(Diary of Samuel Sewall, Vol. 1, 1674-1700, introduction, p.xiii. Internet edition available. Aged 9 Sewall sailed to America from Britain with his Puritan family. He became a business man and judge, was involved in the Salem witch trials and was an early critic of slavery. )
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| John Speed's map of New England, 1635 (Website: Early Dibblees) |
(The Christian Examiner and Theological Review, 1825, II, p. 291)
The early colonists found a country where child rearing practises of the Native Americans, if they cared to examine them, were very similar to those of early Europeans. Native American communities valued boys more highly than girls and gave boys and girls very different upbringing. Some practised infanticide, hardening regimes for infants and young boys were common; they wore few clothes and boys were gradually accustomed from about the age of four to cold baths and, as teenagers, to sleeping out naked to prepare them for the rigours experienced by hunters and warriors. Some tribes practised head-shaping and forms of swaddling infants were almost universal. Wet nursing, however, was not a custom, its place being taken in some tribes by communal nursing of infants. Among the Sioux and Eskimos infants might continue to be nursed for three to five years, probably because this provided good nutrition. (Refs: Hill-Tout, C. British North America, 1907, Vol. 1; Erikson, Erik, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. 1963, p. 133-156 on traditional Sioux upbringing; Bancroft, Hubert Howe, The native races of the Pacific States & North America, 5 vols, 1875; Katz, Friedrich, The ancient American civilizations, 1972)
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| Pilgrims and Native Americans, (Website, Colonial history of Massachusetts) |
'Puritans...men of stern and lofty virtue, of invincible energy, and hard and iron wills; they detested both the civil and religious despotism of their times, and desired, above all worldly consideration, the liberty of worshipping God according to the dictates of their consciences...They did not always exhibit a liberal and enlightened policy...'
(John D. Lord, A modern history from the time of Luther to the fall of Napoleon. 1858, p. 323)
John Lord omits to mention that they did not extend liberty of worship to members of other sects. That was left to the Quaker settlers of Pennsylvania.
The Puritan settlers who landed at Plymouth in 1620 left Europe to create a state which would be run according to their own religious beliefs, where children would not be led astray by contact with irreligious people or people of different persuasions:
'...many of their children by...the great licentiousness of youth in that country (England) and the manifold temptations of that place, were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses...to the great grief of their parents and dishonour of God.'
(William Bradford, History of Plimoth (Plymouth) Plantation 1620-1647, Boston 1912, Vol. 1 p.54-5, quoted in Robert Bremner ed. Children and Youth in America, A documentary history, 1971, Vol. 1,
p. 17 internet edition, Project Gutenberg, available)
(Refs: There are two excellent accounts of Puritanism in New England as it related to children: Sandford Fleming Children and Puritanism, The place of children in the life and thought of the New England churches, 1620-1847, pub. 1933; Edmund S.Morgan The Puritan Family. Essays on religion and domestic relations in 17th century New England, pub. Boston Public Library Trustees 1956, based on the Prince Collection, Boston Public Library, See also: Alice Morse Earle, Child life in colonial days, 1899, Cotton Mather, Diary 1681-1708, Massachussetts Historical Society Collections, 7th series, Vols. VII-VIII, Boston 1911, internet edition available, Jennings, D.
An abridgement of the life of...Dr. Cotton Mather, 1744, internet edition available)
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| Cotton Mather (Wikipedia) |
Judge Samuel Sewall (1652-1730)and Cotton Mather (1663-1728) both important sources for information on child life in the colony, were fathers of large families which they brought up in orthodox Puritan fashion in fear of God and obedience to parents, regarding the father as God's representative in the family. They accustomed their children from early age to practise private meditation on the state of their souls; Cotton Mather 'would often remind them of this their Duty':
"Child, don't you forget every Day to go alone, and pray"
(Diary Vol. 2 p. 651)
Mather made use of every opportunity for improving conversation:
'I will have my Table Talk facetious as well as instructive, and use much Freedom of Conversation in it, yett I will have this Exercise continually intermixed, I will sett before them some Sentence of the Bible, and make some useful Remarks upon it.'
In Jennings abridgement of the life of Cotton Mather he says that Mather 'would pray with them in his study, and make them witnesses of his strong Cries and earnest Wrestlings with God, on their Behalf.' (Jennings p. 20)
Mather began to take his eldest daughter, Katy, into his study for catechising when she was five:
'At length, with many Tears both on my part and hers, I told my child that God had from Heaven satisfied me...That shee shall be brought Home unto the Lord Jesus Christ...I...made the child kneel down by me; and I poured out my cries unto the Lord.'
(Diary for 1697)
Judge Sewall made the death of his son's schoolfellow Richard Dummer an opportunity to take his son Samuel aside to consider the state of his soul:
'Richard Dummer, a flourishing youth of 9 years old, dies of the Small Pocks. I tell Sam of it and what need he had to prepare for Death, and therefore to endeavour really to pray when he said over the Lord's Prayer. He seem'd not much to mind, eating an Apple, but when he came to say, Our Father. he burst out into a bitter Cry and said he was afraid he should die...'
(Diary of Samuel Sewall, Jan 12, 1689, p. 309)
Such distress was celebrated as a sign of the soul's rebirth in Christ. Sewell's daughter Elizabeth suffered such an emotional crisis in January 1696, the minister and Sewall prayed with her, but she continued for several months in fear of not being sufficiently repentant of her sins to ensure she would go to heaven.
(Sewall, Diary, Jan 11 1695-6, p. 419-20)
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| Judge Samuel Sewall (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) |
New England Primer, 1662, which included verses such as this:
The Judge to the Infant:
You sinners are, and such a share
as sinners may expect,
Such you shall have; for I do save
none but my own elect...
Therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell...
The tender mother will owe no other
of all her numerous brood
But such as stand at Christ's right hand
acquitted through his blood.'
(Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom, 1662, quoted in Fleming, p. 82)
There were also sermons specially addressed to children:
'And let me tell you, O Youth and Children: God will surely judge You with the rest of Men; and He'll give you your just Deserts!'
'As innocent as children seem to be to us, yet, if they are out of Christ they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition, as well as grown persons.'
(Sandford Fleming, p. 97)
Sandford Fleming gathered some accounts of the mass religious hysteria which some of the famous preachers could induce:
'This frequently frights the Little Children, and sets them a Screaming; and that frights their tender Mothers, and sets them to Screaming, and by Degrees spreads a great part of the Congregation: and 40, 50 or 100, of them screaming altogether, makes such an awful hideous Noise, as well as make a Man's Hair stand on End. Some will faint away, fall down upon the Floor, wallow and foam. Some Women will rend off their Caps, Handkerchiefs, and other Clothes, tear their Hair down about their Ears, and seem perfectly bereft of their reason.'
(The Boston Post Boy. Charles Chauncy Seasonable thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, 1743, p. 168-70, quoted in Fleming p. 166, Bremner Vol. 1 p. 138 internet editions available)
Women and children were especially susceptible to this religious hysteria, which was encouraged by Church leaders as a sign of religious grace. Child converts were regarded by their elders with respect which they did not normally command, and would speak out and criticise their elders and even their parents, and be seriously listenedto. The case of the Salem witch trials did not stop this practise:
'At first she began with her father, and told him, she could see the Image of the Devil then in his Face, and that he was going Post-haste down to Hell...'
(Charles Chauncy, Minister, 1592-1671 writing mid 17th century, quoted in Fleming op. cit. p. 178)
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| From the Varsity Tutors website, witchcraft and religious fanaticism |
Fleming gives an interesting account taken from John Cotton of the religious revival movement in the 1740s when large numbers of children experienced mass conversion. Whole schools could be overcome by religious fervour so that school work could not continue, possibly this was the reason for the children's fervour:
'Even little children of about nine, ten or twelve years of age set up a Meeting of their own Accord. And all Frolicing and Carousing and Merry Meetings were laid aside.'
(Rev. Mr. Cotton, writing to the Rev. Mr. Prince, Halifax in the County of Plimouth, July 26, 1743, The Christian History, Vol. 1, Boston, 1743, 1744, p. 260-61. Internet edition available. Quoted in Fleming op. cit. p. 147)
The great religious preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) has also left an account of the effects of revival meetings:
'Many of the young People and Children that were Professors appeared to be overcome with a Sense of the Greatness and Glory of divine Things...and many others at the same Time were overcome with Distress about their sinful and miserable State and Condition; so that the whole Room was full of nothing but Out-cries, Faintings and such like' '...The children were very generally and greatly affected by the warnings and Counsels that were given them, and many exceedingly overcome; and the Room was filled with Cries; and when they were dismissed, they were almost all of them, went home crying aloud through the Streets...'
(Fleming op. cit. p. 163)
This expression of religious feeling was also a natural breeding ground for superstitions and belief in witchcraft, beliefs which were also found in Britain. Respected church leaders could attribute the birth of a malformed child to witchcraft:
'I had great reason to suspect Witchcraft in this praeternatural Accident; because my Wife, a few weeks before her Deliverance, was affrighted with a horrible Spectre...'
(Barratt Wendell, Cotton Mather, a biography, Mather's Diary for 1693)
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| The Salem witch trials, from Totally History |
'The Little Creatures ...keep calling me so often to pray with them that I can scarce do it less than ten or a dozen times in a day, besides what I do with my Neighbours.'
Cotton Mather, Diary, 1702, quoted in Wendell op. cit. p. 197)
Preachers, of course, emphasised the doom which awaited the child who died unregenerate:
'In a little time you will be in Eternity, some sooner and some later...Consider how it will be when you come to die and are unconverted...How dreadful it will be to be all together in misery. They you won't play together any more but will be damned together, will cry out with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth together...'Tis not likely you will all live to grow up.'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 99, quoted from the unpublished papers housed at Yale University of the famous American Revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), who had severe problems with unruly boys in his congregation. Internet editions of his sermons available)
Early death was a very real fear to both parents and children. There were diseases such as measles and smallpox. The harsh climate which is the first winter of the colony had killed half the original settlers claimed many more following the expansion of the settlements. The infant death rate was particularly high. Cotton Mather had fifteen children; only six survived to adult years, and only two survived him. Samuel Sewall had fourteen children and five survived. Ironically one cause of the high infant mortality rate was, without any doubt, the pious zeal with which they hurried new born infants to be baptised:
'6 Feb. 1678 Between 3 & 4pm Mr. Willard baptised my Son, whom I named Stephen. Day was Louring after the storm, but not freezing. Child shrunk at the water but cryed not.'
(Sewall's Diary, op. cit. p. 167)
Baptism generally took place when the child was only a few days old, and was not simply the marking of a cross with a damp finger but practically a cold bath, winter or summer:
'She cried not at all, though a pretty deal of water was poured on her by Mr. Willard.'
(Sewall's Diary, 24 Aug. 1690)
Judith Sewall, whose baptism took place in August, was born a month premature. She left the world almost exactly on the date she should have entered it.
Charles Chauncy was a Minister who believed that only baptism by full immersion could be effective. When he carried this out on his twin sons one of them passed out and their mother stopped him from continuing with the baptism, according to John Winthrop, she almost pulled Chauncy himself into the water. (Wikipedia)
The laws of Massachusetts provided for the weekly catechising of children, and for unruly, badly brought up children to be taken from their parents and apprenticed out. Religious instruction of apprentices was one of the duties of a master or mistress. (see Fleming op.cit. p. 104)
Nevertheless, although this preoccupation with the state of the child's soul may seem oppressive to the modern reader, there is no sign that parents were exceptionally harsh with their children The Puritan way was rather one of loving persuasion than force. In Sam Sewall's diary he only twice mentions chastising his children, once when he:
'Corrected Sam. for breach of the 9th Commandment, saying he had been at the Writing School when he had not.'
and once when Sam threw a brass knob at his sister Betty, bruising her forehead.
(Sewall, Diary, Sept. 15, 1688)
Cotton Mather punished his children first by showing his displeasure and finally by banishing them from his sight, and strongly disapproved of beating:
Cotton Mather himself, if his biographer is to be believed, was a model Puritan child:
'He seemed indeed to be sanctified from the womb. For, as soon, almost, as he began to speak, he began to pray, and never left it off again as long as he lived.'
(Jennings, Abridgement of the Life of Cotton Mather, 1744 p. 17 internet editions available)
He would exhort his playmates to prayer, composing suitable prayers for them, and read fifteen chapters of scripture a day from childhood:
'His early Abhorrence of Sin appeared by the Reproofs he would give his Play-Mates for any wicked Works or Practices.'
(Jennings, op. cit. p. 5)
Cotton Mather's brother Nathaniel, like many Puritans, kept a journal in which, aged sixteen, he shows quite a morbid sense of sin:
'Of the manifold sins which I was then guilty of, none so sticks upon me, as that being very young I was whittling on the sabbath-day, and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the door.'
(Fleming, op.cit, p.18-19)
Cotton Mather's son Increase, however, was a handful and there are many despairing references to his wildness in Mather's diary:
'From the Depths I cried unto the Lord, for his grace to be given unto my children; particularly my son Increase! he wrote, and, after Increase, aged fourteen, had blown himself and his sister Lizzie up with gunpowder:
'I would improve this occasion to inculcate Instructions op piety in them and the rest. Especially with Relation to their Danger of Eternal Burnings.'
(Quoted in Wendell, op. cit, p. 242)
To check that all children were getting proper religious instruction, some churches had them publicly recite the catechism in the meeting house, three times a year, a third of the catechism each time. The Rev. Dorcus Clarke remembered it still being done in 1878:
'Father Hale, standing in the pulpit, put the questions to the children in order; and each one, when the question came to him, was expected to wheel out of the line, a la militaire, into the broad aisle, and face the minister, and make his best obeisance, and answer the question put to him without the slightest mistake...If the nervous effects of that exercise were appalling, the moral significance was most salutory.'
The shorter catechism, specially prepared for children by the British Westminster Assembly in 1643-9, had 107 questions with answers ranging in length from eight to a hundred words,. and was supposed to be learned by all children in Massachusetts between the ages of eight and fifteen.
(Paul Ford, The New England Primer, 1897, Appendix IV)
The American novelist Henry James' father (Henry James Sr. 1811-1882) was brought up in a strict Presbyterian household. The children were:
'not to play, not to dance, not to sing, not to read story-books, nor to take a walk in the country, nor a swim in the river; not, in short, to do any thing nature specially craved....nothing is so hard for a child as not-to-do.'
Henry James the elder rebelled against not-to-do my indulging in secret sips of gin or brandy monring and evening when he passed by the shoemakers, a local haunt of vice.
(Leon Edel, Henry James, a life,1953, Vol. 1, p. 23)
Nevertheless, or possibly because of, this surfeit of religious teaching, the children of the Elect constantly strayed from the path of righteousness. As early as 1657 the Rev. Ezekiel Rogers wrote:
'I find greatest trouble and grief about the rising generation. Young people are little stirred here, but they strengthen one another in evil, by example, by counsel. Much ado I have had with my own family...Even the children of godley here and elsewhere, make a useful proof. So that, I tremble to think, what will become of this glorious work that we have begun, when the ancient shall be gathered unto their fathers. I fear grace and blessing will die with them.'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 10)
The Massachussetts boys could be so unruly in church, where they were all seated together, that a tithing man was appointed to be responsible for each ten or so families, to ensure regular church attendance, Sabbath behaviour and learning the catechism. (Alice Morse Earle op. cit p. 244)
A Connecticut judge in 1750 has left a record of their typical misbehaviour:
'Such as larfing or Sailing and puling the hair of nayber benoni Simkins in the time of publick Worship...Such as throwing Sister penticost perkins on the ice it being Saboth day or Lords day....'
(Fleming, op.cit. p. 63)
Jonathan Edwards, the famous American Puritan preacher, struggling with his Northampton congregation in 1744 caught the teenage boys bringing a midwife's manual into church and using it to tease the girls. He read out the names of the culprits in church, and then had to deal with furious parents as well. (blog, Grateful to the Dead, a church historian's playground, found under Jonathan Edwards; Preacher in the hands of an angry church)
Not all children were convinced by their parents' efforts at religious instruction:
'I thought I heard him (his father) talking to one who would come here sometime or other, and would make us go where he was, and would be angry with me if I was not found of him to be of a certain description of character that was agreable to him...I pretty generally concluded that I was a rebel against God' a six year old is reported to have said, and:
'"What is heaven, mamma"...asked one little girl. "It is an eternal sabbath" replied her mother. "Oh dear", exclaimed the child, "What have I done that I should go where there is an eternal sabbath?"'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 170; p. 63; from The Christian Examiner and Theological Review, 1825, II, p. 291)
In the mid 17th century a certain Alvyn Hyde, looking in vain for signs of spiritual strength in his children wrote:
'All my children have perfect bodies, are tolerably active, and possess common sense...but I have to lament before my Heavenly Father, that they all appear to be in a state of nature unsanctified, and unhumbled. I do not mean that they are vicious, but they do not appear to possess religion.'
(Fleming, op.cit, p. 18)
A form of Christianity that crucially depended on members experiencing a sense of personal damnation followed by salvation in Christ came up against its limitations. Inevitably the early Puritans in America had to adapt their beliefs and practises . Their efforts to isolate their religious state from outside influences were doomed to failure as increasing numbers of immigrants of all kinds arrived in America. Other religious refugees founded settlements, the most important being the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Not all the immigrants to Massachusetts were good Puritans, a chronic shortage of servants let to large numbers of people being encouraged to emigrate as indentured servants and these were often from non-Puritan or quite irreligious backgrounds.
'A multitude of ungovernable persons, the very scum of the earth'
This is how the Rev. John White described new immigrants to New England in the early 18th century
(Quoted in Ford, The New England Primer, op. cit, p. 52)
The north received a far higher proportion of religious, respectable middle class immigrants than the southern colonies which attracted large numbers of enterprising adventurers hoping to make money in areas where the rule of law was week. Ne'er-do-wells and younger sons were packed off to Virginia and other colonies to do the best they could for themselves. So young Thomas Verney was packed off to Virginia when he embarrassed his family through an unfortunate love affair when he was nineteen. The letter from the emigration agent to Lady Verney gives interesting details of the equipment a gentleman emigrant in 1635 might want to take with him:
'Now for his owne proper acomodation, I must intreat your ladiship that hee maye bringe vp with him a fether bed, bolster, pillow, blanketts, rugg, and 3 payre of sheets...Maddam, the reson why I intreat your ladyshipp that hee may haue with him for his owne particular vse a fether bed, bolster, blanquetts, rugg, curtaynes, and vallence is, that, althogh howsholds in Verginia ar soe well provided as to enterteyne a stranger with all thinges necewsary for the belly, yeat few or non ar better provided for the back as yeat then to serve theyre own turnes...'
(John Bruce, Letters and papers of the Verney family, Camden Society 1st series, vol. 56, 1853, p.161)
The agent stresses that Thomas should bring with him two or three indentured servants. these were not just for his own use but also a form of investment:
'if hee shall nott like the cuntry, then hee maye sell theyre tyme they haue to serve him vnto other men that haue neede of servants, and make a good bennifitt of them...'
An indentured servant or apprentice was half way between a slave and a freeman, protected by the law, but within that law bound to work a period of between seven and ten years. Traditionally apprentices received instruction in a trade in return for their labour.
It was in this way that large numbers of colonists, and many children, began their lives in America. John Croker, a Quaker for instance, was bound apprentice in 1686 when he was thirteen to:
'one John Sholson, by trade a serge maker, but who also professed surgery'
He was contracted to be taken to the Friends' colony in Pennsylvania and taught the surgical side of his master's business. When he arrived at the colony he spent the first year helping clear land for planting. His master and the family died of the 'distemper' and he wandered the country for a while till he was taken in by friends of his parents and sent to school in Boston. He decided to return to England and, after a very adventurous voyage, being captured by the French and shipwrecked off Newfoundland, reached home back in England. He was about seventeen, and his own mother did not recognise him. The experience, he says in his memoirs, worked him 'into a new lump' and, as his parents hoped, turned him from a wild youth into a model Quaker.
(Brief memoir of the life of John Croker, The Friends' Library, Vol. 14, 1850)
The child's consent to be apprenticed was not considered strictly necessary. When Peter Muhlenberg was sent back from Pennsylvania to his family's native Germany to be educated he ran away to join the army. His father exploded:
'If my boy had played me this trick here and enlisted, I would have sold him as a servant until his majority (age 21) or have put him in the House of Correction...'
(Paul A. Wallace, The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania, 1950, p. 69, from a letter dated 1766)
A new start in America was felt to be such an opportunity that in the 17th century many children receiving poor relief were sent out, more or less forcibly, and indentured to colonists. About 1,500 children were sent out to Virginia from London just between 1619 and 1620 with their passage paid by charity. Children were also sent to Barbados and New England from Bristol and Liverpool. The practise seems to have ceased around 1643. The Records of the Virginia Company
state:
'foreasmuch as we have now resolved to send this spring very large supplies for the strength and increasing of the Colony...and finding that the sending of those children to be apprentices hath been very grateful to the people; we pray your Lordship and the rest in pursuit of your former so pious actions to renew your like favours and furnish us again with one hundred more for the next spring. Our desire is that we may have them of twelve years old and upward with allowance of three pounds apiece for their transportation and forty shillings apiece for their apparel as was formerly granted. They shall be apprentices the boys till they come to twenty-one years of age, the girls till the like age or till they be married and afterwards they shal be placed as tenants upon the public land.'
Each apprentice was given twenty five acres of land at 6d a year rent on completing their apprenticeship, if they survived to do so.
(Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America, a documentary history, 3 vols, Harvard U.P. 1974-Covering US history 1600 onwards. p. 270. Records of the Virginia Company of London, the Court Book, p. See also Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, 1969, Vol. 1, Chapter 6.
The Court Book is also available online.)
In 1620 the British Privy Council authorised the poor law administrators to send children forcibly if necessary:
'if any of them shall be found obstinant to resist or otherwise to disobey such directions as shall be given in this behalf, we to likewise herebye authorise such as shall have their charge of this service to imprison, punish, and dispose any of those children...and so ship them out for Virginia with as much expedition as shall stand with conveniency.'
'(Bremner, Vol. 1, Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1619-1621, Jan 1, 1629)
There was such a demand for labour that children were even kidnapped, as Africans were, and shipped off illegally. Bremner cites several cases of people accused of being a 'common taker up of children into ships' . Once the ship had put to sea it was virtually impossible to get the children back.
(Bremner, Vol. 1, p. 9, quoted from Recognizances taken before Thomas Salow esq. JP of William Graves and Godfrey Vale, Greater London Record Office, Middlesex Sessions Rolls, RJ/SX 1165/54, May 4, 1657, p. 15)
In the 18th century large numbers of immigrants from exceedingly poor European backgrounds began to make their way to America in the hope of a better future, and parents often indentured their children, and themselves, for a number of years to pay their fares. The Lutheran pastor Gottleib Mittleburger wrote an account of the terrible sea voyages from Germany to Pennsylvania in the early 1750 on which many women and children died. He said most immigrants arrived in America owing their passage money. Their labour was sold to masters who came down to the ships to barter with the captain. Families were separated, just as they were at slave auctions and might never see each other again. Children under five could not be indentured, but as they had to be freely given away if their fares were not paid this gave them no safety. Children aged five to ten whose fare was owing were indentured to the age of twenty one. Orphan children could be apprenticed to pay both their own fares and their dead parents. These apprenticeships were really just cheap labour, not designed as apprenticeships traditionally were to teach a trade. The equivalent in Britain would be the practise of sending foundling children to work in the cotton factories.
(Bremner Vol. 1, p. 155. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania ed. and trans. by Oscar Handlin and John Clive, 1st pub. 1756, also Cambridge, Mass. 1960. Internet editions available)
Conditions on the immigrant ships were very hard, even worse than for people now escaping Africa across the Mediterranean, a comparable situation In addition to the normal privations of an eight week voyage in a primitive, overcrowded sailing ship, the captains often cheated their helpless human cargo of their proper rations to increase their profits. According to Mittleburger:
According to Mittleberger:
'Children between the ages of one and seven seldom survive the sea voyage...I myself alas saw such a pitiful fate overtake thirty-two children on board our vessel.'
They generally died from epidemic diseases such as typhoid and measles, impossible to control on a crowded ship.
Although slavery was never practised on the same scale in the north of America as in the southern states, captured Native Americans, including children from hostile tribes were allotted as servants.
So, in 1637 Roger Williams wrote to John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts:
'It having again pleased the most High to put into your hands another miserable drove of Adams degenerate seede, and our bretheren by nature; I am bold...to request the keeping and bringing up of one of the Children. I have fixed mine eye on this litle one with the red about his neck.'
( Papers of the Winthrop Family, Vol. 3,28 June 1637, internet editions available)
The settlers were also encouraged to kidnap Native American children, with the intent of saving their souls:
'...you must procure from them some convenient number of their children to be brought up in your language and manners. And...we think it reasonable you first remove...them from their ...priests by a surprise....'
(1609 Virginia Council, London, Instructions orders and constitutions to Sir. Thomas Gates Kt....Governor of Virginia, Bremner, Vol. 1, p.74.)
The Native Americans had equally little hesitation about kidnapping children from the settlers and bringing them up according to their own traditions.
However, in spite of the immense variation in settlers' backgrounds the spirit of Calvinist Christianity was still predominant in the early years of the colony. Its influence was spread through school text books. Most of the early American ones originated in Britain. The first American school book was the famous New England Primer, published in Boston by Benjamin Harris around 1690.
The early Puritans were more concerned about education than most of the other early colonists. In 1636 Lucy Downing wrote to the Governor of the colony, John Winthrop, from England where she was supervising her son's education, complaining of the lack of schools in the colony:
'I beleeu a collegd (sic) would put noe small life into the plantation.'
(Winthrop papers, Vol. III, p. 367)
That year the General Court of Massachusetts established a secondary school which two years later became Harvard, the oldest college in America. This was also the first school to be established with funds specially voted for the purpose; half the colony's annual income. It remained a small college for some time. In the 1690s the average number of students graduating was only thirteen a year. Pupils entered at age fourteen and lived in college. As in equivalent British boarding schools, food was bad, discipline arbitrary and teaching poor. Students were intended for careers in the religious ministry.
(Harry G. Good and James D. Teller, A history of American education, 3rd ed. 1973, p. 57)
In 1642 a law was passed to compel parents to have their children taught to read 'so much learning as may inable them perfectly to read the english tongue, and knowledge of the Capital Laws''
Parents must also have their children catechised at least once a week. The motive behind this concern was religious, as was Puritan concern with education in Britain. Children must learn to read English so that they could read the Bible.
The first law concerning the organised provision of schooling was passed by the Court of Massechusetts in 1647. Towns of 50 households were required to maintain a school master for teaching elementary schooling, and towns of 100 households to maintain a grammar master to teach Latin and Greek to boys going to college. This was the first law ever passed for the provision of public schooling at public expense.
(Morgan, op.cit, p.45)
Many small towns, however, preferred to pay a fine rather than make provision for schooling, reflecting the view of many of the settlers that education was largely a waste of time. This belief was particularly strong among those involved in agriculture, an industry which traditionally regards education for the work force with deep suspicion. It was the religious leaders of the community who fought for education.
School houses were often simple log cabins and children were expected to help provide the wood for the stove to heat them. This was so generally accepted that in 1736 West Hartford barred from the fire every child whose parents had not sent wood. The scattered population, especially in frontier areas, led to itinerate school teachers, staying a few months in several townships on a circuit and often combining school teaching with other duties. The demands of a farming community also led to experiments with two term tuition, the younger children studying in summer, under a female teacher, the older ones in winter when the harvest was over and they were not needed in the fields. As all over Europe, the harvest came first. (see Alice Morse Earle, op.cit, p. 70-79)
Many children who attended did so sporadically. Abraham Lincoln, for example, is said to have had less than a year's formal education, and educated himself, very successfully. (see Wikipedia for details)
Samuel Goodrich, better known as 'Peter Parley', one of the most popular 19th century writers of instructional books for children, also attended this type of school and left a description:
'In winter the battle for life with green fizzling fuel, which was brought in lengths and cut up by the scholars was a stern one. Not infrequently the wood, gushing with sap as it was, chanced to let the fire go out, and as there was no living without fire, the school was dismissed, whereat the scholars rejoiced.
He goes on:
I was about six years old when I first went to school. My teacher was 'Aunt Delight' a maiden lady of fifty...The children were called up one by one to Aunt Delight, who sat on a low chair, and required each, as a preliminary, "to make his manners", which consisted of a small, sullen nod. She then placed the spelling-book before the pupil, and with a pen-knife pointed one by one, to the letters of the alphabet, saying "What is that?"
I believe I achieved the alphabet that summer. Two years later, I went to the winter school at the same place kept by Lewis Olmstead...Reading, writing and arithmetic were the only things taught, and that very indifferently.
(Quoted in Clifton Johnson OId-time schools and school-books, 1904, p. 116)
By 1700 about a third of the towns in Massachusetts had schools of some kind.
There is a description of Boston Latin School under Ezekiel Cheever, headmaster for seventy years, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair:
'Now imagine yourselves, my children, in Master Ezekiel Cheever's school room. It is a large, dingy room, with a sanded floor, and is lighted by windows that turn on hinges and have little diamond-shaped panes of glass. The scholars sit on long benches, with desks before them. At one end of the room is a great fireplace, so very spacious that there is room enough for three or four boys to stand in each of the chimney corners...What a murmur of multitudinous tongues...as the scholars con over their various tasks...'The boys are all construing Virgil; since the school was originally intended to train future ministers of the church, girls were not admitted.
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair or True Stories from New England History, 1620-1808, chapter 3. 1841 Project Gutenberg internet edition available)
All schools above dame school level were church schools in New England but in the colonies around New York, at that time called New Amsterdam, and under Dutch influence, there were a considerable mix of other nationalities and religions, here many private and non-religious schools were set up. These followed a tradition of religious freedom, particularly in areas colonised by the Dutch, who also imported from the Netherlands a system of school provision from the town rates; 'board schools'.
(see Good &Teller, op. cit. p. 34)
There were also missionary schools set up for the Native Americans and free charity schools for the poor, pioneered by William Penn in Philadelphia from 1689 where the Charter school began to provide free instruction for those who could not afford to pay. Penn knew the value of education, as his three letters to his children, written as he left England having been granted the lands which became Pennsylvania by King Charles II:
'My Dear Springett, Be good, learn to fear God, avoide evil, love thy book, be kind to thy Brother and Sister & God wil bless the & I will exceedingly love thee.'
'Dear Laetitia, I dearly love y & would have thee sober, learn thy book & love thy Brothers. I will send thee a pretty Book to learn in. ye Lord bless thee & make a good woman of thee.'
'Dear Billie, I love thee much, therefore be sober & quiet & learn his book, I will send him one, so ye Lord bless ye. Amen.'
(Howard M. Jennings, The Family of William Penn, London: Headley Brost, Philedelphia, The Author, 1899)
In the southern colonies and Caribbean where the population was more scattered than in the north, the pattern of education was even more diverse. Many wealthy planters sent their children, especially their sons, abroad for their education, either to Britain or to France, depending on their religion and national background. Alternatively they might be sent north. Alice Morse Earle quotes the letters of the Halls, a family of Barbados planters who sent their son Richard and later their daughter to live with their grandmother and be educated in Boston. Richard Hall wrote to his father in 1719 about his studies:
'Honour'd Sir...I am now in the Second form, and am learning Castilio (Castiglione?) and Ovid's Metamorphosis & I hope I shall be fit to go to College in two Years time...'
His grandmother's letters are usually about the state of his clothes:
'Richard wears out nigh 12 pairs of shoes a year. He brought 12 hankers with him and they have all been lost long ago...His way is to tie knottys at one end & beat Boys with them and then to lose them & he cares not a bit what I will say to him.'
Alice Morse Earle, op.cit. p. 86)
Alice Morse Earle also quotes a letter from a Dutch boy, John Den Broeck, who went away to school in 1752 without his spare shoes:
'Honour'd Father...I have found all the things in my trunk but I must have a pair of Schuse. And mamma please to send me some Ches nutts and some Wall nutts: you please to send me some smok befe, and for bringing my trunk 3/9, and for a pare of Schuse 9 shillings. You please to send me som dride corn (popcorn?) My Duty to Father and Mother and Sister and to all friends. I am your Dutyfull Son John Ten Broek. Father forgot to send me my Schuse.'
(Alice Morse Earle p. 80)
Many families in the south, as in Europe, employed private tutors or governesses for their children rather than send them away to school. Here is Philip Vickers Fithian's account of his post as tutor with a Williamsburg family:
He has two sons, and one Nephew; the eldest Son is turned of Seventeern, and is reading Salust and the greek grammar; the others are about fourteen, and in english grammar, and Arithmetic. He has besides five daughters which I am to teach english, the eldest is turned of fifteen, and is reading the spectator; she is employed two days in every week in learning to play the Forte-Piana, and Harpsicord...
(Bremner op. cit Vol. 1, p. 200, from D. Hunter ed. Journals and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774; A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion Williamsburg, Va, 1945, p. 34. Spelling and grammar as quoted. See Philip Vickers Fithian Journals and Letters 1767-1774, edited by John Rogers Williams, 1900, internet edition available)
This is just the kind of education the children of an English gentleman might expect in the 18th century.
However, education seems to have been more valued in the north than in the south. Possibly this reflected the pattern of immigration, the north having received a far higher proportion of middle class immigrants who traditionally valued on education.
In America as in Britain there was controversy over the merits of a classical or a more practical, technological, education. In America, shortage of men with skills such as engineering led to a greater demand from political leaders for practical, technological, scientific education. In 1682 William Penn, in Frame of Government, advocated a similar course of study to that recommended by the great European educator Comenius, with special emphasis on mathematics, particularly applied maths, navigation, surveying, shipbuilding and agriculture. (Good & Teller, op. cit, p. 61)
Benjamin Franklin in his Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania, 1749, outlined similar proposals for the setting up of academies to teach both the classics and practical subjects such as writing, drawing, arithmetic, accounts, the first principles of geometry and astronomy, English grammar and a general knowledge of history and geography, morality and some practical agriculture and mechanics. As a result of his proposals the Philadelphia Academy was set up which provided such course alongside a traditional classical education. It was hoped that this would, among other advantages, help to remedy the shortage of country schoolmasters;
'The Country suffering at present very much for want of good Schoolmasters, and oblig'd frequently to employ in their schools vicious imported Servants, or concealed Papists, who by their bad Examples and Instructions often deprave the Morals or corrupt the Principles of the Children under their care.'
Benjamin Franklin, Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania, 1749, Bremner op.cit. Vol. 1, p. 188 intenet edition available)
Parents, however, continued to prefer the traditional education of a European gentleman for their sons, and the practical side of the academy was not a success. There were, however, many private academies set up to teach practical subjects, as in Britain. In addition many private tutors advertised lessons in subjects such as book-keeping.
In 1779 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, 1776) proposed an education bill for Virginia which would have given that state the beginnings of a well organised state system of general education. His proposals provided for a primary school in each township of over a hundred families, giving three years free education to the brighter boys, but otherwise fee-paying. This would have provided a grounding in English grammar, classics, geography and arithmetic. Jefferson further proposed scholarships to William and Mary College for promising secondary school boys without funds of trheir own. This scheme, however, came to nothing. America, like Britain, did not get an organised system of state schooling until the 19th century.
Girls too had a conventional schooling on the European model, most receiving little or no academic education though housewifely skills were valued perhaps more highly in 17th and 18th century America, where servants were less easy to come by than in Europe. Mrs. Anne Grant (1755-1838) was brought up in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now New York, in the early 18th century. She learned to do exquisite needlework, and to be an excellent housewife, but very little else. In her memoirs she said girls of her class:
'were taught...to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls could read English; when they did they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and a few were taught writing.'
(Earle, op.cit, quote from Mrs. Ann McVicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, pub. Philadelphia, 1846, internet edition available)
The influential wife of President John Adams, Abigail Adams, (1744-1818) daughter of a New England minister, gave a similar account, expressing her concern for girls' education:
'My early education did not partake of the abundant opportunities which the present days (1817) offer and which even our common country schools now afford. I never was sent to any school. I was always sick. Female education in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetick; in some few and rare instances music and dancing.'
(Earle, op.cit. p.93)
Seminaries like those in Britain developed in the 18th century in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Richard Hall's sister was sent, from Barbados like her brother, to stay with her grandmother in Boston and attend one when she was eight. She was even more disobedient than her brother, removing herself and her maid to lodgings because she had to share a room and was not allowed wine with her meals, and having to be forcibly returned to her grandmother's. Her father backed her up over the wine, saying it was more fitting to her station than water. Her grandmother wrote complaining that:
'Sally won't go to school nor to church and wands a new muff and a great many other things she don't need.' Sally studied dancing, sewing and writing.
(Earle, op.cit. p.102. From the letter book of the Hon. Hugh Hall, Judge of the Admiralty)
However a number of girls' schools opened in the late 18th century which provided an unusually academic education for girls. John Poor's Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia offered tuition in rhetoric, geography, reading, writing, English composition and arithmetic. The tuition at the Moravian schools in Bethlehem, the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans, and Caleb Bingham's Academy in Massachusetts and Westtown Boarding School, Pennsylvania (founded 1799), were providing good secondary education for both boys and girls before 1800, long before any equivalent schooling was available in Britain.
With such revolutionary plans for girls' education being developed it is not surprising that some parents had alarming visions of their daughters becoming unmarriageable bluestockings or over-straining their delicate brains. Harry Laurens advised his daughter, aged twelve, to keep her mind on domestic matters:
'When you are measuring the surface of the globe, remember you are to cut a part in it , and think of a plum pudding and other domestic duties.'
(Earle, op.cit. p. 78)
The early settlers relied mostly on school books imported from Europe; the English schoolmaster John Brinsley's A consolation for our grammar schools, 1622 was partly written for the Virginia colonists, to help preserve the purity of the English language among the Virginia colonists.
(see Good and Teller, op.cit. p. 9) The works of popular British Puritan authors Isaac Watts, Nathaniel Cotton and James Janeway were as popular in New England as in Britain. However, the religious tone of many approved British primers was not generally acceptable to New England settlers and they soon produced their own. John Cotton (1585-1652, no relation to Nathaniel) was a British Puritan minister who fled persecution in Britain in 1632 and became a very successful minister in Massachusetts. His Spiritual milk for Boston Babes is considered the first American published school book, 1646 (for the text see Milk for Babes Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments, see Wikipedia; internet edition available, University of Nebraska)
Cotton Mather (1663-1728) produced an edition of James Janeway,'s Token for Children, 1671, the famous British Puritan school book, with additional biographies of American Puritans:
'When she was about Two and a half Old; as she lay in the Cradle, she would ask her self that Question, What is my corrupt Nature? and would make Answer again to her self, it is empty of Grace, bent unto Sin, and only to Sin, and that continually. She took great Delight in learning her Catechism, and could not willingly go to Bed without saying some Part of it.'
(Quoted in A.S. W. Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books, 1966, p. xxxi.
(A token for children. Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children. By James Janeway, Minister of the Gospel. : To which is added, A token, for the children of New England. Or, Some examples of children, in whom the fear of God was remarkably budding before they died; in several parts of New England. Preserved and published for the encouragement of piety in other children.)
Other New England writers and emigrants like the well know poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) published collections of pious poems similar to those also published in Britain at that time:
(The Works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse, ed. John Ellis, 1867, p. 151, The Four Ages of Man. Internet edition available.
Anne Bradstreet emigrated from Britain with her family and was the first woman poet to be published in America)
America also produced a few books on polite behaviour, similar to the British books of courtesy. The School of Good Manners, New London, 1754, suggests by implication that the standard of table manners among the settlers was not high:
'Grease not thy fingers or table napkin more than necessity requires - Spit not, cough not, nor blow thy nose at the table, if it may be avoided; but if there be necessity, do it aside, and without much noise - Lean not thy elbow on the table, or on the back of the chair - Stuff not thy mouth so as to fill thy cheeks, be content with smaller mouthfuls - Smell not of thy meat nor put it to thy nose; turn it not the other side upwards to view it upon thy plate. Gnaw not bones at the table but clean them with thy knife (unless they be very small ones) and hold them not with a whole hand, but with two fingers. Drink not nor speak with anything in thy mouth.'
(The School of Good Manners, New London, 1754, quoted in Rosenbach, op.cit, p. xxx1x.
Internet ed. available of 1790 and 1815 editions of this popular little book)
The most important American schoolbook produced by Puritans was the New England Primer, printed in many editions in America and Britain right into the 19th century. This little book originated like the British Royal Primer in the desire for one standardised catechism to replace the many highly individual works prepared by various ministers for the use of their own congregations. Its compiler was a printer, Benjamin Harris (active 1673-1716?), who fled to New England in 1686 after being implicated in the Popish Plot. He set up the London Coffee House in Boston where he sold 'books, Coffee, Tee and Chucaletto' a kind of early Waterstones. He had already written and published The Protestant Tutor, in England, in 1681,(under the piazza of the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, London): 'It is the design of that little Book to bring up children in an Aversion to Popery.'
This became the basis for The New England Primer. Although many 17th editions were printed none seem to have survived, the earliest know in dated 1727. ( see Paul Ford, The New England Primer, 1897 and later reprints)There is a complete text of a 1777 edition, printed by Edward Draper, Boston, on the internet, googlebooks.co.uk)
It is possible to see the effect of alternate periods of religious fervour and secularisation, Royalist and Republican sentiment in the changing language of editions of this little book, which in early editions begins with a woodcut of the martyrdom of the Rev. John Rogers, burned at the stake in London, Britain, for his faith watched by his wife and nine children, one a babe in arms.
The 1777 edition has a woodcut of John Hancock, President of the Second Congress at the time of the American Revolution and break from the British Monarchy.
'The British response to events in America:
'Your cousin Andrew is going to America to bring the Rebels to submission. As you read scripture you have learnt that Rebellion is like the sin of witch-craft, leaving your natural Lord & setting up another. I hope he'll fight 'em well...'
( Verney Letters if the 18th century, Vol. 2.)
The New England Primer continues with the ABC as in hornbooks. The Puritans quickly discarded the cross, traditionally printed at both ends of the top row, 'Christ's cross row', as a 'graven image', smacking of Popish idolatory. After this comes a rhyming alphabet, a mixture of religious and secular:
'In Adam's fall
We sinned all'
....
'King Charles the Good,
No Man of Blood'
echoing Royalist sentiments.
This later became:
'Our king the good
No man of blood'
and as Republicanism gained ground:
'Kings should be good
Not men of blood'
After 1776 the rhyme reads triumphantly and censoriously:
'The British King
Lost States thirteen'
while W acquired the new rhyme:
'By Washington
Great deeds were done'
and 'Great Washington brave
His country did save'
Between 1740 and 1760 when New England was experiencing a profound religious revival the secular parts of this alphabet were evangelised:
'Whales in the Sea
God's voice obey'
In a variant called The New English Tutor a religious proverbs alphabet was substituted:
'eXhort one another daily, while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the Deceitfulness of Sin.'
In the late 18th century, however, the alphabet was secularised again, with the introduction of rhymes from the British publisher John Newbery's version, the Royal Primer:
A despicable subversion of Purtain belief in heavenly rewards.
Other British children's books popular in America were also amended after the Revolution. In William Cowper's popular poem John Gilpin, for example the President was substituted for the King, with total disregard for the metre:
Independence also led to a great increase in the production of native American school books, partly in response to Noah Webster (1758-1843), creator of the first American Dictionary, who campaigned fiercely for American youth to be educated in America:
'A foreign education is directly opposite to our political interests, and ought to be discontinued, if not prohibited.
(Bremner, op. cit, Vol. 1. quoted from The American Magazine, 1, May, 1788, p. 370-4)
Noah Webster himself produced the widely used American Spelling Book, 1783, which has never been out of print (Encyclopaedia Britannica, internet ed.) of which one critic complained that the woodcut of Webster used as a frontispiece was so ugly it scared the children from their lessons. (see Clifton Johnson, Old-time schools and school books, 1904, p. 171)
Preachers, of course, emphasised the doom which awaited the child who died unregenerate:
'In a little time you will be in Eternity, some sooner and some later...Consider how it will be when you come to die and are unconverted...How dreadful it will be to be all together in misery. They you won't play together any more but will be damned together, will cry out with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth together...'Tis not likely you will all live to grow up.'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 99, quoted from the unpublished papers housed at Yale University of the famous American Revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), who had severe problems with unruly boys in his congregation. Internet editions of his sermons available)
Early death was a very real fear to both parents and children. There were diseases such as measles and smallpox. The harsh climate which is the first winter of the colony had killed half the original settlers claimed many more following the expansion of the settlements. The infant death rate was particularly high. Cotton Mather had fifteen children; only six survived to adult years, and only two survived him. Samuel Sewall had fourteen children and five survived. Ironically one cause of the high infant mortality rate was, without any doubt, the pious zeal with which they hurried new born infants to be baptised:
'6 Feb. 1678 Between 3 & 4pm Mr. Willard baptised my Son, whom I named Stephen. Day was Louring after the storm, but not freezing. Child shrunk at the water but cryed not.'
(Sewall's Diary, op. cit. p. 167)
Baptism generally took place when the child was only a few days old, and was not simply the marking of a cross with a damp finger but practically a cold bath, winter or summer:
'She cried not at all, though a pretty deal of water was poured on her by Mr. Willard.'
(Sewall's Diary, 24 Aug. 1690)
Judith Sewall, whose baptism took place in August, was born a month premature. She left the world almost exactly on the date she should have entered it.
Charles Chauncy was a Minister who believed that only baptism by full immersion could be effective. When he carried this out on his twin sons one of them passed out and their mother stopped him from continuing with the baptism, according to John Winthrop, she almost pulled Chauncy himself into the water. (Wikipedia)
The laws of Massachusetts provided for the weekly catechising of children, and for unruly, badly brought up children to be taken from their parents and apprenticed out. Religious instruction of apprentices was one of the duties of a master or mistress. (see Fleming op.cit. p. 104)
Nevertheless, although this preoccupation with the state of the child's soul may seem oppressive to the modern reader, there is no sign that parents were exceptionally harsh with their children The Puritan way was rather one of loving persuasion than force. In Sam Sewall's diary he only twice mentions chastising his children, once when he:
'Corrected Sam. for breach of the 9th Commandment, saying he had been at the Writing School when he had not.'
and once when Sam threw a brass knob at his sister Betty, bruising her forehead.
(Sewall, Diary, Sept. 15, 1688)
Cotton Mather punished his children first by showing his displeasure and finally by banishing them from his sight, and strongly disapproved of beating:
'Tutors, Be strict, But yet be Gentle too:
Don't by fierce Cruelties fair Hopes undo
.......
The lad with Honour first, and Reason Rule;
Blowes are but for the Refractory Fool.'
(Morgan, op.cit, p. 58, quoted from Cotton Mather, Corderius Americanus, an essay on the good education of children, p,20-21 internet editions available)Cotton Mather himself, if his biographer is to be believed, was a model Puritan child:
'He seemed indeed to be sanctified from the womb. For, as soon, almost, as he began to speak, he began to pray, and never left it off again as long as he lived.'
(Jennings, Abridgement of the Life of Cotton Mather, 1744 p. 17 internet editions available)
He would exhort his playmates to prayer, composing suitable prayers for them, and read fifteen chapters of scripture a day from childhood:
'His early Abhorrence of Sin appeared by the Reproofs he would give his Play-Mates for any wicked Works or Practices.'
(Jennings, op. cit. p. 5)
Cotton Mather's brother Nathaniel, like many Puritans, kept a journal in which, aged sixteen, he shows quite a morbid sense of sin:
'Of the manifold sins which I was then guilty of, none so sticks upon me, as that being very young I was whittling on the sabbath-day, and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the door.'
(Fleming, op.cit, p.18-19)
Cotton Mather's son Increase, however, was a handful and there are many despairing references to his wildness in Mather's diary:
'From the Depths I cried unto the Lord, for his grace to be given unto my children; particularly my son Increase! he wrote, and, after Increase, aged fourteen, had blown himself and his sister Lizzie up with gunpowder:
'I would improve this occasion to inculcate Instructions op piety in them and the rest. Especially with Relation to their Danger of Eternal Burnings.'
(Quoted in Wendell, op. cit, p. 242)
To check that all children were getting proper religious instruction, some churches had them publicly recite the catechism in the meeting house, three times a year, a third of the catechism each time. The Rev. Dorcus Clarke remembered it still being done in 1878:
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| An example from Cotton Mather's catechism (National Humanities Center website) |
The shorter catechism, specially prepared for children by the British Westminster Assembly in 1643-9, had 107 questions with answers ranging in length from eight to a hundred words,. and was supposed to be learned by all children in Massachusetts between the ages of eight and fifteen.
(Paul Ford, The New England Primer, 1897, Appendix IV)
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| The British Westminster Assembly catechism (Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary website) |
'not to play, not to dance, not to sing, not to read story-books, nor to take a walk in the country, nor a swim in the river; not, in short, to do any thing nature specially craved....nothing is so hard for a child as not-to-do.'
Henry James the elder rebelled against not-to-do my indulging in secret sips of gin or brandy monring and evening when he passed by the shoemakers, a local haunt of vice.
(Leon Edel, Henry James, a life,1953, Vol. 1, p. 23)
Nevertheless, or possibly because of, this surfeit of religious teaching, the children of the Elect constantly strayed from the path of righteousness. As early as 1657 the Rev. Ezekiel Rogers wrote:
'I find greatest trouble and grief about the rising generation. Young people are little stirred here, but they strengthen one another in evil, by example, by counsel. Much ado I have had with my own family...Even the children of godley here and elsewhere, make a useful proof. So that, I tremble to think, what will become of this glorious work that we have begun, when the ancient shall be gathered unto their fathers. I fear grace and blessing will die with them.'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 10)
The Massachussetts boys could be so unruly in church, where they were all seated together, that a tithing man was appointed to be responsible for each ten or so families, to ensure regular church attendance, Sabbath behaviour and learning the catechism. (Alice Morse Earle op. cit p. 244)
A Connecticut judge in 1750 has left a record of their typical misbehaviour:
'Such as larfing or Sailing and puling the hair of nayber benoni Simkins in the time of publick Worship...Such as throwing Sister penticost perkins on the ice it being Saboth day or Lords day....'
(Fleming, op.cit. p. 63)
Jonathan Edwards, the famous American Puritan preacher, struggling with his Northampton congregation in 1744 caught the teenage boys bringing a midwife's manual into church and using it to tease the girls. He read out the names of the culprits in church, and then had to deal with furious parents as well. (blog, Grateful to the Dead, a church historian's playground, found under Jonathan Edwards; Preacher in the hands of an angry church)
Not all children were convinced by their parents' efforts at religious instruction:
'I thought I heard him (his father) talking to one who would come here sometime or other, and would make us go where he was, and would be angry with me if I was not found of him to be of a certain description of character that was agreable to him...I pretty generally concluded that I was a rebel against God' a six year old is reported to have said, and:
'"What is heaven, mamma"...asked one little girl. "It is an eternal sabbath" replied her mother. "Oh dear", exclaimed the child, "What have I done that I should go where there is an eternal sabbath?"'
(Fleming, op. cit, p. 170; p. 63; from The Christian Examiner and Theological Review, 1825, II, p. 291)
In the mid 17th century a certain Alvyn Hyde, looking in vain for signs of spiritual strength in his children wrote:
'All my children have perfect bodies, are tolerably active, and possess common sense...but I have to lament before my Heavenly Father, that they all appear to be in a state of nature unsanctified, and unhumbled. I do not mean that they are vicious, but they do not appear to possess religion.'
(Fleming, op.cit, p. 18)
A form of Christianity that crucially depended on members experiencing a sense of personal damnation followed by salvation in Christ came up against its limitations. Inevitably the early Puritans in America had to adapt their beliefs and practises . Their efforts to isolate their religious state from outside influences were doomed to failure as increasing numbers of immigrants of all kinds arrived in America. Other religious refugees founded settlements, the most important being the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Not all the immigrants to Massachusetts were good Puritans, a chronic shortage of servants let to large numbers of people being encouraged to emigrate as indentured servants and these were often from non-Puritan or quite irreligious backgrounds.
'A multitude of ungovernable persons, the very scum of the earth'
This is how the Rev. John White described new immigrants to New England in the early 18th century
(Quoted in Ford, The New England Primer, op. cit, p. 52)
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| Map of the USA, 1789-1790 (Wikipedia Commons website) |
'Now for his owne proper acomodation, I must intreat your ladiship that hee maye bringe vp with him a fether bed, bolster, pillow, blanketts, rugg, and 3 payre of sheets...Maddam, the reson why I intreat your ladyshipp that hee may haue with him for his owne particular vse a fether bed, bolster, blanquetts, rugg, curtaynes, and vallence is, that, althogh howsholds in Verginia ar soe well provided as to enterteyne a stranger with all thinges necewsary for the belly, yeat few or non ar better provided for the back as yeat then to serve theyre own turnes...'
(John Bruce, Letters and papers of the Verney family, Camden Society 1st series, vol. 56, 1853, p.161)
The agent stresses that Thomas should bring with him two or three indentured servants. these were not just for his own use but also a form of investment:
'if hee shall nott like the cuntry, then hee maye sell theyre tyme they haue to serve him vnto other men that haue neede of servants, and make a good bennifitt of them...'
An indentured servant or apprentice was half way between a slave and a freeman, protected by the law, but within that law bound to work a period of between seven and ten years. Traditionally apprentices received instruction in a trade in return for their labour.
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| The Hon. Thomnas Verney, painted by Kneller (Artnet website) |
'one John Sholson, by trade a serge maker, but who also professed surgery'
He was contracted to be taken to the Friends' colony in Pennsylvania and taught the surgical side of his master's business. When he arrived at the colony he spent the first year helping clear land for planting. His master and the family died of the 'distemper' and he wandered the country for a while till he was taken in by friends of his parents and sent to school in Boston. He decided to return to England and, after a very adventurous voyage, being captured by the French and shipwrecked off Newfoundland, reached home back in England. He was about seventeen, and his own mother did not recognise him. The experience, he says in his memoirs, worked him 'into a new lump' and, as his parents hoped, turned him from a wild youth into a model Quaker.
(Brief memoir of the life of John Croker, The Friends' Library, Vol. 14, 1850)
The child's consent to be apprenticed was not considered strictly necessary. When Peter Muhlenberg was sent back from Pennsylvania to his family's native Germany to be educated he ran away to join the army. His father exploded:
'If my boy had played me this trick here and enlisted, I would have sold him as a servant until his majority (age 21) or have put him in the House of Correction...'
(Paul A. Wallace, The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania, 1950, p. 69, from a letter dated 1766)
A new start in America was felt to be such an opportunity that in the 17th century many children receiving poor relief were sent out, more or less forcibly, and indentured to colonists. About 1,500 children were sent out to Virginia from London just between 1619 and 1620 with their passage paid by charity. Children were also sent to Barbados and New England from Bristol and Liverpool. The practise seems to have ceased around 1643. The Records of the Virginia Company
state:
'foreasmuch as we have now resolved to send this spring very large supplies for the strength and increasing of the Colony...and finding that the sending of those children to be apprentices hath been very grateful to the people; we pray your Lordship and the rest in pursuit of your former so pious actions to renew your like favours and furnish us again with one hundred more for the next spring. Our desire is that we may have them of twelve years old and upward with allowance of three pounds apiece for their transportation and forty shillings apiece for their apparel as was formerly granted. They shall be apprentices the boys till they come to twenty-one years of age, the girls till the like age or till they be married and afterwards they shal be placed as tenants upon the public land.'
Each apprentice was given twenty five acres of land at 6d a year rent on completing their apprenticeship, if they survived to do so.
(Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America, a documentary history, 3 vols, Harvard U.P. 1974-Covering US history 1600 onwards. p. 270. Records of the Virginia Company of London, the Court Book, p. See also Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, 1969, Vol. 1, Chapter 6.
The Court Book is also available online.)
In 1620 the British Privy Council authorised the poor law administrators to send children forcibly if necessary:
'if any of them shall be found obstinant to resist or otherwise to disobey such directions as shall be given in this behalf, we to likewise herebye authorise such as shall have their charge of this service to imprison, punish, and dispose any of those children...and so ship them out for Virginia with as much expedition as shall stand with conveniency.'
'(Bremner, Vol. 1, Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1619-1621, Jan 1, 1629)
There was such a demand for labour that children were even kidnapped, as Africans were, and shipped off illegally. Bremner cites several cases of people accused of being a 'common taker up of children into ships' . Once the ship had put to sea it was virtually impossible to get the children back.
(Bremner, Vol. 1, p. 9, quoted from Recognizances taken before Thomas Salow esq. JP of William Graves and Godfrey Vale, Greater London Record Office, Middlesex Sessions Rolls, RJ/SX 1165/54, May 4, 1657, p. 15)
In the 18th century large numbers of immigrants from exceedingly poor European backgrounds began to make their way to America in the hope of a better future, and parents often indentured their children, and themselves, for a number of years to pay their fares. The Lutheran pastor Gottleib Mittleburger wrote an account of the terrible sea voyages from Germany to Pennsylvania in the early 1750 on which many women and children died. He said most immigrants arrived in America owing their passage money. Their labour was sold to masters who came down to the ships to barter with the captain. Families were separated, just as they were at slave auctions and might never see each other again. Children under five could not be indentured, but as they had to be freely given away if their fares were not paid this gave them no safety. Children aged five to ten whose fare was owing were indentured to the age of twenty one. Orphan children could be apprenticed to pay both their own fares and their dead parents. These apprenticeships were really just cheap labour, not designed as apprenticeships traditionally were to teach a trade. The equivalent in Britain would be the practise of sending foundling children to work in the cotton factories.
(Bremner Vol. 1, p. 155. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania ed. and trans. by Oscar Handlin and John Clive, 1st pub. 1756, also Cambridge, Mass. 1960. Internet editions available)
Conditions on the immigrant ships were very hard, even worse than for people now escaping Africa across the Mediterranean, a comparable situation In addition to the normal privations of an eight week voyage in a primitive, overcrowded sailing ship, the captains often cheated their helpless human cargo of their proper rations to increase their profits. According to Mittleburger:
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| Mittleburger, Journey to Pennsylvania, p. 23 (Library of Congress) |
According to Mittleberger:
'Children between the ages of one and seven seldom survive the sea voyage...I myself alas saw such a pitiful fate overtake thirty-two children on board our vessel.'
Although slavery was never practised on the same scale in the north of America as in the southern states, captured Native Americans, including children from hostile tribes were allotted as servants.
So, in 1637 Roger Williams wrote to John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts:
'It having again pleased the most High to put into your hands another miserable drove of Adams degenerate seede, and our bretheren by nature; I am bold...to request the keeping and bringing up of one of the Children. I have fixed mine eye on this litle one with the red about his neck.'
( Papers of the Winthrop Family, Vol. 3,28 June 1637, internet editions available)
The settlers were also encouraged to kidnap Native American children, with the intent of saving their souls:
'...you must procure from them some convenient number of their children to be brought up in your language and manners. And...we think it reasonable you first remove...them from their ...priests by a surprise....'
(1609 Virginia Council, London, Instructions orders and constitutions to Sir. Thomas Gates Kt....Governor of Virginia, Bremner, Vol. 1, p.74.)
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| (Native American children, n.d.Pinterst: Hoze.space) |
However, in spite of the immense variation in settlers' backgrounds the spirit of Calvinist Christianity was still predominant in the early years of the colony. Its influence was spread through school text books. Most of the early American ones originated in Britain. The first American school book was the famous New England Primer, published in Boston by Benjamin Harris around 1690.
The early Puritans were more concerned about education than most of the other early colonists. In 1636 Lucy Downing wrote to the Governor of the colony, John Winthrop, from England where she was supervising her son's education, complaining of the lack of schools in the colony:
'I beleeu a collegd (sic) would put noe small life into the plantation.'
(Winthrop papers, Vol. III, p. 367)
That year the General Court of Massachusetts established a secondary school which two years later became Harvard, the oldest college in America. This was also the first school to be established with funds specially voted for the purpose; half the colony's annual income. It remained a small college for some time. In the 1690s the average number of students graduating was only thirteen a year. Pupils entered at age fourteen and lived in college. As in equivalent British boarding schools, food was bad, discipline arbitrary and teaching poor. Students were intended for careers in the religious ministry.
(Harry G. Good and James D. Teller, A history of American education, 3rd ed. 1973, p. 57)
In 1642 a law was passed to compel parents to have their children taught to read 'so much learning as may inable them perfectly to read the english tongue, and knowledge of the Capital Laws''
Parents must also have their children catechised at least once a week. The motive behind this concern was religious, as was Puritan concern with education in Britain. Children must learn to read English so that they could read the Bible.
The first law concerning the organised provision of schooling was passed by the Court of Massechusetts in 1647. Towns of 50 households were required to maintain a school master for teaching elementary schooling, and towns of 100 households to maintain a grammar master to teach Latin and Greek to boys going to college. This was the first law ever passed for the provision of public schooling at public expense.
(Morgan, op.cit, p.45)
Many small towns, however, preferred to pay a fine rather than make provision for schooling, reflecting the view of many of the settlers that education was largely a waste of time. This belief was particularly strong among those involved in agriculture, an industry which traditionally regards education for the work force with deep suspicion. It was the religious leaders of the community who fought for education.
School houses were often simple log cabins and children were expected to help provide the wood for the stove to heat them. This was so generally accepted that in 1736 West Hartford barred from the fire every child whose parents had not sent wood. The scattered population, especially in frontier areas, led to itinerate school teachers, staying a few months in several townships on a circuit and often combining school teaching with other duties. The demands of a farming community also led to experiments with two term tuition, the younger children studying in summer, under a female teacher, the older ones in winter when the harvest was over and they were not needed in the fields. As all over Europe, the harvest came first. (see Alice Morse Earle, op.cit, p. 70-79)
Many children who attended did so sporadically. Abraham Lincoln, for example, is said to have had less than a year's formal education, and educated himself, very successfully. (see Wikipedia for details)
Samuel Goodrich, better known as 'Peter Parley', one of the most popular 19th century writers of instructional books for children, also attended this type of school and left a description:
'In winter the battle for life with green fizzling fuel, which was brought in lengths and cut up by the scholars was a stern one. Not infrequently the wood, gushing with sap as it was, chanced to let the fire go out, and as there was no living without fire, the school was dismissed, whereat the scholars rejoiced.
He goes on:
I was about six years old when I first went to school. My teacher was 'Aunt Delight' a maiden lady of fifty...The children were called up one by one to Aunt Delight, who sat on a low chair, and required each, as a preliminary, "to make his manners", which consisted of a small, sullen nod. She then placed the spelling-book before the pupil, and with a pen-knife pointed one by one, to the letters of the alphabet, saying "What is that?"
I believe I achieved the alphabet that summer. Two years later, I went to the winter school at the same place kept by Lewis Olmstead...Reading, writing and arithmetic were the only things taught, and that very indifferently.
(Quoted in Clifton Johnson OId-time schools and school-books, 1904, p. 116)
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| Peter Parley on geography, 1832 (Website Housesandbooks) |
There is a description of Boston Latin School under Ezekiel Cheever, headmaster for seventy years, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair:
'Now imagine yourselves, my children, in Master Ezekiel Cheever's school room. It is a large, dingy room, with a sanded floor, and is lighted by windows that turn on hinges and have little diamond-shaped panes of glass. The scholars sit on long benches, with desks before them. At one end of the room is a great fireplace, so very spacious that there is room enough for three or four boys to stand in each of the chimney corners...What a murmur of multitudinous tongues...as the scholars con over their various tasks...'The boys are all construing Virgil; since the school was originally intended to train future ministers of the church, girls were not admitted.
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair or True Stories from New England History, 1620-1808, chapter 3. 1841 Project Gutenberg internet edition available)
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| Grandfather's Chair, 1898 edition (Pinterest) |
(see Good &Teller, op. cit. p. 34)
There were also missionary schools set up for the Native Americans and free charity schools for the poor, pioneered by William Penn in Philadelphia from 1689 where the Charter school began to provide free instruction for those who could not afford to pay. Penn knew the value of education, as his three letters to his children, written as he left England having been granted the lands which became Pennsylvania by King Charles II:
'My Dear Springett, Be good, learn to fear God, avoide evil, love thy book, be kind to thy Brother and Sister & God wil bless the & I will exceedingly love thee.'
'Dear Laetitia, I dearly love y & would have thee sober, learn thy book & love thy Brothers. I will send thee a pretty Book to learn in. ye Lord bless thee & make a good woman of thee.'
'Dear Billie, I love thee much, therefore be sober & quiet & learn his book, I will send him one, so ye Lord bless ye. Amen.'
(Howard M. Jennings, The Family of William Penn, London: Headley Brost, Philedelphia, The Author, 1899)
In the southern colonies and Caribbean where the population was more scattered than in the north, the pattern of education was even more diverse. Many wealthy planters sent their children, especially their sons, abroad for their education, either to Britain or to France, depending on their religion and national background. Alternatively they might be sent north. Alice Morse Earle quotes the letters of the Halls, a family of Barbados planters who sent their son Richard and later their daughter to live with their grandmother and be educated in Boston. Richard Hall wrote to his father in 1719 about his studies:
'Honour'd Sir...I am now in the Second form, and am learning Castilio (Castiglione?) and Ovid's Metamorphosis & I hope I shall be fit to go to College in two Years time...'
His grandmother's letters are usually about the state of his clothes:
'Richard wears out nigh 12 pairs of shoes a year. He brought 12 hankers with him and they have all been lost long ago...His way is to tie knottys at one end & beat Boys with them and then to lose them & he cares not a bit what I will say to him.'
Alice Morse Earle, op.cit. p. 86)
Alice Morse Earle also quotes a letter from a Dutch boy, John Den Broeck, who went away to school in 1752 without his spare shoes:
'Honour'd Father...I have found all the things in my trunk but I must have a pair of Schuse. And mamma please to send me some Ches nutts and some Wall nutts: you please to send me some smok befe, and for bringing my trunk 3/9, and for a pare of Schuse 9 shillings. You please to send me som dride corn (popcorn?) My Duty to Father and Mother and Sister and to all friends. I am your Dutyfull Son John Ten Broek. Father forgot to send me my Schuse.'
(Alice Morse Earle p. 80)
Many families in the south, as in Europe, employed private tutors or governesses for their children rather than send them away to school. Here is Philip Vickers Fithian's account of his post as tutor with a Williamsburg family:
He has two sons, and one Nephew; the eldest Son is turned of Seventeern, and is reading Salust and the greek grammar; the others are about fourteen, and in english grammar, and Arithmetic. He has besides five daughters which I am to teach english, the eldest is turned of fifteen, and is reading the spectator; she is employed two days in every week in learning to play the Forte-Piana, and Harpsicord...
(Bremner op. cit Vol. 1, p. 200, from D. Hunter ed. Journals and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774; A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion Williamsburg, Va, 1945, p. 34. Spelling and grammar as quoted. See Philip Vickers Fithian Journals and Letters 1767-1774, edited by John Rogers Williams, 1900, internet edition available)
This is just the kind of education the children of an English gentleman might expect in the 18th century.
However, education seems to have been more valued in the north than in the south. Possibly this reflected the pattern of immigration, the north having received a far higher proportion of middle class immigrants who traditionally valued on education.
In America as in Britain there was controversy over the merits of a classical or a more practical, technological, education. In America, shortage of men with skills such as engineering led to a greater demand from political leaders for practical, technological, scientific education. In 1682 William Penn, in Frame of Government, advocated a similar course of study to that recommended by the great European educator Comenius, with special emphasis on mathematics, particularly applied maths, navigation, surveying, shipbuilding and agriculture. (Good & Teller, op. cit, p. 61)
Benjamin Franklin in his Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania, 1749, outlined similar proposals for the setting up of academies to teach both the classics and practical subjects such as writing, drawing, arithmetic, accounts, the first principles of geometry and astronomy, English grammar and a general knowledge of history and geography, morality and some practical agriculture and mechanics. As a result of his proposals the Philadelphia Academy was set up which provided such course alongside a traditional classical education. It was hoped that this would, among other advantages, help to remedy the shortage of country schoolmasters;
'The Country suffering at present very much for want of good Schoolmasters, and oblig'd frequently to employ in their schools vicious imported Servants, or concealed Papists, who by their bad Examples and Instructions often deprave the Morals or corrupt the Principles of the Children under their care.'
Benjamin Franklin, Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania, 1749, Bremner op.cit. Vol. 1, p. 188 intenet edition available)
Parents, however, continued to prefer the traditional education of a European gentleman for their sons, and the practical side of the academy was not a success. There were, however, many private academies set up to teach practical subjects, as in Britain. In addition many private tutors advertised lessons in subjects such as book-keeping.
In 1779 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, 1776) proposed an education bill for Virginia which would have given that state the beginnings of a well organised state system of general education. His proposals provided for a primary school in each township of over a hundred families, giving three years free education to the brighter boys, but otherwise fee-paying. This would have provided a grounding in English grammar, classics, geography and arithmetic. Jefferson further proposed scholarships to William and Mary College for promising secondary school boys without funds of trheir own. This scheme, however, came to nothing. America, like Britain, did not get an organised system of state schooling until the 19th century.
Girls too had a conventional schooling on the European model, most receiving little or no academic education though housewifely skills were valued perhaps more highly in 17th and 18th century America, where servants were less easy to come by than in Europe. Mrs. Anne Grant (1755-1838) was brought up in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now New York, in the early 18th century. She learned to do exquisite needlework, and to be an excellent housewife, but very little else. In her memoirs she said girls of her class:
'were taught...to read, in Dutch, the Bible, and a few Calvinistic tracts of the devotional kind. But in the infancy of the settlement few girls could read English; when they did they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and a few were taught writing.'
(Earle, op.cit, quote from Mrs. Ann McVicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, pub. Philadelphia, 1846, internet edition available)
The influential wife of President John Adams, Abigail Adams, (1744-1818) daughter of a New England minister, gave a similar account, expressing her concern for girls' education:
'My early education did not partake of the abundant opportunities which the present days (1817) offer and which even our common country schools now afford. I never was sent to any school. I was always sick. Female education in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetick; in some few and rare instances music and dancing.'
(Earle, op.cit. p.93)
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| Abigail Adams, America's First Lady 1797-1801 (Wikipedia) |
'Sally won't go to school nor to church and wands a new muff and a great many other things she don't need.' Sally studied dancing, sewing and writing.
(Earle, op.cit. p.102. From the letter book of the Hon. Hugh Hall, Judge of the Admiralty)
However a number of girls' schools opened in the late 18th century which provided an unusually academic education for girls. John Poor's Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia offered tuition in rhetoric, geography, reading, writing, English composition and arithmetic. The tuition at the Moravian schools in Bethlehem, the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans, and Caleb Bingham's Academy in Massachusetts and Westtown Boarding School, Pennsylvania (founded 1799), were providing good secondary education for both boys and girls before 1800, long before any equivalent schooling was available in Britain.
With such revolutionary plans for girls' education being developed it is not surprising that some parents had alarming visions of their daughters becoming unmarriageable bluestockings or over-straining their delicate brains. Harry Laurens advised his daughter, aged twelve, to keep her mind on domestic matters:
'When you are measuring the surface of the globe, remember you are to cut a part in it , and think of a plum pudding and other domestic duties.'
(Earle, op.cit. p. 78)
The early settlers relied mostly on school books imported from Europe; the English schoolmaster John Brinsley's A consolation for our grammar schools, 1622 was partly written for the Virginia colonists, to help preserve the purity of the English language among the Virginia colonists.
(see Good and Teller, op.cit. p. 9) The works of popular British Puritan authors Isaac Watts, Nathaniel Cotton and James Janeway were as popular in New England as in Britain. However, the religious tone of many approved British primers was not generally acceptable to New England settlers and they soon produced their own. John Cotton (1585-1652, no relation to Nathaniel) was a British Puritan minister who fled persecution in Britain in 1632 and became a very successful minister in Massachusetts. His Spiritual milk for Boston Babes is considered the first American published school book, 1646 (for the text see Milk for Babes Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments, see Wikipedia; internet edition available, University of Nebraska)
Cotton Mather (1663-1728) produced an edition of James Janeway,'s Token for Children, 1671, the famous British Puritan school book, with additional biographies of American Puritans:
'When she was about Two and a half Old; as she lay in the Cradle, she would ask her self that Question, What is my corrupt Nature? and would make Answer again to her self, it is empty of Grace, bent unto Sin, and only to Sin, and that continually. She took great Delight in learning her Catechism, and could not willingly go to Bed without saying some Part of it.'
(Quoted in A.S. W. Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books, 1966, p. xxxi.
(A token for children. Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children. By James Janeway, Minister of the Gospel. : To which is added, A token, for the children of New England. Or, Some examples of children, in whom the fear of God was remarkably budding before they died; in several parts of New England. Preserved and published for the encouragement of piety in other children.)
Other New England writers and emigrants like the well know poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) published collections of pious poems similar to those also published in Britain at that time:
'Stained from birth with Adam's sinful fact,
Thence I Began to sin as soon as act:
A perverse will, a love to what's forbid,
A serpent's sting in pleasing face lay hid:
A lying tongue as soon as it could speak,
And fifth Commandment I do daily break.'
Anne Bradstreet emigrated from Britain with her family and was the first woman poet to be published in America)
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| The poet Anne Bradstreet (Wikipedia) |
America also produced a few books on polite behaviour, similar to the British books of courtesy. The School of Good Manners, New London, 1754, suggests by implication that the standard of table manners among the settlers was not high:
'Grease not thy fingers or table napkin more than necessity requires - Spit not, cough not, nor blow thy nose at the table, if it may be avoided; but if there be necessity, do it aside, and without much noise - Lean not thy elbow on the table, or on the back of the chair - Stuff not thy mouth so as to fill thy cheeks, be content with smaller mouthfuls - Smell not of thy meat nor put it to thy nose; turn it not the other side upwards to view it upon thy plate. Gnaw not bones at the table but clean them with thy knife (unless they be very small ones) and hold them not with a whole hand, but with two fingers. Drink not nor speak with anything in thy mouth.'
(The School of Good Manners, New London, 1754, quoted in Rosenbach, op.cit, p. xxx1x.
Internet ed. available of 1790 and 1815 editions of this popular little book)
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| (internet: archive.org) |
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| 1777 edition, Panoply Books internet site |
This became the basis for The New England Primer. Although many 17th editions were printed none seem to have survived, the earliest know in dated 1727. ( see Paul Ford, The New England Primer, 1897 and later reprints)There is a complete text of a 1777 edition, printed by Edward Draper, Boston, on the internet, googlebooks.co.uk)
It is possible to see the effect of alternate periods of religious fervour and secularisation, Royalist and Republican sentiment in the changing language of editions of this little book, which in early editions begins with a woodcut of the martyrdom of the Rev. John Rogers, burned at the stake in London, Britain, for his faith watched by his wife and nine children, one a babe in arms.
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| The martyrdom of the Rev. John Rogers (internet, Keely Brooke Keith) |
The 1777 edition has a woodcut of John Hancock, President of the Second Congress at the time of the American Revolution and break from the British Monarchy.
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| (The very rare 1777 edition, internet: Panoply Books, booksellers) |
'Your cousin Andrew is going to America to bring the Rebels to submission. As you read scripture you have learnt that Rebellion is like the sin of witch-craft, leaving your natural Lord & setting up another. I hope he'll fight 'em well...'
( Verney Letters if the 18th century, Vol. 2.)
The New England Primer continues with the ABC as in hornbooks. The Puritans quickly discarded the cross, traditionally printed at both ends of the top row, 'Christ's cross row', as a 'graven image', smacking of Popish idolatory. After this comes a rhyming alphabet, a mixture of religious and secular:
'In Adam's fall
We sinned all'
....
'King Charles the Good,
No Man of Blood'
echoing Royalist sentiments.
This later became:
'Our king the good
No man of blood'
and as Republicanism gained ground:
'Kings should be good
Not men of blood'
After 1776 the rhyme reads triumphantly and censoriously:
'The British King
Lost States thirteen'
while W acquired the new rhyme:
'By Washington
Great deeds were done'
and 'Great Washington brave
His country did save'
Between 1740 and 1760 when New England was experiencing a profound religious revival the secular parts of this alphabet were evangelised:
'Whales in the Sea
God's voice obey'
In a variant called The New English Tutor a religious proverbs alphabet was substituted:
'eXhort one another daily, while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the Deceitfulness of Sin.'
In the late 18th century, however, the alphabet was secularised again, with the introduction of rhymes from the British publisher John Newbery's version, the Royal Primer:
'He who ne'er learns his ABC
Forever will a blockhead be.
But he who learns his letters fair
Shall have a coach to take the air.'
A despicable subversion of Purtain belief in heavenly rewards.
Other British children's books popular in America were also amended after the Revolution. In William Cowper's popular poem John Gilpin, for example the President was substituted for the King, with total disregard for the metre:
'Let's sing "Long live the President,
And Gilpin long live he;
And when he next doth ride abroad,
May I be there to see.'
(A.S.W. Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books, 1966, p.1)Independence also led to a great increase in the production of native American school books, partly in response to Noah Webster (1758-1843), creator of the first American Dictionary, who campaigned fiercely for American youth to be educated in America:
'A foreign education is directly opposite to our political interests, and ought to be discontinued, if not prohibited.
(Bremner, op. cit, Vol. 1. quoted from The American Magazine, 1, May, 1788, p. 370-4)
Noah Webster himself produced the widely used American Spelling Book, 1783, which has never been out of print (Encyclopaedia Britannica, internet ed.) of which one critic complained that the woodcut of Webster used as a frontispiece was so ugly it scared the children from their lessons. (see Clifton Johnson, Old-time schools and school books, 1904, p. 171)
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| Noah Webster, American Spelling Book, frontis. 1790 edition, Library of Congress Internet editions available
This was the beginning of a concentrated effort to develop a spirit of American nationalism which would forge the disparate settlers into one nation.
nikyrathbone.blogspot.com childhoodblog@gmail.com |
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