Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) and its film adaptation Gettysburg (1993) both overlap and diverge in their cultural work. They both show, this paper argues, great respect and sympathy for Union and Confederate soldiers. From this shared ancestor, a split occurs: the book then questions, perhaps in a general sense, war and its ideologies, growing quite nihilistic, while the movie maintains focus on the fighting men’s heroism, even elevating it through sound. We might think of a simplified slate of categories of cultural presentations of war and those who conduct it (which at times feel contradictory), ignoring neutral categories:

1) Question War; No Soldiers Are Heroes
2) Question War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes
3) Question War; Both Sides’ Soldiers Are Heroes
4) Accept War; No Soldiers Are Heroes
5) Accept War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes                   
6) Accept War; Both Sides’ Soldiers Are Heroes 

This paper places Shaara’s work in Category 3 and Gettysburg in Category 6. It further posits that the senselessness of war found in the former and the both-sides heroism of both texts are made more possible or likely by the exclusion of African American perspectives. 

The 1996 edition of The Killer Angels features a blurb declaring the text a “bitter anti-war tract.”^[1] While Shaara’s work is open to various interpretations, it is indeed easy to sense a deepening nihilism as one marches through its pages. In the beginning, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain gives a moving speech to Union soldiers: “If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new… We’re an army going out to set other men free.”^[2] By the end, after the slaughter at Gettysburg, Chamberlain has “forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely. It seemed very strange now to think of morality…”^[3] The bloodbath was so great as to render causes questionable, even naive. Union troops, Chamberlain muses, were “animal meat: the Killer Angels.”^[4] That is to say, examining an earlier titular reference, that “Man” may pursue moral “action…like an angel” yet cannot even do this without “murderin’” — his noble cause is thus debased, his pursuit of it violent, horrific, suicidal, senseless.^[5] Are those marching to war for a cause good but foolish, simply meat in the meat grinder? Admiring and pitying fallen Southerners and Northerners alike, Chamberlain remarks to his brother that the dead are “all equal now.”^[6] Capping their discourse on why men fought, the subtext seems to be that whether motives are right or wrong, destruction awaits — what real meaning do motives then have? All of this feels bathed in the anti-Machiavellian anti-war tradition, where the means are of equal or even primary importance in the moral calculus. Significantly, it all occurs in the final two pages of the book, where it takes on the mien of a conclusion (reflecting a page of cause-critiquing quotations before the narrative begins^[7]). 

Three pages prior, the mood in the Confederate camp is rather similar. The defeated General Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant General James Longstreet reflect somberly on the outcome of the battle. “I don’t think we can win it now,” Longstreet says, speaking of the war.^[8] Shaara writes: “After a moment Lee nodded, as if it were not really important.”^[9] Lee muses that each soldier has his own reasons to fight and die, but seems to frame himself as a man caught up in something against his will, swept this way or that on a current of uncontrollable events. “If they go on,” Lee says of his men, “I will go on… If the war goes on…what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them.”^[10] Lee describes a reactionary existence — if his men, the Confederacy, or the Union wish to fight, he must follow, forced to do likewise. Then Lee verbalizes the intimated unimportance of Confederate victory with a remarkable line: “Does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?”^[11] Meaninglessness again permeates. Human agency erodes. If one is forced to act, or is carried through places and events by divine, inevitable forces, why would outcomes matter to the individual? Throughout the text, Lee reflects that outcomes are in God’s hands.^[12] Here Lee implies that to care about who wins the war is nonsensical, as either result would be God’s will, beyond human control or motivation. Causes hardly matter. This religious nihilism is mixed with ideals of duty, as seen in Lee’s “If they go on” statements and his final lines in the book. “You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army,” he tells Longstreet, as if they are men just doing their jobs. “But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only soldiers who die.”^[13] It may be useful for soldiers to have causes — ideology turns ordinary, even angelic men into killers — but in the end one is playing a role for armies, nations, gods, and other higher forces, carried along by the current, one’s individual designs rendered futile. 

Gettysburg ends with Chamberlain and his brother embracing to moving, soaring music.^[14] The former’s thoughts from the book are not verbalized. Lee’s reflections do make it into the film, except for his “Cause” line. The music is mournful. However, the absence of Lee’s final line and Chamberlain’s private thoughts, and perhaps less attention paid to Lee’s fixation on God’s will throughout, lessens the impact of the general’s gloomy ponderings on meaning. “Does it matter after all who wins?” is a bit more difficult for a viewer to understand — perhaps it will be chalked up to mere despair over losing a battle — and feels more like it is in the film out of obligation than thematic significance. Its inclusion feels like that of a Confederate debate on Darwin.^[15] “Because,” the screenwriter might say, jabbing a finger at the book, “it’s there.” Regardless, one would be hard-pressed to find other vestiges of nihilism in Gettysburg. It has rather different emotions to evoke.

Lighting, music, framing, and other elements of film language set a tone and instruct the viewer how to feel. In Gettysburg, largely free of any questioning or despair over meaning and war, the Union and Confederacy are presented as heroic in roughly equal measure. The music, for instance, is consistently sympathetic. “March to Mortality (Pickett’s Charge)” offers as glorious a sound as any offered to the Union. “General Lee at Twilight” and “General Lee’s Solitude” are reverent and thoughtful, much like Chamberlain’s “Men of Honor” (both men also get voiceovers, usually reserved for positive protagonists). Ominous music does make an appearance, such as when Lee’s pride and concerns of honor override sensible tactical decisions, or during Chamberlain’s increasingly bloody and precarious defense of the Union flank at Little Round Top. But this is not a film that would assign a darker score or lighting arrangement to those who fought for the nation seeking to preserve the enslavement of black people. There are no insinuations of villains; both sides get to be the heroes.

The narrative takes the same tack, but simply follows foundational elements of The Killer Angels. Shaara may question mass bloodshed over causes, but his book is greatly sympathetic toward participants on both sides. The film simply focuses on and emulates the latter. Confederates are God-fearing, treat local populations with respect, care about honor (albeit to a fault), fight for their rights and the consent of the governed rather than slavery, lament both gray and blue losses, and do not consider Union soldiers enemies (they are rather all friends tragically torn asunder). Gettysburg is sure to show shoeless Confederates and amputations in makeshift hospitals on Lee’s side rather than the Union’s, stresses that Lee was “perhaps the most beloved general in American history,” and so on. The Union army is sympathetically presented as well. Respect and equal time are likewise offered to both sides in the book.^[16] The shared cultural work of book and film are clear: these men were all Americans (nearly a direct quote^[17]), all honorable, brave, admirable. National leaders and their (slaveholding) motives may be problematic, but not the fighting men.^[18] Historians, of course, be damned.^[19]

Arguably, these pieces of popular culture are more free to engage in anti-war nihilism and both-sides heroism because they are not interested in the black experience. So little interest is expressed, in fact, that while historians have established that blacks, slave and free, supported both armies as laborers at Gettysburg, the book and film show nothing of the sort — only a chance encounter with a runaway slave that has Chamberlain and other Unionists marveling as if observing an extraterrestrial.^[20] This lack of attention makes sense. Presenting meaninglessness and celebration of Confederates in an exploration of what was by then a war to free African Americans from slavery^[21] is disjointed and uncomfortable. It seems easier to do without black characters and their perspectives around to contradict the sentiments. 

In a film like Glory (1989), where black men are more centered, nihilism and both-sides admiration seem less possible.^[22] In this work, the Confederates are a distant enemy, seen only on the battlefield. It is blacks who are shoeless, the Union that has an amputation scene; black laborers are present on Northern lines. It is the black Union troops of the 54th Massachusetts who are the heroes, alongside their white commander Colonel Robert Shaw. They alone get soaring music, parades, black children in awe, and celebration of their accomplishments, from protests against unequal pay to the valiant attack on Fort Wagner that proved the might of black soldiers to the nation two weeks after Gettysburg. “Ain’t even much a matter what happens tomorrow,” Private Trip (Denzel Washington) says on the eve of the assault, “’cause we men, ain’t we?” This may sound nihilistic, but no: Trip suggests that whether they live or die, win or lose, their presence, actions, and cause matter — they have climbed to a status, the soldier, once reserved for white men, so-called full men, and in battle prove themselves equal, worthy of freedom.^[23] “O Heavenly Father,” cries Sergeant Major John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman), “we want you to let our folks know that we died facing the enemy! We want ’em to know that we went down standing up! Amongst those that are fighting against our oppression. We want ’em to know, Heavenly Father, that we died for freedom!” Could meaninglessness be comprehensible in a text where men are fighting for their liberation and common humanity? Would admiration of their enemies find a home? Presentation Category 5: Accept War; One Side’s Soldiers Are Heroes.^[24]

In sum, The Killer Angels lifts up the tragedy of war and its fueling ideologies, reaching a rather nihilistic conclusion, while still paying immense deference to soldiers — the victims — on all sides, doing what it can to parse their motives from those of the real culprits, national leaders.^[25] It embodies the “hating war is not hating the troops” refrain. Meanwhile, Gettysburg simply lauds the boys in blue and gray, accepting war; here causes, such as states’ rights of self-determination (preservation of slavery being hardly worth mentioning, again the motives of others higher up), not only go unquestioned but can be celebrated for inspiring men to acts of bravery and sacrifice. As with heroism, both texts treat causes as equivalent. One positions causes as equally dangerous, the other as equally celebratory, or at least roughly so. Glory, centering African Americans, rejects all these ideas, having no taste for nihilism nor patience for equivalencies. 

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^[1] Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1996). See interior praise pages.

^[2] Ibid., 28.

^[3] Ibid., 329.

^[4] Ibid. 

^[5] Ibid., 114.

^[6] Ibid., 330.

^[7] “I hate the idea of causes,” an E. M. Forster quote reads on the page after Shaara’s dedication, “and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

^[8] Ibid., 325. 

^[9] Ibid. 

^[10] Ibid., 326. 

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid., 15, 137, 182-183, 257-258, 287. 

^[13] Ibid., 326. This reflects page 251, where Lee has “no cause” and fights only for the people of Virginia.  

^[14] Gettysburg, directed by Ron Maxwell (1993; Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema).

^[15] Shaara, Killer Angels, 125.

^[16] See for example Shaara, Killer Angels, 15, 61-62, 126-128, 163, 174, 181, 240, 246, 256-257, 302-303, 316, 329, 333. Also relevant is the page of quotations (before the Contents) on friendship, family, and civility and their relationship to causes, patriotism, and crimes against humanity. As is the framing of two sides fighting for two different “dreams” on the back cover. Should not the focus be, all this suggests, on what unites us? Were there not good people on both sides?

^[17] Ibid., 329. 

^[18] Indeed, none of this is to argue that Shaara or the film’s creators would have preferred a Confederate victory or that the works are pure bothsidesist texts. Consider, for instance, that the author uses both Union and Confederate officers to declare that the war was over slavery (see pages 28 and 244), and spends no time defending the institution. Shaara may have opposed slavery like most Americans of the 1970s. The point is that the Southerners of book and film are divorced from the motivation to preserve slavery and can thus be lifted up as heroes. With such a division in place, sympathies can be extended to the Confederate army, but not toward Confederate politicians, the new nation, or slavery.

^[19] Maintaining control of black people was a motivating factor for ordinary Confederate soldiers. See Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 12, 36-39, 217-218.

^[20] In Shaara, Killer Angels, see pages 161-162.

^[21] See Manning, This Cruel War. Recall also that Gettysburg (July 1863) occurred after the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863).

^[22] Glory, directed by Edward Zwick (1989; Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures). 

^[23] While Trip does question whether final victory will mean much for blacks when refusing Shaw’s request that he carry the flag, in the climactic battle he picks up the fallen flag, signifying full devotion to the cause.  

^[24] Minus, of course, some racist Union soldiers and officers.

^[25] For example, Shaara, Killer Angels, 244: “The war was about slavery, all right. That was not why Longstreet fought but that was what the war was about…” 

Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) both present stories based on Pocahontas mythology, the former directly with its titular character and the latter less directly through its stand-in Magawisca. These works also offer some progressive ideas: independent, outspoken women protagonists, criticism of white attitudes and actions toward Native Americans, and a multicultural framing of colonial history are inherent to each, to different degrees and with varying flavors. The purposes of the creators had some overlap, as did the cultural work done upon the American societies of each century. However, the Magawisca story is one Disney’s Pocahontas could not fully express. Pocahontas, constrained by art form and associated ideological filters, cannot critique Christianity or its specific denominations. Sedgwick employs Magawisca to engage in such a critique, doing some cultural work quite different from that of Disney.

Pocahontas has little interest in the religion of the English. True, in its first song, “The Virginia Company,” a chorus sings, rather inaudibly, of sailing to the New World “for glory, God, and gold.”^[1] “Say your prayers, lads!” shouts one sailor as a storm threatens to sink their ship. “Godspeed,” another says later. Most notably, the English refer to the Powhatans as “heathens” and “devils,” their skin a “hellish red.” Beyond this, however, Christianity remains invisible, with no discussion of the subject or religious imagery to be found. There are no priests, no prayers before battle, no crosses, no bibles. The staff in Theodoor Galle’s Allegory of America or the garb in Eugène Duflot de Mofras’ engraving of Padre Narciso Duran and the indigenous girl would have seemed as foreign to Disney’s areligious Englishmen as to Native Americans. The Jamestown settlers may not have been religious refugees, but they were religious people, most Anglican. The only religion the film considers is that of the Powhatans, animating animism (most notably the Grandmother Willow tree and the wind) and featuring much dialogue, spoken or sung, on spirits in nature. It is a rather lopsided presentation.

One might interpret this as the creators rejecting Christianity and pushing Native American spiritualism on young people, as some Christian conservatives did in the 1990s, but there exists a superior explanation, simple sanitization. Remember, Pocahontas is sympathetic toward the Powhatans. Governor Ratcliffe is the villain; the English are greedy for gold, quick to violence, and regard indigenous people as “savages,” “vermin” who are “barely even human”; whites lament “what you get when races are diverse” and openly admit they “invaded [Indian] land.” The Powhatans step toward violence rather reluctantly.^[2] Pocahontas rejects it entirely; racism and imperialism, too: “You think you own whatever land you land on… You think the only people who are people / Are the people who look and think like you.” The cultural work of the text clearly frames the English arrival at what would become Jamestown as problematic, victimizing Native Americans — “This is their land!” John Smith, the transformed Englishman, bellows at Ratcliffe to drive the point home. But while the creators cared about multiculturalism and different historical perspectives, in 1995 there were still limits to who could be greedy, racist invaders. Whites clearly, but to frame Christians as such was far less likely. Anglican beliefs, practices, symbols, possessions, and so on — Christianity’s place in the story of 1607 — would be minimized or erased (“disarticulated”^[3]), consciously or not, to align with and protect the dominant belief system of American audiences. In the same way even populist-leaning cultural productions often leave capitalism and consumerism unexamined, Christianity remains “uncontested,” even in a progressive text with much to say about race, gender, and imperialism.^[4] Ratcliffe and his men would not be displaying crosses or holding bibles in between (or while) marching to war or singing “We’ll kill ourselves an Injun / Or maybe two or three.” This absence constructs, as John Storey of the University of Sunderland wrote when exploring theories of ideology, a “distorted image of reality,” or at least of history.^[5] 

Try to imagine a Disney movie critiquing Christianity in a serious, unambiguous way. It is difficult to do. Pocahontas can tell Smith about her faith — “I know every rock and tree and creature / Has a life, has a spirit, has a name” — but she cannot criticize his. In Hope Leslie, however, Magawisca is not so restrained. She tells Everell Fletcher, the character who parallels John Smith, about how colonists decapitated her brother. “You English tell us,” Magawisca says, “that the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts, for ye say it teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness — if ye had such a law and believed it, would ye thus have treated a captive boy?”^[6] The Puritans of 1640s Massachusetts were hypocrites, in other words, extolling the bible but not taking its edicts seriously. Everell has no response to this. Sedgwick, or the narrator, often as unsubtle as filmmakers 170 years hence, praises Magawisca’s “reflecting mind” for highlighting the “most serious obstacle to the progress of the christian religion.”^[7] The contrast between the faith’s “divine principles and the conduct of its professors” made conversion of “heathen men” more difficult; Sedgwick criticizes the faith — or rather those, past or present, who ignore its edicts to address the “Indian problem” — without fully rejecting its aims.^[8]

Magawisca, having observed Puritan violence and faith alike, resists the Fletchers’ attempts at conversion. On “principle,” “her eye is shut and her ear is closed” to Christianity.^[9] Sedgwick again assigns Magawisca “rare gifts of mind,” stressing the intellectual and rational nature of her opposition to a religion overly violent and, further, fundamentalist.^[10] For Magawisca is following the example of her mother, Monoca, who refused to convert, believing in the efficacy of all faiths: “all the children of the Great Spirit were equal objects of His favour,” and the bible was divinely “withheld” from Pequot culture because it was not “needful.”^[11] The Fletchers are sympathetic toward this view, supposing they should not be narrow-minded and wondering if Monoca’s good deeds would be enough for salvation.^[12] Here is a call for religious tolerance — Sedgwick may not fully reject conversion aims, but she does question them. It is difficult to envision the questioning of Christianity as the one true faith, or linkage of Christianity to hypocrisy and violence, in Pocahontas.

Why does a popular cultural artifact from 1827 seem more free to engage in religious criticism, even of long-faded sects, than one from 1995? True, different eras have different tolerances — at times the “pulse of the masses”^[13] is counterintuitive and surprising — and varied creators have varied intentions. We cannot discount these things. It is insufficient to say that Hope Leslie is for adults and Pocahontas for children, as the latter has no problem marking whites and historically celebrated history as problematic — it simply will not do the same to a specific group. (Some cultural theorists describe popular culture as possessing an inherent clash and negotiation between ideologies of resistance and domination, between, in Gramsci’s terms, counter-hegemonic elements and hegemony, which may explain the allowance of some critiques and not others in any given work.^[14])

Form is surely part of the answer. The writer is like a vigilante, with more freedom of expression. While still constrained, far fewer people stand between her unexpressed vision and the public consumption of her art, compared to film production. Less of Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” — required training, technology, access to institutions — stands in her way.^[15] Ideas can more easily traverse from mind to page to publisher to printer to bookshop. Publishing houses are institutions, of course, but perhaps easier to get “authorization” (pace historian Holt N. Parker) from than film studios, given the scale of the endeavors and opportunities at small firms.^[16] Perhaps more important is the potential societal response. Should the writer traffic in troubling or counter-hegemonic ideas, she can be waved away as a lone lunatic. Not unreasonably, the public places responsibility for a novel’s content on the author (the publishing institution usually avoids blame, though not always). Ruling classes may therefore be less concerned, creating opportunities.

A film is a bit different, with many more individuals involved in its creation, meaning more gatekeepers. Radical ideas can be better filtered out. The requirement of more cultural capital means those who produce such art are better aligned with elite interests or are among their number (in other words, hegemonic influence and cultural capital are tied together in a positive correlation, one rising with the other). Sizable, elite-owned institutions are, or were, generally necessary to create and distribute feature-length movies of acceptable quality, therefore individual troublemaking is less likely. Further, the institution may be held responsible for the content of this medium. Hope Leslie is a Sedgwick novel, while Pocahontas is a Disney film, not a Gabriel and Goldberg, or Binder, Grant, and LaZebnik, film.^[17] This is to say that compared to lone wolf authors and their novels, more social pressure, and elite pressure, may exist for films to follow dominant ideologies, as it would not do for major institutions to endorse subversive ideas. Art’s form, its associated barriers to existence and post hoc legitimizations, affects what art can say. After all, is it not easier to imagine a novel from the 1990s criticizing past Christians, and harder to imagine an 1820s Broadway play (films did not exist) doing the same? (There are no absolutes, of course, only influences.)

Cultural theorists contend that texts “always present a particular image of the world” and “win people to particular ways of seeing” it.^[18] Texts take sides, in other words.^[19] Our two works took opposite positions on whether Christianity had much to do with the European incursion in North America. Pocahontas sees and hears nothing of Anglicanism, therefore she cannot comment upon it, while Magawisca exists in a thoroughly Puritan world and is free, or forced, to interact with it. Despite any similar cultural work these texts do, and without denying other divergences undiscussed, such a significant narrative and semiotic difference sends a rather different message to viewers and readers, which, while its impact may be impossible to measure, should not go unnoticed.

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^[1] Pocahontas, directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg (1995; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios).

^[2] Of the Powhatans, only Kocoum seems eager to fight. Powhatan eventually feels he has no choice, but in the end rejects violence like his daughter.

^[3] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 10th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2024), 11.

^[4] LeRoy Ashby, “The Rising of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch,” OAH Magazine of History 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 13. Often critique must stay within certain parameters, Ashby argues.

^[5] Storey, Cultural Theory, 3.

^[6] Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (New York, NY: Penguin, 1998), 52-53.

^[7] Ibid., 53

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid., 32.

^[10] Ibid., 33.

^[11] Ibid., 21.

^[12] Ibid., 21-22. It should also be noted that Hope stands up to Puritan authorities and extremism during the witch trial in chapters eight and nine, one of several criticisms of religion by white characters.

^[13] Ashby, “Popular Culture,” 11-12.

^[14] Storey, Cultural Theory, 10-11.

^[15] Holt Parker, “Toward a Definition of Popular Culture,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (May 2011): 160-162.

^[16] Ibid., 163-166.

^[17] Directors, writers.

^[18] Storey, Cultural Theory, 4.

^[19] Ibid.

Upon visiting the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives museum, or seeing an image or recreation of the document elsewhere, one is at once struck by an interesting oddity. The letter “s” appears to be, in some places, replaced with a lowercase “f”! Why in the world does the Constitution speak of “Congreſs” rather than “Congress”?

You may need to zoom in or find a magnifying glass to notice that the letter is not actually an “f.” The little horizontal line is either nonexistent or is only found on the left side of the symbol’s body, rather than going all the way through. It looks like this: “ſ.” This letter is, in fact, a “long s,” which has long fallen out of use.

Conservator Rachel Bartgis at the National Archives writes that the English alphabet, being an offshoot of the Roman alphabet with the same feature (why the Romans favored this is unknown), used both a short and long “s” until the early 1800s. The “ſ,” the “long s,” was used at the (uncapitalized) beginning or middle of words. The “short s,” the one we know and love, was used at the end or when capitalization was involved. Today’s double “s” (like in “Congress”) would have both letters if at the end of a word (“Congreſs”), but you’d see “ſſ” in the middle of words (“paſſed”).

These rules, Bartgis says, changed over time and were not always followed. Marissa Laliberte at Reader’s Digest suggests that people of past centuries understood how confusing it could be to have an “f” and a “long s” that looked so similar, given certain historical rule breaks: “Often, a short S would go next to the letter F (e.g. misfortune) to avoid confusion.” Considering how small text was printed in newspapers in early America, one imagines plenty of opportunities for frustration.

According to Laliberte, printers in the late 18th century may have begun simplifying and streamlining their typesets, ditching the redundant letter, as technology changed. Each additional letter for new printers, after all, required materials and effort to create and use it. Bartgis implies, however, that the nature of typesetting may have slowed down the transition a bit, as getting rid of one letter required getting rid of several combination blocks used in the printer, such as “ſh” (for the “shhhh” sound). Replacing all those could be costly.

While you will not see the “long s” much outside of historical documents, and there remains work to do for historians to uncover why users of Latin (as well as Greek) felt the need for two lowercase “s” letters, your visits to the National Mall will at least be far less confusing in the future.

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Our exploration of American education history continues. Be sure to read the first installment as well: Remarkable Facts About U.S. Schooling (Pt. 1): Patriotism, Girls, Crime, & Anti-Capitalism.

When ideas of women’s nature somehow led to both oppression and new career opportunities

In the early to mid-1800s, women saw “equal education in the common schools, an expansion of educational opportunity for them in women’s seminaries, academies, and normal schools, and an expansion of employment opportunities in the teaching force…without ostensibly altering the patriarchal structure” of education or society (Urban, American Education, p. 101). Most occupations, all colleges, and some subjects were not for women (Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, p. 50-51). Indeed, things were loosened but not dislodged.

Ideologically, this was an interesting moment in American gender history. In Pillars of the Republic, Carl Kaestle notes some of the opposition to female teachers, and how perceived problems were solved. There existed notions of women’s “inability to teach higher subjects” (p. 123), and thus women’s expanding professional role was limited to younger children in common schools. There was concern over women being able to discipline and “control rowdy older male pupils,” but that was solved by the development of hierarchy and administration and institutions with bigger staffs — schools would have female teachers but male supervisors and principal teachers, who would be in charge and could deal with troublemaking older boys (p. 123, 125). Women saw real advancements, but the patriarchal society, in its usual way, placed limits upon them based on perceptions of their nature. What’s interesting is that perceptions of women’s nature at the same time fueled those real professional advancements, with ideas of women’s nurturing, mothering constitutions making them ideal for teaching young children (p. 123-124). It is perhaps rare to see ideologies of a male-dominant society work to create new professional and personal freedoms for women, alongside and in concert with the standard subjugation.

When the idea that schools created citizens spelled disaster for black people

In Schooling Citizens, historian Hilary Moss argues that the ideology that powered the rise of common schools in the early 1800s also worked to exclude African Americans from these institutions. Moss sees a “paradox” in the fact that “public schooling and white opposition to African American education expanded simultaneously” (p. 3-4). While this may not be the purest of paradoxes, as the United States regularly saw the growth of institutions and opportunities from which people of color were predictably excluded, Moss’ thesis is interesting because it suggests common school ideology inherently and inadvertently set the stage for racial segregation in education. 

Common schools were intended to inculcate in students a “common set of values” and form a “national identity” — children would “become American” (p. 4). Schools created citizens. But this forced a decision, conscious or otherwise, about black Americans. To open the doors to black students would be to acknowledge their American-ness, their inclusion in the national family, their citizenship and associated rights. This would not do. “By advancing an argument for universal education that privileged citizenship,” Moss writes, “school reformers inadvertently reinforced efforts to deny black people access to public schooling…” Indeed, “by invoking civic inclusion…to promote public education, they implicitly justified denying” black involvement (p. 4). Blacks were not citizens, and shouldn’t be, therefore you had to crack down on their education, as schooling was now linked to citizenship. Cities like New Haven, Connecticut, which had previously tolerated it, saw legal and vigilante efforts to crush black education in the late 1820s and 1830s (p. 18-19), during the rise of the common school. White openness to black learning in general and participation in integrated schools in particular diminished. Moss notes that segregation in education and attacks on black self-improvement occurred as part of a larger early nineteenth-century effort to expel blacks from public life, deny them citizenship, and link American-ness with whiteness; common school ideology is not marked as the singular cause of all this, rather it “reinforced” and represented a key part of these trends (p. 11-13).

On the other side of the coin, the reformist link between schooling and citizenship made, for black activists, abolitionists, and others, the entry of black children into public schools even more important, as citizenship, national inclusion, and equal rights could then be claimed and made reality (p. 4-5). Involvement in public schools was “symbolic” of and “symbiotic” with citizenship, true belonging (p. 193), to white segregationists and black advocates alike.

Moss examines education and racial conflict in New Haven, Boston, and Baltimore during this era. Baltimore did not feature public schooling, integrated or otherwise, for black children, but tolerated black-run private schools better, Moss argues, because slavery ensured blacks had little chance of earning citizenship and its rights (plus, black education benefited white employers). New Haven and Boston, in the free North, did offer public schools for black children, but, without the controlling and protective mechanism of slavery, employed more violence and legal weaponry against black self-improvement and integrated schools to keep the black population in line and deny it citizenship (p. 5-6, 68, 192-193). 

Moss provides a diversity of primary sources to show what local African American education and the challenges to it looked like, often comparing and overlaying such sources to offer intriguing insights and support her argument. Take, for example, a chapter on segregation in Boston (“Chapter Five: Race, Space, and Educational Opportunity”). In 1834, white Bostonians on Southack Street petitioned the city not to establish a new black schoolhouse near their homes, complaining of falling property values and neighborhood decay and crime (p. 139). Yet Moss uses an 1844 city map to mark where the signers of the Southack Street petition actually lived, discovering a good number lived blocks away. Moss theorizes these white homeowners did not want to see black children walking down their street on their way to school, and perhaps were uncomfortable with the geographic height of the school, which would sit on a hill, triggering associations with rising black social status (p. 145). Moss, in contrasting different sources, uncovers an attempt to “lay claim to space and in the process to mark people of color as outsiders and noncitizens” (p. 130) — African Americans do not belong, nor deserve the literal or philosophical higher station a new school would provide.

When tragic, twisted motives somehow prompted racial integration

In the late nineteenth century, the United States sought to do something about Native American tribes on reservations. Rogue nations within U.S. borders would not do — better to get them off the land, absorbing them into white society and wiping out their cultures through education. It was education that would assimilate Native Americans, Americanize them. Here, unlike the case of blacks and segregation cited above, education and its Americanizing, citizen-making purpose spurred racial integration! Has integration ever been based upon such troubling motives?

Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, and others wanted Native Americans “among the whites” (Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, 1892). They would work and live together (the “Land in Severalty Bill” should let “two or three white families come between two Indian families”). 

Integration would have a “civilizing” influence. “The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them… We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.” Pratt compares this to the black experience, which involved more sustained contact with whites: “Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people…”

(Pratt believed environment, not biology, caused inferiority. Carlisle students could “show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored.” And: “It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”) 

Pratt’s plan was integration to achieve cultural eradication. See how it went in Indoctrination and Knowledge: Native American Youth in the Federal Boarding Schools.

When “progressive education” meant a million different things

Progressive reformers wished to change the operations of public schools to meet various needs in the changing society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These needs (and proposed solutions) were at times contradictory (Urban, 171-172). James W. Fraser argues in The School in the United States that progressive education “meant so many things” to so many different reformers “that it is a virtually meaningless term” (p. 215). Trying to figure out how to organize and categorize progressive reformers is a real challenge.

Fraser offers five subgroups (p. 216) that all wore the progressive label. The administrative progressives sought to shift power from schools and neighborhood boards to centralized municipal school boards made up of the wisest citizens, to standardize education, make it more effective, and address corruption (see also Urban, 173). The second subgroup, militant teachers, wanted the opposite, seeking more control over their own work, employing their own practices to meet student needs, plus better pay and smaller classes (see also Fraser, 222-223). Child-centered curriculum reformers, the third classification, sought to bring active learning, projects, and democracy into the classroom to make learning more interesting and prepare students for democratic participation, a philosophy that also countered administrative prescriptions and systemization. Testing advocates focused on the scientific measurement of student abilities and progress, using this to determine how students were then educated. Finally, there was a subgroup that pushed for teachers to help end capitalism and other social ills, and create a better society, by molding the next generation.

David Tyack, in The One Best System, takes the “diverse reformers, philosophies, and practices” to which progressivism was “loosely applied” and places them in two broad categories (p. 196-197). Administrative progressives consolidated and centralized power, were concerned with “social control” rather than the “individual development of students,” and comprised an “elitist philosophy and constituency” favoring a “corporate model” for education. But Tyack’s pedagogical progressives focused on the development of students. The emphasis was on active learning, “meet[ing] individual needs,” differentiated curricula, the “individual self-expression of the child,” democracy in the classroom, cooperative learning, and so on. Tyack somewhat separates pedagogical progressivism (driven by John Dewey and the “philosophers, psychologists, and curriculum theorists in schools of education” who supported him) from two ideological movements. There was a “libertarian wing” of education reformers that sought student growth and expression free from the repression of traditional schooling, and a “social reconstructionist” wing that sought student growth in “left-liberal ideology,” which would help “undermine the capitalistic system.” But as these groups shared the focus of the pedagogical folks — developing students, as opposed to the management focus of the administrative progressives — they can perhaps be included under the umbrella of pedagogical progressives. 

Both of these frameworks are helpful in understanding progressive education and its diverse meanings, and they are similar enough to fit well together. Tyack’s administrative progressives category could include Fraser’s administrative progressives and perhaps testing advocates, who were concerned with organizing students into the appropriate grades based on mental ability (Fraser, 243-244). Perhaps this meets the needs of each student, but it is clearly systemization, and Fraser notes these scientific-minded reformers were skeptical of education actually changing students or societies (p. 216). Tyack’s pedagogical progressives could include Fraser’s child-centered curriculum reformers, the anti-capitalist visionaries, and perhaps militant teachers, who, again, wanted more control to meet student needs, were against the centralization of the administrative types, and were constructing a better world of their own by organizing for better working conditions and equal pay. 

Potentially, the types of progressive reformers could be organized along lines of political ideology. In American Education, Urban cites Tyack’s two categories and folds them into the broader progressivism of the age that featured a conservative tendency seeking social order and a liberal tendency seeking social justice; the administrative progressives were more conservative, the pedagogical progressives more liberal (p. 171-172, 187). Note how the social order versus social justice frame reinforces how Tyack and Fraser’s typologies fit together above, with two categories having to do with social order and three with social justice. Top-down versus bottom-up control would also be a useful framing of progressive types.  

Fraser (p. 216) hints at another way to organize reforms: by whether the primary focus or concern is on administrators, teachers, or students. In this case, you could have three categories. Administrative progressives and testing advocates could fall under administrators, militant teachers under teachers, and child-centered curriculum reformers and new society radicals under students. As for Tyack, administrative types go under administrators, and the pedagogical types must be broken up between teachers and students (like elsewhere, there is flexibility as to how — for example, is building a new society more a focus on the teachers who teach or the learners who learn?).

When differentiation kept the poor in their place

Tyack (p. 195-196) states that reformers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, like John Dewey, believed “‘meeting the needs of children’ and ‘cooperation’ distinguished the new education from the old,” and that these ideas were key components of progressive education. Tyack cites Cincinnati schools conducting the “radical experiment of trusting…principals and teachers to adapt the curriculum to the children.” The opposite of the old method. However, the wealthy suburban schools shaped their curricula in different ways than poor schools in factory districts — the latter set up a manual training program to prepare students for factory and domestic work (the school was also involved in neighborhood improvements though). In this instance we see that meeting the needs of children simply meant reinforcing social class. The poor work in factories, better educate poor children to work in factories. Urban, on pages 176 and 179, offers more on differentiation, how it was a shift away from the common school idea of equal education for all, and how your class and color determined what curriculum or track you experienced: academic, commercial, or vocational. Meeting student needs and differentiating curricula could be a positive thing in this period, but had a dark side as well.    

In terms of experimentation and implementation, it seems clear Dewey’s child-centered philosophy didn’t advance very far into the public schools (Urban, 191, 195; Tyack, 197). The new pedagogy mostly appeared in experimental schools, such as the one Dewey established at the University of Chicago (Urban, 189). Tyack notes (p. 197) that Dewey’s book highlighting teachers using his child-centered approach featured teachers from small, private schools. Because the method “demanded substantial autonomy on the part of teachers and children,” it clashed with the administrative progressives, standardization and the “one best system,” and so on, the defining features of public schools at the time. Tyack also argues that attempted transitions to the new pedagogy in public schools “often brought more, not less, red tape and administration.”

When colonized people used colonizer ideas for their own purposes

Scholarship on education uses the term “negotiation” to describe how colonized people modified or uniquely utilized colonizer ideologies, practices, and institutions to serve their own interests and goals. Indigenous teachers and students alike engaged in negotiation when they pushed forward or preserved their own ideas in colonial schools, while also often adopting or acquiescing to components of colonizer ideology, in the give-and-take fashion of a negotiation — though here, of course, there is little choice. 

For example, Solsirée del Moral writes in “Negotiating Colonialism: ‘Race,’ Class, and Education in Early-Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico” that while white government and school officials wanted Puerto Rican students prepared for U.S. citizenship and loyalty, Puerto Rican teachers wanted to ready students for citizenship in an independent Puerto Rico (McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 137). It was “an alternative citizenship-building project” (p. 138). A key component was “racial regeneration” — tackling diseases like malaria and social problems like alcoholism — which fit neatly into the American desire to improve the moral, intellectual, and physical nature of the colonized (p. 139-140). In other words, colonial schooling was imposed on Puerto Ricans, but it was used for Puerto Rican nation-building rather than full Americanization; U.S. officials had goals for Puerto Rican improvement, and prior local ideas about racial progress were married to them. This is negotiation — some colonizer practices and ways of thinking are accepted, but they are adapted to suit the interests of the occupied. It’s a mix of resistance and acquiescence, as indigenous interests are advanced through imperial mechanisms. Some American ideologies and goals were rejected, but del Moral notes that the practices of some of the colonized did not outright challenge colonialism and reinforced racial stereotypes and hierarchies (p. 143-144).

In “Americanizing the Teachers: Identity, Citizenship, and the Teaching Corps in Hawai’i, 1900-1941,” Michelle Morgan writes that in Hawaii strict hiring filters ensured immigrant and indigenous teachers were largely supportive of Americanization, but these educators pushed the ideology of equal opportunity and social mobility for students, countering the needs of white planters and businessmen, who wanted students to go through vocational schooling and be ready for agricultural labor on plantations (p. 161, 164-166). Here two American ideologies clash, but colonized teachers on the islands nevertheless stood up for their own goals (and people) and rejected those of the powerful: “American political and educational rhetoric emphasizing democracy conflicted with the goals of a settler colonialist society. This contrast clearly emerged in the debates surrounding vocational education, as teachers and students rejected or modified the efforts of elites to create a malleable plantation labor force” (p. 167). Meanwhile, native Hawaiian students were selective in what lessons they took to heart, rejecting some ideas and keeping others, preserving their cultural pride and identities (Derek Taira, “Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawai‘i’s Public Schools, 1920–1940,” 362, 368).

Different occupied societies would counter or co-opt Americanization in unique ways, having different pre-existing beliefs and practices (but cultural preservation is a major theme). Puerto Rican belief in their approaching national independence and racial decline impacted how students were taught, as did the Hawaiian and immigrant disdain for imperial plantation labor. While this can be seen as successful resistance, scholars suggest Americanization and U.S. officials were also adapting, negotiating. Del Moral writes that “the American empire was daily reproduced within Puerto Rican public schools because it was malleable enough to incorporate those interests, demands, visions, and projects local actors already maintained and defended” (p. 144). Minor pushbacks and indigenous interests could be tolerated and absorbed, as long as they did not seriously threaten colonization. This is a powerful reframing. Morgan writes: “In Hawai‘i’s diverse society, schools needed to suppress indigenous culture and Americanize waves of immigrants. In order to create a teaching force that could accomplish these goals, administrators drew on colonial and local constructions of race, which categorized Kanaka Maoli teachers as the most assimilated and Asian teachers, particularly the Japanese, as the least assimilated” (p. 167). Officials took these pre-existing ideas and made them filters for employment, ensuring they had patriotic and loyal teachers. All of this is to say that in each unique territory the indigenous ideologies and traditions not only determined how indigenous teachers and students would negotiate (often resist) but also how the United States would negotiate (often oppress).

When female teachers joined unions despite it seeming unladylike

Leftwing anticapitalist reformer George Counts, among others, saw teachers as key to broad social reforms. They should preach democracy and other values in the classroom, join unions and organize, and be leaders of radical change (Urban, 236-237). 

Whether or not they agreed with these things, in the early twentieth century teachers were joining unions “in large numbers” (Urban, 237). Union ranks were “enlarged greatly” due to the Depression — teachers came together to protect their jobs and wages, which at times entailed strikes, pickets, and so on.

A challenge to further growth, however, was the perception that joining a union was low brow and low class (Richard Quantz, “The Complex Visions of Female Teachers and the Failure of Unionization in the 1930s,” p. 456), tarnishing the image and social status of teachers. Another challenge would be the conservative nature of most teachers (Urban, 237, 245, 248), who wouldn’t be inclined to challenge the status quo or disobey authority, although many conservative teachers joined unions during this time as well (Urban, 237), as everyone faced the tribulations of the Depression. Further, female teachers had a tender, mother-like image and expectation of docility that contrasted with troublemaking, rebellious union activities (Urban, 246-247, citing Quantz). This would be another factor that prevented even more teachers from joining unions in this era. Many were unconcerned and joined anyway.

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The history of American education is quite intriguing. I’m particularly interested in the higher purposes of schooling — though not all the facts featured in this multi-part series will explicitly relate to this. Some purposes have faded away, others persist to this day. Imparting religious beliefs, patriotism and citizenship, moral values, the desire to build a new socialistic society (see later articles, not so much this one), and more demonstrate how far and how often education stepped beyond more basic aims like the acquisition of academic knowledge or occupational preparation. Let’s explore some of these purposes and other aspects of education history together.

When schools inculcating patriotism was deemed necessary for national survival

In the early republic, education was often seen as an important means of preserving the new nation — its liberties and system of government. Schools could impart loyalty and virtue that would ensure both obedience and wise politics. Historian Carl Kaestle argues in Pillars of the Republic that post-war rebellions, ideological factionalism, and fears that the United States was too diverse for democracy to last motivated the thinking of some Founders and educational reformers (p. 4-5). Schools needed to produce wise voters and lawmakers, so students would need to be made to think in certain ways. 

Noah Webster insisted schools should develop in students an “inviolable attachment to their own country,” while Benjamin Rush saw the need to “convert men into republican machines” who do their part in the collective whole: “good citizens of the republic” were the necessary output of schools, and “the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age” (p. 7). The “obligations of patriotism should be inculcated” in students (Rush, On the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, 1798). Thomas Jefferson, in his 1778 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” wrote that in addition to public happiness, education would give ordinary people “knowledge…which history exhibiteth” that would allow them to recognize “ambition” and “tyranny” — and “defeat” it, protecting the “sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” Emma Willard, in “Proposing a Plan for Female Education” (1819), echoed such sentiments when she wrote that educating women could bring “national glory” and help defend liberties. Indoctrination was for a noble purpose indeed, being how freedom, republicanism, and stability would endure.

This purpose appears in both the earliest and later years of schooling. The New England Primer, which helped little ones learn the alphabet through rhyme, updated its positive views on monarchs to read: “Queens and Kings / Are gaudy things” (Urban, American Education, p. 34). Geography textbooks glorified the beauty of the United States and its republic system, stomped on people from other nations (the Mexicans and Spanish had “bad qualities,” the Irish were “blundering,” the English “haughty”), and in other ways encouraged national pride (Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, p. 46). Students in academies would also learn about Rome and how without citizen virtue a republic would fall (p. 47). These ideas were impressed upon both boys and girls alike, with republican virtue important for male voters or lawmakers and for republican mothers and wives, who were expected to guide and influence men positively (Kaestle, 5; see also Rush, Thoughts on Female Education, 1787). Benjamin Rush recommended subjects like eloquence, which was taught in the Roman Empire and constituted the “first accomplishment in a republic” and was as important as the “sword” in “bringing about American revolution” (On the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, 1798). Ancient republics, the tyranny of European states, and of course the American system of government and U.S. history should also be studied.

When girls had highly similar educations to boys, to a point

In the 17th and 18th centuries, while colleges, many apprenticeships, grammar schools, and other enterprises were solely for boys and young men, schools launched by towns, churches, tutors, and benefactors were generally open to girls and boys alike (and later there were secondary schools like academies and seminaries for young women to continue their studies). Urban, in American Education, highlights girls being educated (p. 20, 33), but mostly just uses the all-inclusive “children” (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 32, and so on). It is clear that the purposes that drove education applied to boys and girls — the Puritans wanted all children to learn the faith and attain salvation, not just boys (29-35); revolutionary thinkers wanted everyone completely devoted to the new nation, and educated women had a role to play in that.

We indeed observe schooling for girls aiding nationalism and male control of society. “Girls’ robust education was to be put to the service of…‘Republican motherhood,’ in which ‘righteous mothers were asked to raise the virtuous male citizens on whom the health of the Republic depended’” (Urban, 67; see also Kaestle, 5). Rush wrote that a purpose of education for women was to “concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government” (Thoughts on Female Education, 1787). Teaching children was the “duty of mothers.” Other positives of learning related to assisting working husbands with bookkeeping or property management. Education was for equipping women to fulfill duties in the home. This was part of a larger trend to redirect women away from public life after advancements during the Revolution. 

The early republic era entailed the reinforcement of the traditional gender order alongside challenges to that order. Urban uses the phrases “complex,” “contradictory,” and “paradoxical” (67). There were clashing sets of ideas: It made sense to Americans — men and women alike — that women should learn intellectual subjects (be a part of the enlightenment tradition) like philosophy, mathematics, language, science, history, government, and so on, and some even considered women to not only be as worthy of intellectual study as men but indeed their intellectual equals (Urban, 67; Nash, 35-36). But after schooling, women should not have “independence” or freedom or power in social life, they should serve as mothers, or at most seamstresses, bookkeepers, teachers, and a limited number of other roles (Urban, 66-67). Beings of equal intelligence or worthiness of education did not deserve social and political equality! 

Another tension was between all the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and women’s subordinate status, a contradiction women drew attention to. Women justified more education and liberties using the philosophy that justified the Revolution: “The awareness of Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Warren, and a few other women who questioned traditional gender relations and educational conventions was rooted in the same Enlightment faith that motivated their husbands and other patriots…” (Urban, 67). Emma Willard implies that because the United States is an enlightened place, caring about liberty, including that of women, educating women is appropriate (“Proposing a Plan for Female Education,” 1819).

Higher education for men and women was generally quite similar, as the large majority of men and women did not attend academy, college, or seminary school. In the context of the men and women who actually did attend such institutions, we see in Nash and Urban that there was much crossover in terms of what was taught, again pretty similar educations, minus some subjects and vocation preparation being reserved for a specific gender (and of course colleges being only for men, to study medicine, law, theology, and so on). 

When it comes to childhood or lower education, something similar can perhaps be said, but with inverted attendance figures. The schooling rate for children in the early republic era appears high. Kaestle (p. 11) estimates that in New York in 1800, 75% of school-age children attended state-funded schools alone, for at least some of the school year. Meaning even higher enrollment when schools that were not state funded are factored in. So with elementary education, one could again say that boys and girls had similar experiences, this time given that a majority participated. Then, again, in the context of what’s actually being taught, Urban (chapters 2-4) suggests highly similar curricula for boys and girls.

When schooling was all about morality and crime prevention

The major goal of common schools — state-funded, open and free to most American children — was to develop moral character. In the early nineteenth century, a lack of virtue was seen as a cause of individual and societal decline, real or potential. Without restraint, self-sacrifice, intelligence, devotion to the common good, hard work, and other marks of good character, people would fall into poverty, vice, and crime (Kaestle, 81-82). Further, morality (most always founded on Christianity in this era) was key to protecting and maintaining the republican experiment. Without commitment to the common good, noble behavior, and a shared understanding of what’s right among citizens, voters, and lawmakers, democracy and liberty would fall (Kaestle, 79-80). Significant social change (industrialization and urbanization creating new forms of poverty, immigration creating both less homogenous populations and concerns about loyalty to and understanding of American ideals) fueled interest in shared moral and attitudinal frameworks (Kaestle, 80).

In Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book (1831), teaching children to read was combined with teaching them to “know their duty” (p. 43-46). “You must not tell a lie,” it instructs, “nor do hurt… Help such as want help, and be kind…” Children are told to “love the law [of God] and keep it,” “walk with the just and do good,” and “shun vice,” never swearing, cheating, or stealing, or else suffer a “bad end.” These instructions are quite lengthy and repetitive to drive home the message. Webster’s text also offers comparative stories of a hardworking, thrifty man who becomes wealthy and a lazy drunk who lives in poverty and misery. Proper character, enforced by schools, was judged to be the cure for American social ills. “All the members of society have a direct interest in the manners of each of its individuals,” reformer Horace Mann wrote (Fourth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education, 1840), reflecting the popular sentiment of the age.

Enforcement may or may not have involved corporal punishment. In the reform era, there was a certain stress on creating a nurturing environment to ensure good behavior was internalized and intrinsically motivated, rather than attempting to beat it into children (Kaestle, 89). Some teachers of course still struck palms. But the most important thing was that order and obedience reigned, as this would ensure children developed proper moral character (Kaestle, 96-97). Mann, in the Fourth Annual Report, wrote that “if order do not pervade the school, as a whole, and in all its parts, all is lost…” It was critical that teachers have strong management and disciplinary skills (teacher qualifications were part of the common school reform agenda). Without those skills, without order, the consequences would be “disastrous.” Physical punishment (Mann uses “chastisement”), while lawful and still widely accepted by the citizenry, was a “last resort,” the “ultimate resource,” a “barbarism” that was still at times “necessary.” If order (so necessary for the development of virtue) required physical discipline, so be it.

In his Twelfth Annual Report (1848), Mann advocates for “Moral Education,” framing the law as an insufficient method of reducing criminality. “For every lock that is made, a false key is made to pick it” — people will earn “dishonest profits” from illegal black market sales, they’ll smuggle, commit fraud, and so on. The law is not enough, you need to develop good character in children to prevent them from becoming adults capable of crime. Religious education and the ethics that came with it played a role here as well.

“Political Education” is also highlighted. Without intelligence, a republican form of government cannot function; Mann compares it to a “mad-house” without supervisors. Students must understand the “true nature and functions of the government,” to prepare for later democratic participation. The Constitution, the separation of powers, elections, the courts, and so on must be understood and supported, discouraging “rebellion” or vindictively taking matters into one’s own hands in a criminal fashion. 

Common schools, then, were a “preventative means against dishonesty, against fraud, and against violence.”

When Horace Mann saw schools as fighting poverty and capitalism

The famous Horace Mann had much more to say about education and morality in his 1848 report. 

“Intellectual Education” was his “means of removing poverty,” an unnecessary evil in society. Schooling, Mann declares, is the great equalizer of social conditions — “all are to have an equal chance for earning” income and growing prosperous after a proper education. The “highest duty of a State” is to safeguard people’s well-being, expanding “human welfare,” thus common schools are necessary. Mann’s opinions are sympathetic toward the poor, containing a high degree of class consciousness, castigating the “treasures” that exist beside “starvation,” declaring “the earth contains abundant resources” enough for all, and highlighting the “grossest inequalities” between those who “toil and earn” (workers) and those who “seize and enjoy” (employers, capitalists). “Labor” (workers) and “property” (employers, capitalists) can be brought into the “same class” through education, so that the former are no longer “subjects” of the latter, under a “tyranny, in the form of capital.” 

We see in Kaestle’s fifth chapter that immoral character was often seen as the cause of poverty. Mann sees a connection, but his empathy is moving: “actual, living beings, beings that have hearts to palpitate” and precious “affections” are testing the “capacities of human nature for suffering and for sin.” Suffering and sin go together, but it’s not so clear that Mann blames the sin for the suffering. Perhaps to a degree — we know he blames poor character for crime and violent rebellion. We also know that he does not believe intelligent, educated people will remain poor — there’s something wrong with the poor that if fixed will solve the social ill. But he seems to assign at least partial blame to the capitalist economic system, with its “antagonistic” classes, the tyranny of employers who seize wealth from workers, gross inequalities, “one class possess[ing] all the wealth and the education,” and so on. 

His explicit comments on morality here are interesting. Education “gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men.” This is a reference to the tyranny and seizing of wealth and low wages and so on, and turns the morality discussion around: the central problem isn’t your immorality, which common schools need to purge, it’s the immorality of others, of capitalists and employers and the rich, people you’ll encounter as a working adult. With education, you’ll be free (or freer) from class exploitation; you’ll be more intelligent, you’ll have more job opportunities, maybe avoid miserable factory life, start your own enterprises, grow prosperous, and so on. Mann isn’t highlighting the immorality of the poor, but rather the sins of the economic system and owners, who engage in “oppression.” Education can free people of that, reducing poverty (and, Mann adds, the riots, rebellions, and hostilities that come with it). 

Mann explicitly places blame for poverty on society and economy, rather than the poor, when he notes “miseries that spring from the coexistence, side by side, of enormous wealth and squalid want.” Moral development in schools is no doubt part of how education will help bring about equality and prosperity for all in the nineteenth century, but moral failure does not appear to be the only cause of poverty or daunting challenge in this reformer’s mind.

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