Page images
PDF
EPUB

58

EARLY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.

CHAPTER IV.

1764-1789.

SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS.

[ocr errors]

-

[ocr errors]

Early educational institutions University of North Carolina founded Colleges founded in South Carolina, Georgia and Maryland - Dickinson College, Pa., and the University of Tennessee - Medical schools Secondary education - The Phillips Academies - Land grants for educational purposes - Thomas Jefferson's educational plans - Compulsory education - Education of females - Religious tolerance more manifest - Progress of the Episcopal Church Congregationalists and other sects Number of ministers and churches Separation of Church and State Scarcity of native literature in early colonial period - Early literature chiefly historical — Principal contributions of the South — Libraries in New England — Historical literature in New England - Controversial sermons and tracts- The Mathers and John Cotton - Edwards

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Printing introduced

and Franklin - Dutch literature Number of books published-Early American Art.

Education.

The period immediately preceding the breaking out of the war for independence was not conducive to general attention to the cause of education. Aside from the ordinary pursuits of life, the people were mostly interested in the consideration of the great public issues of the hour and the impending conflict with with the mother country. Primary education made some progress in nearly all the colonies, but it was progress of a desultory character and not of great extent. The movement for academies began in a small way and several new colleges were established. The College of Rhode Island, later to be known as Brown University, was instituted in 1762 and had one student in 1765. Queens College, afterward to be Rutgers, was started in New Jersey in 1764 and chartered in 1770. Hampden and Sydney Col

Newspapers Political essays, pamphlets, etc.

lege was started in Virginia in 1766, and Dartmouth College began as an Indian missionary school in the wild woods of New Hampshire in 1770. About 2,500 graduates from American colleges were living in the colonies in 1775.

When the war had been brought to a successful conclusion, the cause of education assumed a prominence in the minds of men second to the cause of freedom. In eight States colleges were in existence, and presently there were movements looking to the establishment of collegiate institutions in other States. By its constitution of December, 1776, North Carolina had expressed a purpose to found one or more universities, and now in December, 1789, only a few days after the adoption of the Constitution of the United States the State chartered the University of North Carolina, although it was not until six years

SECONDARY EDUCATION.

With

later that this university was opened to students. In South Carolina, immediately that peace was assured, the Legislature passed an act for establishing three colleges, and under the provisions of this act the college at Charleston was started. In the same year the State of Georgia gave a charter to the University of Georgia. In 1784 the University of Maryland was chartered and, as parts of that institution, Washington College at Chestertown and St. John's College at Annapolis were founded. Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1783 and the University of Nashville in Tennessee in 1785, the list of colleges opened in this period is completed. During the colonial period the collegiate institutions were distributed along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Virginia. There was no marked change in this respect until sometime after the close of the Revolution, except that the establishment of Dartmouth in New Hampshire and the University of Nashville in Tennessee were the first slight indications of any considerable movement of the population into the interior. Three medical schools, in Philadelphia, New York City and Cambridge, Mass., and one law school, in Connecticut were started in this period, but their history belongs to the next century.

In the latter part of the century secondary education made its appearance in the academies, which were established to supplement the gram

VOL. IV-5

59

mar schools and which were the forerunners of the high schools of more modern times. The academy was essentially a private institution, though it sometimes received State help and not infrequently became ultimately incorporated in the public school system. The first incorporated academy was founded in Philadelphia in 1753, through the efforts of Benjamin Franklin. In Massachusetts there was no academy until 1788, when the Phillips at Andover was started, while about the same time Phillips Academy at Exeter, N. H., was also started. In 1761 Lieutenant-governor Dummer of Massachusetts bequeathed his mansion and 330 acres of land in Byfield for the establishment and support of a school, but it was not until 1782 that the academy which bore his name was incorporated - the third in New England. Its activity, however, preceded its incorporation and it was the influence which went out from it that led to the founding of the two Phillips Academies and later, in 1784, that at Leicester, Mass.

The other colonies were not slow in fostering the cause of education during the post-Revolutionary period. In Maine, then a part of Massachusetts, schools were in operation in 1761, 1764, 1774, and 1779, and under the law of 1789 school districts were organized. In the constitution of Vermont in 1777 it was ordered that schools should be established in each town. Schools in Delaware were

60

PUBLIC SCHOOLS; EDUCATION OF WOMEN.

either private or church institutions. A school was opened in Wilmington in 1765 by the Friends and the afterward famous Presbyterian academy in Newark was established in 1767. Delaware made its first land grant for education in 1772, to the town of New Castle for a school plot. North Carolina, in addition to its public, private and church schools, had an academy at Wilmington in about 1760 and one at Newbern in 1764. At the close of the Revolution, South Carolina had eleven public schools, three charitable grammar schools and eight private institutions. When the State constitution of Georgia was framed in 1777, it provided that schools should be erected in every county of the State and supported at the general expense of the State. In 1783 the same State enacted a law providing that the governor might grant 1,000 acres of vacant land for the establishment of a school in each county, and this was the beginning of the poor-school system of the State. In Virginia in 1779 Thomas Jefferson introduced his plan for elementary, secondary, and higher education in free schools and for the ensuing two decades persistently pressed his views, but without favorable results. In New York State legislation was begun in 1786, when it was ordered that in each new township laid out from the unappropriated lands one section should be reserved "for the gospel and schools" and one "for promoting literature." SpeSpecial appropriations were also made.

for the academies. In 1789 Massachusetts passed a general school law which made the establishment of primary and general schools in all towns and rural districts compulsory, and in the same year New Hampshire decreed that there should be grammar schools in all the towns of the State. Vermont placed its first school law on its statute books in 1782, establishing the districts system.

In the earlier colonial period the education of women was comparatively neglected. Household duties rather than book learning were regarded as the essentials for the sex. Girls depended mostly upon home instruction for whatever education they received. Neither the common schools nor those for secondary education afforded or were designed to afford accommodations for them. There were exceptions to that rule, however. In Boston, New York, and other cities there were a few private day and boarding schools for girls, and in 1749 the Moravians at Bethlehem, Pa., established a school for girls that in subsequent years became one of the most flourishing female seminaries in the country.

It was close upon the beginning of the Revolution before any considerable attention was given to this matter, and even then the movement was very feeble. It began in Massachusetts. In 1766 the town of Medford voted that the girls might be instructed" two hours in a day after the boys are dismissed. Shortly

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE MORE MANIFEST.

arrangements were made in some of the towns to teach the girls in the summer months when the boys were so engaged in other pursuits that they had no time to attend school. Thus Dorchester in 1784 and Gloucester in 1790 arranged; the resolutions of the latter town explained that this measure was instituted because the females" are a tender and interesting branch of the community, but have been much neglected in the Public Schools of this town." Norwich, Conn., the girls were admitted" from 5-7 A. M." and in New London in 1774 they were taught in the summer months, also from 5 to 7 in the morning. Boston in 1790 and Northampton, Mass., in 1788 voted to admit girls to the schools in the summer months.*

Religion.

In

As the Revolutionary period opened, religious conditions in the several colonies had become substan

tially fixed. The influx of emigrants of various nationalities in the preceding half century and more had re

* E. G. Dexter, A History of Education in the United States (New York, 1904); Elsie Clews, Educational Legislation and Administration of the Colonial Governments, in Columbia University Publications (New York, 1899); Charles F. Thwing, A History of Higher Education in America (New York, 1906); J. B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States (7

vols., New York, 1884-1910); John Fiske, Old

Virginia and Her Neighbours (Boston, 1897); Richard G. Boone, Education in the United States, in the International Education series, vol. ii., (New York, 1889); P. A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1896).

61

sulted in the introduction of new denominations of differing faiths and varying methods of church organization. In this wide diffusion of divergent views, the early Puritanism and the later Episcopalianism had lost their hold upon the people. Church and State had not yet reached the point of actual and complete severance, but that end was approaching and was already manifest. Tolerance was everywhere more manifest on the part of the older churches. But on the part of the people there was not that devotion to or respect for religion which had characterized the preceding century. The policies of the generation, the consideration of the impending struggle with the mother country, were engaging men's minds and religion was neglected.

Although the Episcopal was the first Protestant Church on the American continent, and was especially favored by the civil government in several of the colonies (Virginia, Maryland, New York, and the Carolinas), it did not attain to a marked degree of prosperity in the colonial period. When the Revolution began, it had not more than eighty ministers north and east of Maryland, and many of these, outside the large cities and towns, were supported supported by the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and had been under such support for one hundred and fifty years. In Virginia and Maryland there were about one hundred and fifty ministers, and in the

62

DENOMINATIONAL STATISTICS.

Carolinas very few. The Church was then decidedly unpopular by reason of its affiliation with the Church of England and the general adherence of its ministers to the royalists' side in the pre-Revolutionary period. After the Revolution, however, it entered upon a new career of prosperity. In 1785 all the American Episcopal churches were united in one body and the first American bishops were ordained in England by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1792 the Church had four bishops and about two hundred ministers.

New England continued to be the principal seat of the Congregational denomination. With the exception of Rhode Island, the Congregationalists were more numerous than any other religious sect; in all New England and in Massachusetts and Connecticut they were more in number than all others combined. In the other colonies, the Church was little known. The Quakers, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians everywhere divided the religious field with the communions earlier founded. This period was particularly noted for the marked advance of Presbyterianism in its membersip and influence, the development of the Lutheran and the Reformed Dutch churches, and the beginning of Methodism.

It is not possible to ascertain the exact number of ministers and churches in the country when the colonies decided to separate from England. A careful estimate, based

largely on known figures, gives the number of ministers as 1,441 and the number of churches 1,940, divided as follows: Congregational, 575 ministers, 700 churches; Baptist, 350 ministers, 380 churches; Episcopalian, 250 ministers, 300 churches; Presbyterian, 140 ministers, 300 churches; Roman Catholic, 26 ministers, 52 churches; Lutheran, German Reformed and Reformed Dutch, each, 25 ministers, 60 churches; Associate, 13 ministers, 20 churches; Moravians, 12 ministers, 8 churches. At that time, the population of the colonies did not exceed 2,500,000 free persons. There was no bishop either in the Protestant Episcopal or the Roman Catholic church and no school of theology. The Methodists did not exist as a body distinct from the Episcopal Church and had no ordained ministers.*

When the Revolution came to its end, the churches were not in a healthful condition. The demoralization of war had adversely affected them and it was not until after the opening of the next century that spiritual conditions showed much improvement. But one thing of importance characterized the period; that was the distinct severance of the relations before existing between Church and State. The majority of the people were either attached to denominations distinct from the established or semiestablished churches, or were entirely

*Robert Baird, Religion in America, p. 120.

« PreviousContinue »