A 1964 master’s thesis by Catherine L. Covert
B.A., State University of Iowa, 1945

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History in the Graduate School of Syracuse University, June, 1964

Thanks to MMUUS member Irene Blakeslee for her working in digitizing this thesis.

Abstract

Hypothesis: That the life of the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, 1797-1871, and his career in educational reform provide a representative picture of the educational philosophies and movements of the antebellum period in the United States.

Method: The author examined May's writings in educational reform, his extensive correspondence with other prominent educators of the day, pertinent contemporary educational publications as well as general newspapers and magazines, pertinent diaries, memoirs, sermons, tracts and official documents of May's period, and appropriate secondary sources on the 19^th Century reform.

Conclusions: May's life spanned the period commonly known as the American educational renaissance, beginning in the early 1820s and extending to the Civil War; his interests reflected the contemporary concerns of educators with improving teaching methods, building a corps of professional teachers, providing improved educational facilities, modifying the curriculum to meet the changing needs of the more heterogeneous group of children to be educated, and encouraging public interest in problems of educational reform. May pioneered in many of these areas. In addition he identified and took public stands on a number of controversial questions which were to remain provocative to educators and the general public: racial integration in the schools, the socialization of education, coeducation, the relationship between religion and the schools, and the extension of education to all age groups and to the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped, the delinquent, and to racial and religious minorities. Though May was an ardent advocate of antislavery, temperance, peace, the reform of prisons and asylums and of many other meliorist movements, he considered education as the most important of all the reforms and the one that would eventually render the others unnecessary.

Preface

On October 4, 1957, a new object flashed across the American skies, the Soviet satellite "Sputnik.” This tiny but terrifying object was to shake Americans out of their lethargy, tighten their defenses, and launch their nation on a time of tension and troubles dominated by the great two-power struggle for control of outer space. The political and military effects of Sputnik proved monumental, but the satellite had equal impact on another segment of the domestic scene, the American educational system. In response to the Russian threat to the continued existence of the American democracy, the whole unwieldy American educational organization rumbled and stirred and shook. Educators reevaluated their total programs, objectives and procedures. From these upheavals emerged a new emphasis on intellectual excellence, a search for the brilliant student, and an anxious acceleration of studies in all the scientific disciplines in the hope that new American talent might wrest control of the skies from the Soviet antagonists and preserve the American system from a frightening new menace.

In strikingly similar fashion has the American educational system once before shaken itself from torpor and re-evaluated its entire role in response to what seemed a threat to the democracy. In the 1830s, however, the threat came, not from without the country, but from within. Internal riots, revolts and violence threatened to rend the whole fabric of the infant republic. As Merle Curti points out, the Dorr war, the anti-rent struggles, and the anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, and anti-abolition riots caused great apprehension.(1) In the 1830s the American democracy was still a dubious experiment. The country was young, not much more than half a century removed from its blood-spattered birth amid riot and rebellion in 1776. These new upheavals of the Thirties and Forties persuaded many that the young republic might perish amid the same violence that heralded its beginnings.

As Sidney Jackson has observed, the elite comprised the social group most threatened by the rising Jacksonian democratic movement with its concomitant social upheaval. At the time, continues Jackson, optimistic reformers who believed in perfectibility were advocating educational reforms they believed might lead to a more utopian kind of society. (2) At this point of social unrest, these two disparate groups banded together in uneasy alliance. Educators saw an opportunity to prove to the alarmed men of wealth and power that reform of the schools might, as Merle Curti says, safeguard republican institutions against "monarchy, mobocracy, and revolution.”(3) A proper education, reformers promised the elite, could inculcate respect for authority, produce a stable and informed mass of citizenry, prevent revolution, and help to save the American experiment.(4)

Persuaded at least in part by these arguments, men of political and social power took action that would have great impact on American schools. In the first major move toward educational reform, the Massachusetts legislature authorized formation of the state's first board of education in 1837; a bright young legislator named Horace Mann was chosen secretary. Subsequently other states followed suit.

Just at this time the economic depression of the late Thirties threatened the lower classes. The same educational reformers who had used their persuasive powers on the gentry attempted simultaneously to prove to the common people that education offered them a path toward prosperity, happiness and the good life.

This two-pronged persuasive effort of the educational reformers directed simultaneously toward the aristocracy and the masses proved, at least in part, effective. Americans of wealth and stature as well as those of more modest rank began to support the revision and expansion of the American educational system. Begun in New England and spreading to all parts of the nation except at the South,(5) a complete reorganization and reevaluation of the educational system resulted.

The new movement was not the birth of the American public school system; it was a re-birth, a renaissance of interest in common education that had once flourished in the first days of the republic when new states set up magnificent school funds and conscientious hamlets organized their own school committees to spend the money. From these promising beginnings, the American common school system has languished: under-supported, under-developed, and under-patronized by the very common people for whom it had been designed. Only the social and economic unrest of the 1830s could resurrect an interest in the common schools as the first bastion of democracy and the basic hope of the republic.

Many of the problems faced by early nineteenth century educational reformers foreshadowed those of later eras. Take the problem, for example, of socializing the American educational system, of providing education for all children at the taxpayer's expense instead of billing each parent for his own child's schooling. By the 1830s the once-princely school funds provided only the most meager support for the greatly swollen number of scholars; most parents were assessed per day for the schooling their children received. The hot arguments of the Thirties and Forties over the pressing question of free schools were almost precisely those that were to rise in the next century from political caucus and legislative committee debating the question of socializing medical care for the aged.

"Are the free schools important enough to the national welfare to pay for them from the public purse?" questioned those thinking of providing free schools. "Will such payment undermine our citizen's individual initiative and enterprise? Will it be fair to tax everyone to pay for the education of some?" Eventually, the Jacksonians and their successors answered these questions in the affirmative; the American socialized educational system was eventually to be taken for granted by their most individualistic descendants as one of the great American institutions for the preservation of liberty.

The question of religious influence in the schools provided another great educational concern of the age. Educators were striving to produce what they called a "secular" school system, that is, one free of influence from specific religious denominations. But they clung to the idea that such a secular system could still provide what they called "moral education" without inculcating any specifically sectarian dogmas. By "moral education," nineteenth century educators meant the general ethical and religious concepts associated with a white, Protestant rural society, though few of them realized their value system was thus circumscribed. Horace Mann, Henry Barnard and most of the others devoutly believed they could teach "morals" without teaching "sectarianism.”

The era's great controversy over reading the Bible in the schools hinged on precisely this fine distinction. The dominant educators wished to teach "morals" and relied on reading the Bible in the schoolroom without comment to accomplish this purpose. They refused to admit the Catholic charge that the commonly used King James version was a sectarian book; such an admission would completely undermine their position and force Bible reading out of the schoolroom. Around this issue raged the battle. Was it fair to make young Catholics listen to the King James version? Was it right to impose the wishes of a religious majority on the minority? Would it be fair, on the other hand, to deprive the large Protestant majority of their major source of "moral education" to satisfy a handful of Catholics? Should the rights and preferences of the many be ignored because of the few?(6) This controversy has also descended to us, largely unaltered and certainly unsolved.

As the free Negroes flourished and multiplied, Americans of the antebellum north began for the first time to wrestle with the problem of racial integration in the schools. Only the bravest reformers urged their communities to seat little white girls next to little Black boys in the classroom. "Amalgamation!" cried the fearful. "The greatest white friend of emancipation that we have," asserted one leading editor, "would be unwilling that his daughter should marry a Black man."(7)

Separate schools for the free-Blacks were almost invariably maintained in those communities enlightened enough to provide any schooling at all for Negroes; a community that provides education in any form for Negroes, warned the pessimists, was sure to be inundated by similar "undesirables" from outside.

The problem of educating what the twentieth century would ungracefully call the "socially and culturally disadvantaged" had also begun to loom on the nineteenth century horizon. How much are we justified in diverting resources from the talented and qualified who promise to provide our national leadership in order to educate others from which leadership might possibly come? This was the query of a few far-seeing educators. What about the poor, what about juvenile delinquents,(8) Indians, idiots or women? The battle for higher education for females was barely underway. Education for members of these other subgroups was undertaken only by visionaries and that on a small scale; most of them were left to roam the streets of were relegated to reservations, asylums, jails, or attics.

Educators attempted to cope with these problems and many others in an intellectual climate not entirely alien to our own. By the time of Jackson's inauguration, the great anti-intellectual revolt was underway against the men of culture and refinement who had led the nation since its inception.

A striking example of the two opposing styles could be seen in the persons of that cultivated aristocrat, John Quincy Adams, and his successor, the great exemplar of the common people, Andrew Jackson. The contrast is not inconceivable to us in a day which has seen Pablo Casals replaced as after-dinner entertainment in the White House by the New Christy Minstrels.

To point out similarities between the Jacksonians' day and our own is not to attempt to make of the Nineteenth century a perfect template for the Twentieth. The similarities between educational objectives, problems and climate of opinion in the two ages are easily eclipsed by the dissimilarities. The Nineteenth century educator's concern was primarily for the soul of the child, not for his psyche or his peer group or his milieu. Educational arguments in that theologically-oriented age hinged more immediately and directly on the relationship of man to his creator; his relationship with society took second place. There and how he would spend his present life was subsidiary in importance to the question of where and how he would spend eternity.

Among the distinctive problems facing antebellum educators were 1) the conversation of a school system formerly dominated by sectarians into a secular system capable of serving children of every persuasion while maintaining an acceptable level of "moral culture", 2) the expansion of a common school system financed from inadequate government funds and the pocketbooks of its patrons into a tax-supported system open to children of all economic levels, and 3) the development of teaching methods to suit these new objectives and the enormously varied kinds of children who would be coming into the expanded system.

The educational history of this exciting era has not been adequately written. The "Dewey revolution" of the Twentieth century has been thoroughly chronicled, not the educational renaissance of the early Nineteenth. And yet in many ways Dewey's methods were prefigured by men of the renaissance—Bronson Alcott, Samuel J. May. Horace Mann and others—long before Dewey popularized them on the modern educational scene. We do have several striking general histories of education in relationships to social cultural and economic factors which include this period, and a few good biographies of the outstanding leaders of the day. Henry Barnard himself still awaits a definitive biography as do many of his colleagues in reform.

Through tracing the career of one of the more influential purveyors of educational reform, Samuel Joseph May, I hope to develop some of the highlights and illumine the rich background of the educational picture in the years before the Civil War. May's lifetime, from 1797 to 1871, spanned the years before, during and immediately after the educational reawakening. Born in Boston to a Brahmin family of distinguished bloodlines, May became a Unitarian clergyman and an ardent social reformer. From this peculiar position of influence and authority, he could denounce or commend the educational practices and philosophies of his age.

That fluid era, however, gave him an opportunity to serve as more than clergyman; at various he was also a teacher in the common schools, a dominant member of the local school committees, a principal of the country's first state normal school, and the chairman of the board of education in one of upstate New York's flourishing cities. Meanwhile, as philosopher, critic and advocate of educational reform he kept up a running commentary which, appearing in leading publications, greatly influenced his own time. Friend and co-worker of Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Bronson Alcott, Edouard Seguin, Samuel Gridley Howe, Harvey Wilbur, Andrew D. White, and other educational pioneers of the age, May could obtain influence, financial support and a public hearing for these reformers through his contacts with the rich and influential of the day.

Beginning in 1837, May aided in Mann's great seminal reform of the Massachusetts school system. Further, he participated actively in the country's first experiment in training professional teachers at the state expense; he helped steer legislators and prepare the people of two states for the innovation of free schools. He pioneered in the battles for integration, coeducation, and the removal of sectarian influences from the schools.

A modest innovator himself in educational theory and practice, May provided his greatest service to American education by spreading the concepts of the great originals in the field. In communicating new and exciting ideas, May had few peers. His later life is a lively case history of the way Horace Mann's reforms were spread and defended in the relatively naive world of upstate New York and how germinal ideas of educational reform sprouted and flourished in new ground, specifically in the remarkable community of Syracuse.

The little city on the canal has long been famous for the vigor and ferment of its intellectual and social life in the Forties and Fifties. Here every new and exciting reform notion found a welcome and a home. Though the city's history in antislavery and women's rights agitation has been explored, relatively little has been written about the way in which Syracuse pioneered in education; it became the first in the state to establish an integrated school system and one of the first in the country to abolish from its schools the cruel whippings and beatings of children which in the name of discipline were a hallmark of education everywhere.

Both of these innovations can be attributed largely to the missionary work of that Yankee-turned-Yorker, Samuel Joseph May.

Born in Boston in 1797, May was graduated from Harvard in 1817 and after finishing his course at Harvard Divinity School was approbated as a Unitarian minister in 1820. He then served as assistant to the Rev. William Ellery Channing at Boston's Federal Street Church, and from 1822 to 1835, as pastor of the Unitarian Society in Brooklyn, Connecticut.

From 1835 to 1836 he acted as general agent for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society; and from 1836 to 1842, as pastor of the Unitarian Society in South Scituate, Massachusetts. After two years spent as principal of the Lexington Normal School in Massachusetts, he assumed the pastorate of the Unitarian Society in Syracuse. He held this position from 1845 until his retirement in 1867, four years before his death in 1871.

Absorbed as he seemed to be in the educational revolution of his day, May acquired more fame in his own lifetime for his place in the other reform movements of the age. He served as a right hand man down through the years to William Lloyd Garrison in the advancement of the antislavery cause,(9) and emerged as one of the few men of respectability and standing to aid Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the burgeoning movement for women's rights. Almost every other serious reform of the day could claim him as an eager partisan: temperance, non-resistance, the reform of asylums and prisons, and the abolition of capital punishment for major crime.

As a clergyman, intellectual and reformer, May was caught up in the major social currents of the day. He was involved in its crises and its satisfactions, conversant both on the philosophical and practical planes with its major problems, a sort of renaissance man of the reform era.

A definitive biography of his many-faceted life has yet to be published. For purposes of this work, however, I have chosen to narrow the field to that of his interest in education. Even such a restricted field of exploration affords an introduction to a fascinating and significant character, and provides a vehicle for examining the educational scene of the first half of the last century.

* * *

Many people have been exceptionally helpful in making this study possible. I should like to acknowledge particularly the help of Dr. Robert Rayback, whose advice and assistance in the preparation of this thesis has gone far beyond the formal requirements imposed on a graduate adviser, and that of Dr. Nelson Blake, in whose classes my interest in May was first stimulated. Both men are professors of history at Syracuse University, as was the late Dr. Freeman Galpin who generously gave me access to his unpublished biography of May. The late Miss Katherine Wilkinson, May's granddaughter, very kindly loaned me surviving diaries and correspondence from the May family. She also shared with me the family traditions concerning her distinguished grandfather as did an outstanding member of a collateral branch of the family, Dr. Martha May Eliot of Washington and Boston.

Librarians and officials of historical societies and associations have been uniformly helpful. This work would not have been possible without the extensive assistance given by Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Wright and Miss Violet Hosler of the Onondaga Historical Association. Every appropriate facility of the Syracuse Public Library was put at my disposal thanks to the kindness of Mr. Henry McCormick, Mr. Gerald Parsons, and Mrs. Ossie Golden. Providing invaluable assistance in securing materials at the Syracuse University Library were Miss Lillian Eckert, Miss Marian Mullen, and Mr. Lester Wells.

I owe much to librarians and curators at the American Antiquarian Society, the American Unitarian Association, Antioch College, Brown University, the Boston Public Library, the Concord Free Public Library, the Connecticut Historical Society, Cornell University, the Detroit Public Library, the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the New York State Historical Association, New York University, Trinity College, Yale University, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

For listening to my theories and helping to clarify my thinking I must extend my thanks to Miss Elizabeth Thompson and Miss Joan Shinew; for stimulating my interest in the nineteenth century educational scene, I must credit Mrs. Grace Douma Shaw.

My greatest debt for patience, forbearance and support during the nine years this study has been underway I owe to my husband, Frank N. Stepanek, Jr.

Footnotes

(1) Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American educators (New York: Scribners, 1835), p. 81.

(2) Sidney Jackson, America's Struggle for Free Schools (New York: American Council on Public Affairs, 1941), p 172-173. The immediate cause of the common revival, says Jackson, was the socio-political crisis of 1834-1837. Earlier radical protest movements had accomplished little.

(3) Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, pp. 194-200. Today, says Curti, we think of our schools as having been founded out of zeal for the welfare of common people. Actually, this zeal was tempered by zeal for the welfare of the employers of labor, for maintaining the political and social status quo. These economic motives were frankly recognized then. For further documentation see below, pp 53-58.

(4) Ibid., p.60.

(5) Because of strikingly different patterns and problems, education at the deep south has been excluded from this study. This work will deal primarily with educational problems in New England and the middle-Atlantic states where May spent his life.

(6) Few educators or citizens seemed concerned about the rights of non-believers and certainly no large protest movements were organized in their behalf. Samuel J. May was almost alone in his advocacy of the rights of "infidels.” See below, p. 151.

(7) Niles Weekly Register ( Baltimore), June 24, 1820.

(8) This term, "juvenile delinquents", which seems so modern, was in common use in the 1840s. The Victorians meant by "delinquents" just what we mean; they had no more idea how to handle them than we do.

(9) May, his cousin Samuel Sewall, and Bronson Alcott attended Garrison's first Boston lecture on abolitionism in 1830 and immediately afterward offered him their support. "May and Sewall were later to become loyal members of Garrison's inner circle; and May became one of Garrison's closest friends." Walter M Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of Wm. Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 41.