, and intellectual growth. Facilitating factors included community needs and ideological support. For women in particular, the overwhelming motivation to teach was economic. Sociologists who study the occupational characteristics that attract people to a particular line of work in the twentieth century generally analyze populations that have a wide range of career choices. In contrast, antebellum women who wanted to combine

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economic self-sufficiency with middle-class respectability had few opportunities to work outside the home. Teaching provided key material benefits by enabling both men and women to become self-supporting or to support a family. Although females received lower wages than did their male counterparts, those who taught in academies enjoyed higher salaries than did teachers in grammar or dame schools. Compared with many other kinds of employment in the nineteenth century, teaching was a service occupation. As discussed earlier, the concept of teaching as service was grounded in both sacred and secular aspects of American culture. For example, within the Roman Catholic Church, teaching had been an honored vocation for centuries. Among the evangelical denominations of the antebellum era, those who taught from a sense of missionary zeal had the full support of their religious institutions and local communities. It is likely that many of the individuals drawn to teach in academies and other higher schools enjoyed the intellectual growth provided by the occupation of teaching. Because antebellum teachers diffused knowledge, their occupation required continued study and learning. The curriculum of higher schools expanded greatly in the nineteenth century, and teachers needed to Jearn new subjects in order to keep up with curricular changes. Community needs served as a facilitating factor that eased entry into the occupation of teaching. Many communities during the antebellum era required teachers to fill their growing schoolrooms. Local communities varied in their reasons for expanding schooling opportunities. For instance, religious communities established academies to provide spiritual as well as academic instruction. Some small towns and industrial centers founded higher schools to educate a skilled workforce; others sought to increase property values and boost their towns' prestige by chartering an academy. Many areas of the country required teachers and drew on the North to supply them. The declining numbers of men willing to teach facilitated the entry of women into teaching. The demand for teachers allowed for a wide decision range, because individuals could decide to teach at a very young age or much later in life. Like Hutchison, a teacher could work for a number of years, leave the occupation, and then return at a later time. Such flexibility made teaching a fluid occupation for men and women alike. Ideological support also facilitated the entry of men and women into teaching. Religious ideology that depicted teachers as faithful laborers made the occupation highly respectable for both sexes. Educational reformers who used the discourse of "separate spheres" to claim that women were especially endowed with qualities necessary for teaching justified the occupation for women at a time when many communities may have viewed the prospect of middle-class females working outside the home with some uneasiness. Because of ideological support, teaching had a positive subjective warrant for women. Dan Lortie defines the subjective warrant as a process in which individuals considering an occupation play an important role in self-selection by qualifying or disqualifying themselves. For instance, an individual feeling an affinity for teaching might say, "This fits who I am, so I can do this." 118 Those who

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defined teaching as an expression of their religious faith could connect the occupation with their beliefs. Women who viewed teachers as having many of the characteristics of good mothers could connect the occupation with their self-image as females. The ideology of evangelism not only expanded women's opportunities for teaching or works of benevolence outside the home, but in some cases provided them with sources of authority and support not otherwise available. Kathryn Walbert argues that in the broader culture of evangelical Christianity in the antebellum South, females could assume the authority of religious leaders, publicly confronting the disbelief of unconverted males with the powers of their own prayers and exhortations. 119 She notes that women evangelicals could draw on a theology and community of fellow believers to support them in disputes with husbands and fathers. Hutchison's story illustrates this point. The evangelical community in Augusta provided moral support for her decision to separate from her husband and gave her the financial resources to leave an intolerable marriage. The transience of nineteenth-century teachers should not be interpreted as implying a lack of commitment to the occupation of teaching. Like many teachers of the period, Hutchison migrated for reasons of financial need and family crisis. Academy teachers moved to obtain teaching positions in areas of greater demand, increase their standard of living, fulfill a sense of missionary zeal, or improve their work environment. Some intrepid souls traveled for the sheer adventure of living in another region. They also moved from place to place when their schools closed for lack of revenues. Even well-established academies were often small enterprises, staffed by a handful of teachers. Moving up in position from teacher to department head, or from department head to principal usually required a move to another institution. Because they depended heavily on the revenues from tuition, academies either closed entirely when enrollments fell, or scaled back operations by reducing their teaching staffs. The experiences of Susan Nye Hutchison serve as a case study of the cultural dissonance, resistance, and accommodation sometimes experienced by nineteenth-century teachers transplanted from one geographic region to another. Northerners who traveled to the South to teach played an important role in Southern education, even though they were relatively transient. As noted above, sources indicate that a smaller percentage of Northern teachers remained permanently in the region than did Northerners who traveled West. The cultural discomfort Northerners experienced may have influenced them to stay only a short time in the South before returning home. Additionally, as the issue of slavery began to polarize the two regions prior to the Civil War, Northerners may have felt less welcome in Southern educational institutions. Nevertheless, during the period of academy expansion in the antebellum era, Southern institutions required teachers to fill their growing faculties, and a surplus of Northern teachers met this need. In spite of cultural differences, many antebellum Southern communities considered teachers like Hutchison to be well suited to provide moral and academic instruction to their daughters. As an evangelical Northerner, Hutchison may have differed significantly from the stereotype of the gay and social Southern lady, but her piety and benevolence made her a suitable model for the Southern Christian woman.

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Before we can begin to make generalizations about the complex relationships between academy teachers and their communities in the United States as a whole, we need more studies of those who worked in institutions serving diverse ethnic communities. Further research is needed to understand the extent to which teachers may have attempted to resist, accommodate, or promote the culture of the local communities in which they taught. For example, although there exist scattered studies of African American teachers working in various areas of the country, our understanding of the ways in which they might have sought to instill values in their students, counter to those of the larger communities in which they worked, is still limited. The same holds true for members of other ethnic groups who might have sought to preserve their own cultural values and religious beliefs by teaching in schools established by their own communities, such as Native American teachers who worked in academies established by various tribes. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate the experiences of white teachers in mission and boarding schools established among the Native American tribes. In such institutions, teachers sought to assimilate students into a culture quite different from that of the local Native American community. In this context, the local community with which the teacher shared customs and values consisted of other members of the educational institution and its administration. To what extent did teachers in such institutions promote, accommodate, or resist, not only the culture of their students, but that of their own educational communities? Most of the educational research that has been published over the last hundred years has focused on the experiences of white Protestants. More studies of the teachers in institutions established by minority ethnic and religious groups will expand our understanding of the ways in which such groups sought to assimilate their constituents successfully into the larger society while still preserving their own culture and religious beliefs.

NOTES Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison, 22 April 1815, Southern Historical Collection (SCH), University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 2. For discussion of the profession of teaching during the colonial period, see Willard S. Elsbree, The American Teacher: Evolution of a Profession in a Democracy (New York: American Book Co., 1939); Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Wiley, 1970); Sheldon Cohen, A History of Colonial Education, 1607-1776 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Harold Buetow, Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970). 3. Richard M. Bernard and Maris A. Vinovskis, "The Female School Teacher in AnteBellum Massachusetts," Journal of Social History I 0 (Spring 1977), 332-345. 4. David B. Tyack and Myra H. Strober, "Jobs and Gender: A History of the Structuring of Educational Employment by Sex," in Educational Policy and Management: Sex Differentials, Patricia Schmuck, ed. (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 136. See also Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in MidNineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 1.

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