What Hath God Wrought (67 page)

In its broadest definition, education is the entire process of cultural transmission. The rapidly expanding communications of the antebellum period enabled people to be better informed about the world than ever before from magazines, newspapers, and books; mail service integrated commercial and civic life. The Second Great Awakening both exploited and fostered these developments.
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Voluntary associations, such as foreign missions, the Sunday-School Union, and the sabbatarian, temperance, antislavery, and peace movements, educated a broad public in the issues of the day. The educational function of the evangelical associations seems particularly important in the case of women. Excluded from political institutions, their increasing literacy nevertheless enabled them to read the news and organize benevolent societies, acquiring further skills in the process.
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The commercialization and diversification of the economy multiplied jobs requiring literate and numerate skills; continued economic development would demand still more of them. American society needed an educational program synthesizing the civic objectives of Jefferson’s Enlightenment with the energy and commitment of the religious Awakening. Such a movement appeared in the educational reforms embraced by the Whig Party in the 1830s. The greatest of the Whig educational reformers was Horace Mann, who became secretary of the newly created Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837. From that vantage point Mann tirelessly crusaded on behalf of “common schools”—that is, schools that the whole population would have in common: tuition-free, tax-supported, meeting statewide standards of curriculum, textbooks, and facilities, staffed with teachers who had been trained in state normal schools, modeled on the French école normale. In Massachusetts, Mann could build on the strongest tradition of public education in any state. There, local communities had become accustomed to taxing themselves to support education. Mann had no hesitation about employing the resources of the state; he was a political disciple of John Quincy Adams. The normal schools that he created (beginning with Lexington in 1839) constituted Mann’s most important innovation, the precursors of teacher training colleges. The normal schools turned out to be the avenue through which women in large numbers first entered any profession. Since they were paid less than men, women teachers provided a human resource agreeable to legislators worried about the cost of Mann’s ambitious plans.
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As envisioned by Mann and his successors until long after the Civil War, the common schools embodied a common ideology. The ideology of the American common schools included patriotic virtue, responsible character, and democratic participation, all to be developed through intellectual discipline and the nurture of the moral qualities. It would never have occurred to Mann and his disciples that such an educational program should not include religion, but since they wanted above all to achieve an education common to all, this necessitated a common religious instruction. In the days of more local autonomy, school districts had taught the religion of the local majority. Now, the Massachusetts School Board prescribed that only those doctrines should be taught on which all Protestants agreed.

The Whig governor, Edward Everett, gave Mann solid support in appointments to the Board and helped him overcome opposition from jealous local authorities, doctrinaire Christian groups, and pedagogically conservative schoolmasters. When a Democrat, Marcus Morton, was elected governor by a margin of one vote in 1839, he proved unable to persuade the Massachusetts legislature to abolish Mann’s Board of Education and its new normal schools.
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Democrats throughout the country remained suspicious of educational programs like Mann’s as the creation of a remote elite; they preferred to leave schools under local control as much as possible. What probably tipped the scales in favor of states assuming some responsibility for education was the growth of cities and towns. With apprenticeship programs declining, the new urban working class embraced common schools as their children’s guarantor of opportunity—besides keeping them off the street. In rural areas, schools always competed with the need for children to work on the farm. The older ones could only attend a few months during the winter, when their labor and that of their part-time teacher could best be spared; the younger ones could also be taught in the summer after planting and before harvesting.
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At the top of Mann’s agenda stood the education of the immigrants, especially the children of migrant laborers. But nondenominational Protestant schools proved to be unacceptable to the growing Irish immigrant community. In New York, the conflict between Protestant-public schools and the Catholic minority led by Bishop (later Archbishop) John Hughes embarrassed the enlightened Whig governor, William H. Seward. Seward tried vainly to bridge the gap between the two sides with an unsuccessful proposal for state subsidies to Catholic schools, as Protestant educational enterprises had often been subsidized. Instead the legislature ruled that no public money should go to any school in which religion was taught.
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The lesson for the rest of the country was clear: Where public aid to Protestant institutions had been within the bounds of political acceptability, such aid to Catholic institutions was not. When faced with a charge of inconsistency, public authorities would cut off aid to Protestants rather than extend it to include Catholics.

To be sure, many public, or common, schools would retain features of nondenominational Protestantism for a good many years to come. Horace Mann hoped that passages from the Bible, read without interpretation, might offer a nonsectarian common religious ground. Although Catholics and even some of the Protestant sects did not find this acceptable, Bible-reading in the common schools remained a widespread and even increasing practice in nineteenth-century America. Probably over half of American common schools practiced Bible reading at the end of the nineteenth century.
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In 1840, the U.S. census takers for the first time asked questions about literacy. They recorded 9 percent of adult American whites as illiterate, a rate comparable with that of Prussia, whose educational system, run by the established church, was much admired. Even when the African American population was included, U.S. illiteracy at 22 percent compared favorably with the 41 percent illiteracy in England and Wales recorded by their census of 1841. American literacy varied widely by region. In New England no state had less than 98 percent literacy, which equaled Scotland and Sweden, the two countries where energetic programs sponsored by Protestant established churches had forged the world’s highest literacy. The American state with the highest white illiteracy in 1840 was North Carolina: 28 percent. The public school system called for in the North Carolina state constitution of 1776 had never been implemented. However, in 1839 the Whigs gained control of North Carolina’s legislature and put through a long-delayed law authorizing common schools in counties that consented to them. As a result, white illiteracy in North Carolina fell to 11 percent over the next twenty years.
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III

Like school systems, higher education in the antebellum period reflected the energy of religious bodies and the frequent reluctance of civil authorities to spend money or expand the sphere of government. George Washington had conceived of a national university in the District of Columbia but had never been able to persuade Congress to implement his vision. He had gone so far as to will a portion of his estate to form a core endowment for such a university. But Congress ignored his bequest, and in 1823 the fund became worthless when the company in which it was invested went bankrupt. Jefferson had originally supported a national university but eventually decided that an amendment to the Constitution would be required to authorize it. Madison and John Quincy Adams both recommended a national university; neither could budge Congress. Opposition came from existing colleges that feared being overshadowed, from strict construction of the Constitution, and from sheer parsimony. Under the Jacksonians the project of a national university vanished.
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As an alternative to a university created by the federal government, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, intended as a model of public secular education. Drawing upon his network of political influence, the ex-president was able to get himself named rector and its site located in Charlottesville, close enough to Monticello that he could oversee every detail. The versatile elder statesman designed its architecture and mode of governance, named the professors, and even presumed to prescribe the curriculum—at least in sensitive subjects like politics and religion. After his death in 1826, Jefferson’s tombstone proclaimed the three achievements of which he was proudest: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom; & Father of the University of Virginia.”
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Jefferson made the University of Virginia an architectural masterpiece. As an institution of higher learning, however, its distinction was not immediately apparent. In the first functioning academic year, 1825–26, the only one the founder lived to see, the students took advantage of Jefferson’s permissive discipline to get drunk, gamble, skip classes, and misbehave; among those who had to be expelled for participation in a riot was the founder’s own great-grandnephew.
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The shortcomings of the student body reflected the legislature’s failure to establish a proper system of preparatory secondary schools. Funding remained perennially problematic; the recruitment of both faculty and students, difficult. Sadly, Jefferson’s own vision for his beloved university had contracted over time. Originally he had imagined it drawing students from all over the Union, but after his political vision narrowed during the Missouri controversy, his plans for the university changed too. In the end, he conceived it as a bastion of southern sectionalism.
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The University of Virginia was by no means the only example of a disparity between promise and realization in American higher education during the early national period. In some states, the gap was greater. The so-called University of the State of New York had been created in 1784 as part of a grandiose plan intended to coordinate all levels of education, primary, secondary, and higher, in the state. In practice, however, this “University” exerted little control over the activities nominally subject to it, some of them private and sectarian. Not until after World War II did New York actually create a state university that would engage directly in teaching and research. The contrast between dream and reality appears again in the case of Michigan. Augustus Woodward, whom Jefferson appointed chief justice of Michigan Territory, projected the “University of Michigania.” However, for a long time the state only implemented primary and secondary levels of instruction; the Ann Arbor campus did not open until 1841, although the present University of Michigan proudly declares the date of its founding to be 1817. Finally, one might note the 1816 constitution of Indiana, which called for “a general system of education, ascending in regular gradation from township schools to state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all.” It took more than thirty years for the Indiana legislature to begin to implement this promise. In the meantime, a Presbyterian seminary-turned-college operated in Bloomington.
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At the time of independence the United States contained nine colleges, all with religious connections. The status that these colleges would enjoy in the republic only gradually achieved definition. At first they seemed “mixed corporations,” privately owned but subsidized in return for serving public functions, like some banks and turnpikes of the time. The instability of such a status appeared in the Dartmouth College case of 1819. This lawsuit originated in a dispute between the president of the college and the trustees. Both sides were Federalist and Calvinist, but a majority of the trustees supported organized revivals and novel moral reforms like temperance. The president of the college had no sympathy with this program, and the trustees dismissed him. The Republican-controlled state legislature intervened on the side of the president, trying to make a mixed public-private institution more responsive to religious diversity. But the trustees resisted. Daniel Webster, a Dartmouth alumnus, took their case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state legislature had no business tampering with Dartmouth’s royal charter. Webster won, and by his victory he set Dartmouth on a course of transformation from a mixed public-private institution into a completely private college.
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If the New Hampshire Republicans lost their battle against the Dartmouth trustees, they won the war on another front. The same Jeffersonian legislature that tried to alter the Dartmouth charter took advantage of the division among Federalists to strip the Congregational Church of its favored status in New Hampshire. Republican secularists allied with Baptists and other dissenters to pass what they called a “toleration act” that (in effect, if not in theory) disestablished religion in New Hampshire.
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The disestablishment of the New England state churches foreshadowed the disestablishment of what we call the Ivy League colleges, though the separation of college and state occurred more gradually. Eventually all but one of the colonial foundations became private and, if they did not need to fear for their autonomy, neither could they look to their state governments for financial assistance.
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The College of William and Mary in Virginia, alone among the nine colleges predating independence, ended up a state institution. The secularization of the colonial colleges is another story, one that takes place after the Civil War.

The most successful example of a state-founded, state-supported venture in higher education in the early national period was South Carolina College, founded in 1801. Although roiled by some of the same early problems with discipline as the University of Virginia, the college surmounted them to become the only institution of higher learning in the United States generously supported by annual legislative appropriations. Since the state did not support public schools, they did not compete with the college for funds.
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Thomas Cooper, an expatriate Englishman, accepted the presidency of South Carolina College in 1821. Cooper combined proslavery politics with anti-clericalism; Jefferson declared him “the greatest man in America, in the powers of mind,” and had tried desperately to recruit him to head the University of Virginia.
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In South Carolina, Cooper won popularity with his ardent state-rights rhetoric during the nullification crisis, only to lose it soon afterwards by his tactless denunciations of Christianity. Under fire from a combination of Presbyterian clergy and political Unionists, Cooper found it necessary to resign in 1834. The one example of successful state-sponsored higher education in the country also illustrated the unacceptability of state-sponsored secularism.
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