The free school idea in Virginia before the Civil War ...

Foreword

This study is an attempt to assemble and interpret new documentary evidence upon the evolution of the common free school in Virginia. A preliminary survey of the field, " Elementary Education in Virginia during the Early Nineteenth Century," was submitted to a seminar in the History of American Education at Teachers College in 191 1. That investigation represented an effort to organize the facts of local history as a basis for a course in the History of Modern Education for Virginia normal schools, training classes, and study circles of teachers in service.

The investigation has been continued with the belief that the story of the state's educational transition from colony to commonwealth has never been told; that fragmentary bits of evidence have, in the main, suffered misinterpretation from sentimentalist and ill-informed critic alike. Virginia should not be condemned because it was not like the industrial states; nor should its apologists cite the glory of the University and gloss over the very significant struggle for popular education that characterized the Old Dominion during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Virginia before the War did not succeed in creating a centralized state system, supported by compulsory public taxation, but it would be equally wrong to say that it was a laggard among the states. One should approach this period with the assumption that ante-bellum Virginia evolved the foundations, at least, of a common free school system and moved, perhaps, as rapidly to a democratization of its institutions as did any of the agricultural sections of the American states.

My acknowledgment is due Professor Paul Monroe for his investigations and for those standards of scholarship which have been conscious goals in the progress of this work. To Professor William H. Kilpatrick, I am especially indebted for three readings of the manuscript, many conferences, and numerous fruitful suggestions of new lines of research. To

iii iv Foreword

Dr. I. L. Kandel, I am also grateful for a careful, critical reading of the manuscript. To Miss Julia C. Patton, of the Department of English, Teachers College, I am under obligation for assistance in the final revision for the press. The greatest debt, however, is to my wife, without whose encouragement and constant help this study would have been impossible.

W. A. M.

Teachers College, Columbia University December 3, 191 7

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Colonial Social System and Early Free School

Foundations i-ii

Introduction

THE COLONIAL SOCIAL SYSTEM AND EARLY FREE SCHOOL FOUNDATIONS

When Virginia's early Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, anxious to secure himself with the restored Stuarts, 1 reported in 1671 to. the Lord Commissioners of Trade and Plantations on conditions in the colony, " Thank God, there are no Free Schools," he gave rise to a misconception that has died only with the present generation. As a matter of fact, there had been English "free" school foundations in the colony almost from its inception. The Governor himself sanctioned private free school bequests when he approved the Act of 1642, which incorporated the Benjamin Syms's School "according to the godly intent of the said testator and for the encouragement of others in like pious performances." 2

The implications of Berkeley's historic exclamation are not

1 Cf. Brown, Alexander, English Politics in Early Virginia History, 8, n, 12, et seq.: "The first English colony [Virginia] was not founded by a king nor by an agent of a king nor on the monarchial principles of government advocated by a king." The charters of 1609 and 161 2 were fathered by Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Edwin Sandys, who were at the same time leaders of the liberal party or "advocates of English rights" against "the secret court Spanish party" of James I. Sandys was also a prime factor in the affairs of the Virginia Company of London. Mr. Brown quotes one Captain John Bargraves, a contemporary of Sir Edwin Sandys, as saying, "Sandys' . . . purpose was to erect a free popular state in Virginia in which the inhabitants should have no government put upon them but by their own consent." In 1624, however, this movement was interrupted by the establishment of "His Majesties' most princely government . . . thirteen councilors in Virginia and as many in England, all nominated by His Majesty." One of Berkeley's early acts, 1642, was a "Declaration against the company" in answer to a petition of the Patriot or Liberal party in Virginia (vide Hening, I, 231) . During the period of the Commonwealth, patriot governors ruled the colony under the authority of the House of Burgesses, which was a representative body. In 1660, on Berkeley's return to power, a new House loyal to Charles II was returned and every effort was again made to stem the tide of popular government, which finally found expression in the revolution of 1776. Throughout Berkeley's administration every means was used to crush sedition, to prevent "misgovernment," as the governor artfully phrased self-government.

_ 2 Hening, Statutes, I: Act XVIII, March 1642-3, confirms Benjamin Syms's will givipg lands for a free school in Elizabeth City County, and encourages all "" others in like pious performances."

clear, as it confuses the issue of popular schools with that of liberal education. Since the primary object of the Syms school was to equip the poor with little more than the three rs, it has been advanced that Berkeley's protest was against the liberal or "free" courses of study of the great English Public Schools, Eton and Harrow, etc., not against the teaching of the mechanics of learning to tradesmen who were not intellectually "free" men at all. 3 William and Mary, 1693, was the first free school — libera schola — in this sense in the colony. Yet Berkeley is said to have headed a subscription in 1662, on his return to the governorship, for the establishment of such "a free school and college." But however this ambiguous term " free " is to be understood, there is no doubt as to Berkeley's main position. He feared the power of radical ideas expressed through free schools, free press and free pulpits. He remembered too well the dangerous activities of the " Patriot" party in the reign of James I and its sedition against "the best government." Only "court" histories received the royal imprimatur and one licensed newspaper and printing press was deemed sufficient for the colony. The whole spirit of his report is an arraignment of those agencies for self-government and for the diffusion of knowledge which the colony was even at that time nourishing. His philippic, indeed, indicates a substantial class in the colony who, through education, "had brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world." It would seem to bear witness to the fact that the very idea he would suppress was dangerously active in Virginia, that royal interests had much to fear in a group of liberals intent on civil freedom.

In a less widely quoted sentence in his answer to the Commissioners' question, "What course is taken about instructing the people in the Christian religion?" Governor Berkeley did, however, state the future educational policy of Virginia when he said, "The same course that is taken in England out of town, every man according to his ability instructing his children," 4 i.e., every man teaching his own children and seeing to it that the indigent were taught. Virginia was destined to become a colony of large landholders and dependents, and

3 Cf. William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine, VI, 78.

The Colonial Social System 3

to find in the traditions, institutions, and social distinctions "of England out of town" an expression of its growing land and anti-commercial interests.

It is not to be understood, however, that Virginia was a replica of English civilization in all its aspects. As a stage of social evolution there is reason to believe that with slavery and the new distinction between master and servant which that institution made, Virginia was, in its self-sustaining isolated "baronages," a replica of a much earlier state of English society than that of the Restoration with its great commons and industrial classes. The colony's social-economic system sprang from the policy implied in the English attorneygeneral Seymour's tesjy reply to Commissary Blair's plea in 1692 for a college for the education of native ministers, that the souls of the Indians and settlers might be saved: "Damn your souls, make tobacco!" The mother country encouraged the growth of large plantations and actively hindered navigation and every effort to establish towns and encourage industry. 5 England monopolized the carrying trade of the world so far as she could control it, and that she did control it for a time the War of the American Revolution attests. As Virginia developed, land, therefore, became even more the measure of wealth and opportunity than in Old England. Fortunately for the future of democracy, Virginia was vast in area, land was cheap, and yielded abundantly to extensive cultivation, while out beyond the headwaters of the rivers and across the mountains lay the great open West.

Apparently the English-born aristocrat was the exceptional immigrant to the colony. Although it is said that more than five hundred Virginia families of the late eighteenth century traced their origin to distinguished English families, the Virginia planter-aristocrat evolved, in the most part, from the successful English middle class. 6 After the first enthusiasm of the gentlemen adventurers was dampened by the reverses at Jamestown, the permanent settlers of the colony,

5 Hening, op. cii., II, 471; III, Act Establishing Towns, 1705, repealed 1710; Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, p. 44; Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I. Cf. Jefferson's opposition to commercialism in Virginia, Beard, Charles A., Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, 422-5.

6 Vide Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, 28, 61.

financed in the main by the Virginia Company of London, were drawn more and more largely from two main sources: (i) the great independent merchant class of the English trading population who sought civil freedom and business advantage in the New World and found it in land; and (2) the more nondescript but not wholly unsubstantial indentured servant class who, in spite of the period of servitude to the planter demanded as the price of passage, saw for themselves in the bonus of fifty acres of land 7 a new economic status in life.

The idea, then, of the wholesale transplanting of English aristocracy to the Old Dominion is, it would seem, largely a romance based on the distinctive aristocracy Virginia evolved of itself as a result of the natural operation of economic law. A bourgeois class passed quickly into a landed class. A part of England's middle class, with a few representatives of the English gentry, gained advantage first through land, later through negro slavery, and finally through shutting off competition and retarding the rise of a rival commercial class. Virginia may truly be said to have evolved its aristocracy of land and its class of dependent poor.

This new aristocracy fortified itself by intermarriage as did the aristocracy of the Old World. A spirit of family pride, the desire to found a family and maintain and perpetuate property, laid the foundations of Virginia's social and political system. Fathers wished to bequeath not only their property but even political office to their sons. Family became a basis of class, and family connection, a basis for that proprietary spirit with which Virginians have always regarded their state and their kin. The present practice of tracing one's kin to remote degrees is reminiscent of this early caste spirit.

The products from Virginia opened a new and fertile field to English commercialism; the African negro slave offered a new class for exploitation. With the introduction of slavery as a substitute for service under the old wage or apprenticeship system, Virginia, of course, did not reflect seventeenthcentury English life. Before the negro came in profitable numbers to the colony, however, white labor was imported from Old England by the London Company. The indentured servant, drawn from all classes of English society, came

7 Beverley, Robert, History of Virginia, 1722, 238.

The Colonial Social System 5

in great numbers as tobacco became commercially important and demanded extensive farming. As these servants finished their indenture they were free, if financially able, to buy land or to go into voluntary service. When the negro was introduced the white servant was not able to compete with him. The negro was permanent, cheaper, more tractable, better able to withstand the exigencies of climate and to do the work required in the fields. As the number of negroes increased there could be no basis of competition or of labor equality. The key to success and to self-respect lay in the ownership of land or in migration to the West. In this great region groups of colonists such as the Germans of the lower Shenandoah Valley, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Southside and Southwest, and the Huguenots of Piedmont had established themselves. Many of those in the eastern counties who did not acquire land pushed into Piedmont or passed over the mountains into Transylvania and Trans-Alleghany.

A type of selection operated to sift the socially fit from the naturally "poor." The well-to-do, freed from labor and detail by slave-service and disciplined by noblesse oblige, became a class well trained in leadership. The indolent and less competent sank into a slavery of poverty and social inefficiency and became, in fact, a nucleus of the traditional "poor white" 8 of Old Virginia. The gradual evolution of poor laws, or rather modifications of the English Statute of Artificers, the Statute for the Relief of the Poor, 1562, and the Statute of 1601, indicates a growing class of the "poor" that looked to the colony, and, in the early days of the commonwealth, to the state, for vocational training, for the means of reading and writing, and, at times, for maintenance in adult years. The odious distinction between the "rich" and the "poor" and the paternal attitude of the rich toward the dependent lower class, so characteristic of the English social system, became deeply rooted in the customary thinking of both classes and ran well into the nineteenth century. New demands would come with the development of a new social class, an independent, self-conscious middle class of free land-owning farmers, too small even now in some of the South-

8 Vide Washington, Henry A., Social System of Virginia, in Southern Literary Messenger, 1848, 70; also Wertenbaker, op. cit., 146. ■■.-„-- ern states. Virginia's part in the American Revolution, it will be remembered, was largely fomented among the "backwoods" of Piedmont and "New" Virginia, where the small, independent farmer had already found a place. Patrick Henry was representative of this democracy and Thomas Jefferson, in his crusade to hasten the day of a new political era, found his inspiration in this class.

Education in colonial Virginia reflected the social philosophy and safeguarded the economic-social interests upon which the plantation system was built. The Established Church of England and the Colonial Assembly administered the educational and civil affairs of the colony. Those who could afford it retained tutors in their families. This was the most approved practice among the well-to-do down to the time of the Revolution. Under the patronage of the Church certain parishes supported Latin grammar schools. It cannot be said, however, that even the majority of the parishes had such schools, as the tutorial system and the great distances between plantations combined to make this institution unnecessary and impracticable. Sporadic private English neighborhood schools later appeared and became known in the country districts as the "Old Field" Schools. The "poor" — children of indigent parents, orphans of all classes left without property — were given a practical education appropriate to their social station through apprenticeship to a master of one of the trades. The state gave little concern to "literary" education except to exact a guarantee from communities that all teachers should be sound in the doctrines of the Church and safe subjects of the Crown. 9 Except for certain statutes governing the College of William and Mary, practically all legislation on public education was in approval of free school foundations or in the regulation of apprenticeship. 10 In the four years 1679-83, Surrey County Court alone bound out more than fifty apprentices under indentures providing for their education. 11 There were, when Berkeley made his misleading statement about Virginia "free" schools, at least seven free or

10 Vide Knight, E. W., Sewanee Review, January, 1916; Hening, Statutes,

11 Bruce, Philip, Institutional History of Virginia, I, 310; also Economic History of Virginia, I, chaps, IX, X. An excellent example of the administration

The Colonial Social System 7

charity school foundations for the poor established to supplement the educational provisions of the apprenticeship acts. 12 The practice of apprenticing children for specific training extended to the wealthy. No less a Virginian than Colonel John Carter orders in his will of January 3, 1669, that his son Robert (King Carter) in his minority be

"well educated for the use of his estate, and he is to have a man or youth servant bought for him that hath been brought up in the Latin school and that he (the servant) shall constantly tend upon him, not only to teach him his books, either in English or Latin, according to his capacity (for my will is that he shall learn both Latin and English, and to write), but also to preserve him from harm and from doing evil. My executors to allow my wife for her sons education 10 pounds per annum and in case my wife put her son out apprentice his portion to bind him is to be paid" 13

In the case of the "poor," the services of a youth were given for several years to a master workman, who in return was obligated to teach him his trade, the three r's, and to make him God-fearing and law-abiding; to furnish him, in short, with three sets of habits valuable to a poor man. Thus, as Hugh Jones said in 1724, the colony was "never tormented with vagrants. When there is a numerous family of poor children the vestry takes care to bind them out apprentices till they are able to maintain themselves with labor." 14

Princess Anne County records reveal this means of educating its poor children. On March 2, 171 2, Samuel Shepherd petitioned the court for

"Liberty to Erect a Schoole on Ye Courthouse for common Benefit t which upon consideracion of ye advantage y't may arrive from ye same it is ordered accordingly, provided he build the same as ffar as he cann from ye Church and Courthouse. . . it is ye Judgm't of this court y't he have Liberty to keep School in ye Court House till a school house be built." 15

of this system is to be found in the Princess Anne Co. Records, May i, 171 7, reprinted in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, II, 345: "Ordered that ye Sheriff Sumon George Smyth to the next Court to answere the Complaint of his apprentice Rich'd Williams & Shew ye court Reasons why he does not Teach him to read as by indenture he is oblig'd." At a Court held June 5, 1717: "George Smyth being Som'd to this Court to answere the complaint of his apprentice Richard Williams & upon his appearing and promising to put ye said apprentice forthwith to Schoole & to doe his true Endeavour to teach him his trade ye Court doe order ye s'd Rich'd home to live with his master ye remaining part of his time by indenture."

12 Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, I, 357-61.

13 Extract, will, Col. John Carter, Lancaster Court House, recorded Jan. 9 1722, cited in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, II, 229.

14 Jones, Hugh, The Present State of Virginia, 309.

15 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, III, 193, communicated by Edward W. James.

In 1 716 the same court ordered:

" George Shurly petitioning for Liberty and Lycence for his Servant Peter Taylor to keep Schoole in the Court house jury roome & ye Court thinking ye same to be a reasonable and usual practice doe order that he have Liberty as aforesaid, he taking due care to keep ye benches &c. in such good order as they are at present in." 16

It is common knowledge that despite Berkeley's remark, Virginia, as an infant colony, saw the need of free, if not common schools. The short-lived school at Charles City, destroyed in 1622, was a free school. From the time of the bequest of Benjamin Syms, 1634, it was a common practice among Virginians, as it was among pious English gentlemen everywhere, to remember the education of the poor in their wills. Robert Beverley, in 1703, leads one to believe that these legacies were very numerous and were in many cases "sl handsome maintenance to a master." Mr. Bruce, in his recent social studies of the colony, lists the more important of these foundations. 17

In addition to those cited by Mr. Bruce, the provisions of several other wills may be given here as typical of the spirit of the colony. John Farneffold, an Anglican minister of Fairfield parish in Northumberland County in 1702, left

"one hundred acres ... for the maintenance of a free school to be called Winchester schoole for fower o' five poore children belonging to ye parish & to be taught gratis & have their dyett and lodging and washing, & when they can read the Bible & write a legible hand to dismiss them & take in more ... for further encouragement of a school master I give dyett, lodging and washing, 500 pounds of tobacco & a horse, Bridle and Saddle to ride on during his stay. . . . Item what school books I have in my study I leave for ye benefit of ye schoole." 18

In the will of Daniel Hornby, a merchant tailor of Richmond County, " 20 pounds a year for five years is left to support a Latin master who should teach ten children gratis as a condition of the bequest." 19 Humphrey Hill of King and Queen County, St. Stephen's Parish, in 1775 left £500, the interest on which was "to be annually paid to such school-

16 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, III, 193, communicated by Edward W. James.

17 Bruce, op. cit., I, 350-60: Syms', 1636; Capt. Moon's, 1655; King's, 1669; Eaton's, 1689; Ed. Moseley's, 1721; Richard Russell's, 1721; Hugh Lee's, 1652; William Gordon's, 1685; et at.

18 William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, XVII, 245; also

The Colonial Social System 9

master as shall teach one or more children whose parents are unable to pay for the instruction." 20 The present Marriot High School of St. Stephen's Parish, King and Queen County, was built several years ago with the residue of the bequest made about this time by the widow of Captain Marriot of Bewdley. The original bequest was one thousand acres of land, near St. Stephen's Church, to be divided into ten farms, the rents to be devoted to the education of poor children. 21 One of Nansemond County's early free school funds came from the will of John Yeates, Sept. 18, 1731, who gave the rent of his land and the hire of his slaves to help keep his church in repair and pay the yearly wages of a schoolmaster. In other items of the will, his library and a sum of £10 for other books were given the free schools he had made possible. 22 William Monroe, 1767, of Orange, left an estate of £20,000, 23 and the Rev. Samuel Sanford, 1710, 24 of Accomac, a fund, each for the encouragement of education in his respective county. In running through old wills one frequently finds provision for free schools as an alternative in case the beneficiary die without issue or before the will is probated. These old wills are mute evidences of the early colonial free school idea.

Thus the English laissez-faire policy upon which the colony's social-economic system was built extended to its educational system. The socially competent looked after their own affairs and later fought any change in principle of government which forced them to give up this privilege of initiative. Vagrancy and the burden of pauperism were carefully guarded against. The socially incompetent, the poor, were educated as a protection to established society, taught "to maintain themselves with labor."

In the transition from colony to commonwealth, the free, common school must be slowly and painfully evolved. As long as the ideal of worth was the land-bond, two classes — the Rich and the Poor — were inevitable. The free school for all classes could not come until the state assumed the

21 From a personal letter from Dr. Bernard Walker, born about 1825 in St. Stephen's Parish, and familiar with the operation of this fund and its intent.

22 Virginia School Report, 1885, Part Third, 230, full text of the original will and the incorporation by the state, 1803, are reprinted here.

io The Free School Idea in Virginia

responsibility of popular education as something more than "a pious performance" or a means of protecting society against vagrancy. The growth of commercial interests must break down the dual social system and give rise to a virile commons. Moreover, the Virginia gentleman's inherent love for English institutions must give way to the larger, newer conception implied in our modern, locally controlled, nonsectarian common free school, — the fruit of America's own experiment with the ideal of political democracy.

One should not look for radical institutional changes, for they did not come in the other American states. The history of the modern free school idea in post-revolutionary Virginia is a history of the same bitterly contested but progressive evolution as in the other states. The Virginia aristocrat was, perhaps, no less a "wild democrat" or more careful of the rights of his own class, than the large tax-payers of New York, Massachusetts, or Connecticut. All of the original states, during the early formation of the Union, were dominated more or less by the religio-aristocratic conceptions of school government and support, conceptions common to the thought and practice of Old England. Virginia fought with the other states the same battles for the democratization of her institutions, and by the time of the Civil War had evolved the foundations, at least, of free schools. And this remarkable progress was hampered at all times by the economic burdens of negro slavery, by the social system that slavery entailed, by a sectionalism which Virginia's peculiar land conformation determined from the outset, and finally by a dramatic political controversy over ways and means of realizing a democratic state, the first fruit of which was the persistence of customary thought and the defeat of a concerted school legislation which might have placed the Old Dominion first among the free school states.

The object of this study, therefore, is to trace the progress of the free school idea as it evolved out of earlier English poor law provisions, apprenticeship, and free scholarships in the private schools to that high-water mark of ante-bellum educational legislation, "The Schools for the Education of All Classes," 1850-60, in which, in a few counties at least, all the the children of the rich, the bourgeoisie, and the "poor white" could be taught in common without prejudice. This was

The Colonial Social System n

accomplished through the spread of the Literary Fund "Poor" Schools under the Act of 1818, for the definition of the word "poor" is eventually widened to include a large percentage of the state's growing middle class, originally excluded under the charity school act. The natural course of this evolution is through the widespread faith in the voluntaristic movements for the promotion of elementary education, such as the Lancasterian, Infant, and Sunday schools, which in 1818-25 were subsidized by the state and which made possible the system of free schools before the Civil War. Notwithstanding the failure of the friends of democracy to unite on a common plan of state school government — one of the great reasons for the retardation of the free school idea — Virginia's present organization is not a gift of Reconstruction but the fulfillment of those county common school experiments which in 1859 may have been seen in every geographical subdivision of the state.

Chapter II

EARLY PROPOSALS AND PROVISIONS FOR FREE PRIMARY SCHOOLS. THE BILLS OF 1 779 AND 1 796. JEFFERSON'S IDEA OF THE PLACE OF EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY

The Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge submitted on June 8, 1779, by Jefferson, as part of the Report of the Revisors of the state code, 1 is generally accepted as the first American proposal for a modern state school system. This report was not acted upon until after the close of the war, when fifty-six of the one hundred twenty-six provisions were written into the state code. The provision for education was one of those more radical departures from colonial practice, — manumission and the education of negro slaves being another, — which was not accepted. The temper of the war legislature, however, was more after Jefferson's own heart. Evidently, while formulating the new code, he presented his ideal of education in a free state to his colleagues in the House, for in a letter to George Washington, in 1786, he said of his bill: "I never saw one received with more enthusiasm than that was in the year, 1778, by the House of Delegates, who ordered it printed; and it seems afterwards that nothing but extreme distress of our resources prevented its being carried into execution during the war." 2

In his autobiography Jefferson makes himself very clear in discussing the proposals for constitutional revision. By his bills for the abolition of primogeniture, entails, and for religious liberty and public schools, "every fibre of antient and future aristocracy would be eradicated . . . and a foundation laid for a government truly republican." In particular the school bill would guarantee that democracy, i.e., the poor, would "maintain themselves and exercise with intelligence their part in self-government without the violation of a single