Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (81 page)

Yet in the decades immediately following the Revolution, few of these elaborate educational plans came to fruition. Virginia repeatedly tried to erect a comprehensive school system along Jeffersonian lines, but the expense of such a system and the dispersed population prevented legislative adoption. In 1796 the Virginia legislature at least approved the creation of a system of elementary schools but left it to each county court to implement, in Jefferson’s opinion, effectively allowing the county courts to emasculate what the legislature had promised.

Elsewhere religious jealousies and popular opposition to tax increases for schools that still seemed to benefit only elites undermined support for comprehensive school systems. Too many ordinary farmers and artisans did not want their children compelled to go to school all day; they needed their labor at home. When little happened as a result of the 1784 act in New York, the state legislature tried again in 1795 and in 1805 to encourage the establishment of a comprehensive school system. Although many gentry leaders urged the need for public education, the public remained skeptical. Consequently, schooling continued in nearly all the states to be largely a private matter. In place of the elaborate plans for publicly supported education, reformers had to make do with privately supported charity schools, Sunday schools, and infant schools.

Even in New England, with its long tradition of public education, privately supported academies sprang up in the post-Revolutionary years to replace the older town-supported grammar schools that had existed in the colonial period. These academies, designed separately for both young men and women, became very important vehicles of education. As a Federalist complained in 1806, even “the middling class of society” was finding it “fashionable” to send their sons and daughters to these academies, often because the ambitious young people themselves pressed their parents to allow them to attend the schools.
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Because the modern distinction between public and private was not yet clear, legislatures continued to grant public money periodically to some of these essentially private charity schools and academies.

Despite the spread of private education, however, the republican ideal of single, comprehensive, publicly supported systems of schooling did not die. Even though they were never adequately implemented, a series of legislative acts in states like New York and Massachusetts kept alive the republican idea of a three-tiered public-supported system for all people. A successful publicly funded modern educational system would come only in the common school movement of the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
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F
ORMAL SCHOOLING, OF COURSE
, was never all that the Revolutionaries meant by education. Although many thought the Revolution was over in 1783 with the British recognition of American independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush knew better. “We have changed our forms of government,” he said in 1786, “but it remains yet to effect a revolution in
our principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government that we have adopted.”
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Rush was born in Philadelphia in 1745, and, like so many of the other Revolutionaries, he had no distinguished lineage: his father was an ordinary farmer and gunsmith. When Rush was five his father died, so his mother began running a grocery store to support the family. At the age of eight Rush was sent to live with a clergyman-uncle who saw to it that he received an education. After graduating from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1760, Rush apprenticed as a physician in Philadelphia before leaving for further medical training at the University of Edinburgh. After returning to America in 1769, he became professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia and a participant in the Revolution both as a political leader and as a physician.

Since Rush came to believe that “the science of medicine was related to everything,” he considered everything within his intellectual domain and had something to say about everything. In the decades following the Revolution Rush carried on what one historian has called “a one-man crusade to remake America.”
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“Mr. Great Heart,” Jeremy Belknap called him, after the character in John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
who attacked all the giants and hobgoblins that stood in the way of getting to the Celestial City. Believing that he “was acting for the benefit of the whole world, and of future ages,” Rush campaigned for every conceivable reform—for a national university, churches for blacks, temperance, healthy diets, the emancipation of the slaves, prison reform, free postage for newspapers, enlightened treatment of the insane, the education of women, animal rights, and the abolition of hunting weapons, oaths, dueling, and corporal and capital punishment. He even hoped eventually to eliminate all courts of law and all diseases. He was not so utopian, he said in 1786, as to think that man could become immortal, but he did believe that “it is possible to produce such a change in his moral character, as shall raise him to a resemblance of angels—nay, more, to the likeness of God himself.”
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As republicans, Americans shared at least some of Rush’s enthusiasm for reform, and their leaders enlisted every kind of media to change people’s opinions, prejudices, and habits. Of these media the spoken and written word was most important. Every occasion demanded a lengthy speech, and
republican oratory was now celebrated as a peculiarly American form of communication. Groups sponsored public lectures on all sorts of topics and laid the foundations for the later lyceum movement. But it was printed matter, with its republican capacity to reach the greatest numbers of people, which came to be valued most. Private conversation and the private exchange of literary manuscripts among a genteel few might be suitable for a monarchy, but a republic required that politeness and learning be made more public.
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As republican citizens, many Americans, especially among the middling sort, became ever more anxious about acquiring gentility. People wanted more advice and etiquette manuals for every occasion or subject—from how to write letters to friends to how to control and clean their bodies. People, even gentry, who during their entire lives had never been wet all over now engaged in occasional bathing. In the 1790s public bathhouses were erected in some American cities as people began responding to the appeals for more cleanliness contained in scores of conduct manuals.
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All the various efforts to become more polite that had characterized eighteenth-century colonial society took on greater urgency under the new Republic. During the entire eighteenth century Americans published 218 spelling books designed to improve the writing of the English language, two-thirds of them in the final seventeen years of the century, between 1783 and 1800.
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By the early nineteenth century Noah Webster’s comprehensive speller, first published in 1783, had sold three million copies.
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Although writing and spelling were important, they were not as important as reading. The few private libraries that had existed in the large cities in the colonial period were now supplemented by publicly supported libraries, which in turn sponsored increasing numbers of reading clubs, lectures, and debating societies.
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Most Americans now believed that anything that helped the spread of learning was good for their republic, for an informed citizenry was the source of republican freedom and security.
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Although Americans could
not agree on what the citizenry should be informed about, they created new organizations for the collecting and conveying of knowledge at remarkable rates. Beginning with the reorganization of the American Philosophical Society in 1780, Americans began establishing many new learned academies and scientific societies. John Adams helped to form the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Massachusetts. In 1799 the Connecticut Academy was created, and soon other states were establishing similar institutions.

In 1791 Congregational clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap, concerned about the lack of any repository for historical documents in the United States, founded the Massachusetts Historical Society. The society was designed to preserve the materials that would “mark the genius, delineate the manners, and trace the progress of society in the United States.”
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It became the model for the New-York Historical Society (1804), the American Antiquarian Society (1812), and dozens of other historical societies created in other states in the early nineteenth century.

Everywhere institutions and organizations were burdened with the responsibility of imparting virtue and knowledge to the citizenry. Freemasonry, for example, came to see itself principally as an educational instrument for promoting morality. “Every character, figure, and emblem, depicted in a Lodge,” declared a Masonic handbook, “has a moral tendency to, and inculcates the practice of virtue.” But Masonry was not content with educating only its members; it sought to reach out and affect the whole society. Masonic brothers were involved in a multitude of public ceremonies and dedications—anointing bridges, canals, universities, monuments, and buildings. In 1793 President Washington himself, wearing a Masonic apron and sash, laid the cornerstone of the new United States Capitol in the planned Federal City. Masons, many of whom were artisans, architects, and painters, placed the fraternity’s emblems, signs, and symbols on a wide variety of objects, including ceramics, pitchers, handkerchiefs, liquor flasks, and wallpaper—with the didactic hope of teaching virtue through the simple and expressive visual language of Masonry.
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Printed matter flooded the new Republic. Three-quarters of all the books and pamphlets published in America between 1637 and 1800 appeared in the last thirty-five years of the eighteenth century. Few periodicals had appeared during the colonial period, and these had been frail and unstable, blossoming for a moment and dying like exotic plants. As late as 1785 only one American magazine existed, and it struggled to survive.
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Suddenly, this all changed. Between 1786 and 1795 twenty-eight learned and gentlemanly magazines were established, six more in these few years than in the entire colonial period. These magazines contained a rich mixture of subjects, including poetry, descriptions of new fossils, and directions for expelling noxious vapors from wells; and for the first time some of the magazines were aimed at female readers.

Although the Confederation had not done much to accelerate the movement of information throughout the country, the newly invigorated federal government was eager to change things. In 1788 there had been only sixty-nine post offices and less than two thousand miles of post roads to service four million people over half a continent. Congress’s establishment of a national post office in 1792 created new routes and led to a proliferation of post offices throughout the country. By 1800 the number of post offices had grown to 903; by 1815 there were over three thousand post offices. Every little American town or hamlet wanted one. Since a post office was “the soul of commerce,” a group of South Carolinians in 1793 naturally had petitioned for one. Without “such a direct, regular, and immediate communication by posts,” the petitioners said, we are “kept in ignorance” and “know not anything which concerns us, either as men or as planters.” To some observers the postal system seemed to be the most useful and rapidly improving feature of American life. “The mail has become the channel of remittance for the commercial interests of the country,” said Jefferson’s postmaster general, Gideon Granger, “and in some measure for the government.” The postal system was helping to annihilate time and distances everywhere.
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Americans would soon make their postal system larger than the postal systems of either Britain or France. By 1816 the postal system had over thirty-three hundred offices, employing nearly 70 percent of the entire federal civilian workforce. The amount of mail increased just as quickly. In the year 1790 the postal system had carried only three hundred
thousand letters, one for about every fifteen persons in the country. By 1815 it transmitted nearly seven and a half million letters during the year, which was about one for every person. The post office was, as Benjamin Rush urged in 1787, the “only means” of “conveying light and heat to every individual in the federal commonwealth.” And, unlike the situation in Great Britain and other European nations, the mail was transmitted without government surveillance or control.
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All these developments helped to speed up the rate at which information was communicated from one place to another. In 1790 it had taken more than a month for news to travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia; by 1794 that had been cut to ten days. In 1790 it had taken forty days to receive a reply to a letter sent from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia; by 1810 that time had been reduced to twenty-seven days.
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The postal system had its greatest effect on the circulation of newspapers. Congress’s Post Office Act of 1792 allowed all newspapers, and not just those close to the centers of power, to be sent by mail at very low rates; in effect, newspaper circulation was subsidized by letter-writers. This act allowed for the dispersal of newspapers to the most remote areas of the country and nationalized the spread of information. In 1800 the postal system transmitted 1. 9 million newspapers a year; by 1820 it was transmitting 6 million a year.
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