Abstract
In late colonial America schooling was plentiful but unorganized; schools were increasing in importance but still supplementary to the family, the church, and apprenticeship. Throughout the colonies schools provided training in rudiments for the many, classical training for the few, and some supplementary schooling in technical subjects for a growing number of town dwellers. Common schooling was not “neglected,” as historians of the public school system once asserted; rather, the legacy of the colonial period was a mode of schooling quite different in structure and operation from that to which we have been accustomed since the mid-nineteenth century. In coastal towns like New York, parents bought schooling as a commodity in an open market. Schoolmasters competing for students offered subjects ranging from the alphabet to astronomy, for children of all ages, at all times of the day. Schooling arrangements were haphazard and temporary; people in all ranks of society gained their education in a patchwork, rather than a pattern, of teachers and experiences.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See also Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill, 1960),
and Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970).
Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System, chaps. 3–6; see also, Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);
Stanley K. Schultz, “The Education of Urban Americans: Boston, 1789–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1969);
Raymond A. Mohl, “Education as Social Control in New York City, 1784–1785,” New York History 61 (Spring 1970): 219–37.
New York Daily Advertiser, January 13, 1791, cited in Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York, an American City, 1783–1803, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), p. 216; on the economics of the 1780s,
see E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 1783–1789 (New York, 1932), pp. 28–29.
Pomerantz, New York, p. 216; Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, eds., Moreau de St. Mery’s American Journey, 1793–1798 (New York, 1947), pp. 157–60. These sources imply that the wage increase represented increases in real income.
On commodity prices, see Moreau, Journey, pp. 157–60; on rents, see James G. Wilson, The Memorial History of the City of New York (New York, 1893), 2:21, and Pomerantz, New York, pp. 169, 227–28. The best proof that workingmen could afford school tuition is that so many of them in fact appear in the pay school lists analyzed below.
See Paul H. Douglass, American Apprenticeship and Industrial Education (New York, 1921);
Samuel McKee, Jr., Labor in Colonial New York (New York, 1935);
Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946). Douglass wrote that apprenticeship was unchanged after the Revolution and began to decline with industrialization after the War of 1812, while McKee (p. 62f.) saw signs of decline before the Revolution, and Morris (p. 200) says the system began to decline at the close of the Revolution. There are no figures available to document any of these contentions, but impressionistic evidence, such as is presented here, indicates that while apprenticeship may have begun to “decline,” it had not, by any means, “declined.”
See Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York, 1931), p. 90;
Elinor Barnes, “The First Federal City, New York in 1789,” New York History 21 (April 1940): 160;
Alfred Young, “The Mechanics and the Jeffersonians, New York, 1787–1801,” Labor History 5 (Fall 1964): 260–61.
Noah Webster to William Currie, December 20, 1797, in Letters of Noah Webster, ed. Harry N. Warfel (New York, 1953), pp. 168–69; Moreau, Journey, pp. 156, 166; Alfred Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York (Chapel Hill, 1967), pp. 471–74.
The higher concentration of renters in some wards and owners in others was increasing and is emphasized in Young, Democratic Republicans, e.g., p. 474. The remark of Young and Lynd, however, that “the suffrage bottle may be viewed as half full or half empty,” applies to residential segregation as well; it is a matter of emphasis (Staughton Lynd and Alfred Young, “After Carl Becker; The Mechanics and New York City Politics, 1774–1806,” Labor History 5 [Fall 1964]: 223).
The description of Harlem is from John Bernard, Retrospections of America (New York, 1887), p. 50.
Harlow, Bowery, p. 91; see also Kenneth D. Miller, The People Are the City: 150 Years of Social and Religious Concern in New York City (New York, 1962), p. 25. For a similar assessment of Boston in this period, see Schultz, “Education of Urban Americans,” p. 47,
and Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880, rev. ed. (Boston, 1959), p. 15.
Richard J. Purcell, “Immigration to the Canal Era,” in History of the State of New York, ed. Hugh M. Flick, 10 vols. (New York, 1934–1937), 7:7, 12 f.; Wilson, History, 3:71; Young, “Mechanics and Jeffersonians,” p. 264 and passim.
Pomerantz, New York, pp. 334, 337–38; I. N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 6 vols. (New York, 1895–1928), May 22, 1794 [dates refer to his “Chronology”]; New York Argus, September 3, 1795; Webster to Theodore Sedgwick, January 2, 1795, in Warfel, Letters, p. 124; the Gaine quotation is found in Pomerantz, New York, p. 203.
See Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?” in Industrialization in Two Systems, ed. H. Rosovsky (New York, 1966), pp. 41, 46.
The 64 children whose parents were not found in the Directory may have included a higher proportion of poorer families because the Directory probably omitted more poor men than others. Student names were matched with parents in several ways. The most secure are those matched through baptisms. Except with very common names, these identifications are fairly certain. Second, children with the same family name, especially if listed next to each other, were generally assumed to be siblings, so some baptismal identifications led to further matching of brothers or sisters with parents. Third, in the case of the Dutch charity school, the parents’ names and addresses were recorded on the register and are reprinted in Dunshee, Dutch Church. These three means of identification provided the parents’ names for about half of the final sample. The others were identified from wills, or, with less certainty, by the general combination of probability factors, that is, whether the name was less than common, whether there was only one such adult listed in the Directory, whether that adult lived close to school, and whether the family structure of that household head (as recorded in the federal Census of 1790) allowed the possibility of a child of the right sex and age. These factors were combined in judgments that yielded probable, if not positive, identifications. Many possible matches were discarded. The materials used, in addition to the Teachers’ Reports, Low’s 1796 Directory and the 1790 Census, Heads of Families … (Washington, 1908), included: First Presbyterian Church (12 West 12th Street), Baptisms, MS, Vol. I (1728–1790), Vol. II (1791–1802); Trinity Church, Baptisms, transcript, New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. I (1749–1813); Methodist Episcopal Church Records, Vol. 233, Baptisms, NYPL; Tobias A. Wright, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church … Baptisms, 1731–1800 (New York, New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1902; reprinted, Gregg Press, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1968);
Rev. James H. McGean, “The Earliest Baptismal Register of St. Peter’s Church, New York City,” Historical Records and Studies 1 (Part I, 1899, Part II, 1900): 97–107, 387–99; and New York City Wills, New York Surrogate’s Court, Room 402.
See Pomerantz, New York, p. 430; for seaman’s wages, see Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth; The American Record Since 1800 (New York, 1964), p. 531.
Stokes, Iconography, May 10, 1794; Associated Teachers, Minutes, p. 290.
George Clinton, speech to the legislature, 1795, in State of New York, Messages from the Governors… , ed. Charles Z. Lincoln (Albany, 1909), 2:350; Samuel S. Randall, History of the Common School System of the State of New York … (New York, 1871), pp. 7–10; New York Laws, 1795, chap. 75.
On the charity schools see Henry W. Dunshee, History of the School of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in New York. … (New York, 2d ed., 1883);
William W. Kemp, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (New York, 1913);
David and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Truth in the New World; Portrait of Shearith Israel, 165–1954 (New York, 1955);
Charles C. Andrews, The History of the New York African Free School (New York, 1830).
Elsie G. Hobson, Educrxtional Legislation and Administration in the State of New York, 177–1850 (Chicago, 1918), p. 83.
Ibid., p. 29; Randall, Common School System, pp. 9–11; see also Robert F. Seybolt, The Act of 1795 for the Encouragement of Schools and the Practice in Westchester County, New York State Local History Service Leaflets (Albany, 1919).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 John L. Rury
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kaestle, C.F. (2005). Common Schools before the “Common School Revival”: New York Schooling in the 1790s. In: Rury, J.L. (eds) Urban Education in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981875_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981875_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53020-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8187-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)