Chapter IV: The Inalienable Right

Sam wound up his long speech and sat down amid the glares of his angry neighbors. He had just finished painting, in minute and embarrassing detail, a picture of the deplorable state of their own public schools in Brooklyn, Connecticut. They knew in advance, of course, that the common schools were in sorry shape over much of the state, but they did think that the education of their own young here in the pleasant village of Brooklyn was a shade superior to anything else in up-country Connecticut.(1)

Mr. May's unfortunate remarks proved especially mortifying to the local citizens in the presence of representatives from school committees all over the state, gathered to discuss the school situation. It was the afternoon of March 5, 1827. The occasion would prove historic: the first convention of citizens called in the United Stated to discuss the question of popular education.(2) Mr. May had written the circular summoning all interested Connecticut citizens to discuss the "numerous evils of the present system," though his name did not appear on the call. The circular was signed, instead, by the officers of the School Visitors in Brooklyn, Pomfret and Centerbury.(3) In this long and involved document, May posed a series of penetrating questions about books, teachers, school houses and teaching methods. He had designed them carefully to show the people of Connecticut they had no reason to be proud of their public instruction. Enough depressing information he thought, might prod the legislature to action.(4)

The circular proved electrifying to the countryside. More than a hundred towns responded; some sent letters, others dispatched delegates to the convention.(5) After the meeting had assembled, May encouraged the other delegates to confessions, by a "full unsparing exposure of the low state of the schools in Brooklyn."(6) As he had hoped, his tactics disarmed the other delegates, and they began to confess the shortcomings of their own school systems. The Brooklyn people perked up a bit as they heard worse things from other towns. The convention, aroused, voted to issue a full report of its deliberations and a call for reform.

This pioneer gathering in Brooklyn was evaluated 40 years later by Henry Barnard, editor of the American Journal of Education and a prominent historian of education in nineteenth century American life. The Brooklyn meeting, he said, called public attention through the state to the condition of the common schools and showed them "wholly inadequate to the thorough education of the young and undeserving the reputation claimed for them abroad."(7)

In the months following, other groups issued similar appeals. Pressure groups organized. A sluggish legislature bestirred itself to issue its own report condemning the disreputable state of the common schools. The reform of the Connecticut school system had begun.(8)

* * *

May had discovered the shameful state of the common schools in Connecticut almost as soon as he became pastor in 1822 of the First Ecclesiastical Society in Brooklyn, a parish he had insisted on taking despite strenuous opposition from parents and friends.(9) Why, they argued, give up his good prospects of a city parish? Why remove himself to the wilds of rural Connecticut, to the isolation of a village pastorate, to the entrenched bastion of Congregational Orthodoxy?

They wasted their breath. What delightful possibilities might there be for a man of battle in the First Society of Brooklyn—first and only Unitarian church in the whole of Orthodox Connecticut?(10) What clash and controversy in a state where only recently professed Unitarianism had been legal felony?(11) What stimulus might he find in a tiny congregation so ardent in its new-found Unitarianism as to have locked the door of the church against its protesting orthodox minister and his remaining trinitarians?(12) Who wanted to stay on in Boston where Unitarianism, already settling into respectability, was losing its tang of heresy, capturing counting house, bench and bar?(13)

May decided that the Brooklyn invitation was "a loud call to me, in the providence of God, to undertake the work of an evangelist in the most 'Orthodox' state in New England."(14) He was called in mid-February of 1822, and was ordained to the Unitarian ministry by the Boston clergy on March 14. He preached his first sermon as pastor in Brooklyn on March 17.(15)

The little village looked peaceful enough under the great elms that arched over churches, mills and shops. Its residents found their new minister a young man of vigorous intellect, good education and wide philanthropic interests.(16) Still a bachelor at 25, young May now stood a sturdy five foot, eight inches tall. His dark brown hair was combed back from a high forehead. His eyes were hazel, his nose roman," and his mouth generous and wide.(17) The Sewall cleft marked a firm chin.(18) Already he displayed one of his most distinctive characteristics: the ability to discriminate between what he felt about people personally and what he thought of their views. He could love a man and hate what he believed, simultaneously. It was an endearing characteristic, surprising in an ardent reformer, and destined to stand Sam in good stead in a life of controversy.(19) One of his typical gestures was to insist that when the struggling little orthodox group ordained their new minister, they should borrow the larger Unitarian church for the service. This gesture unsettled the speaker of the occasion, a fiery Calvinist who arrived ready to denounce all brands of Unitarianism, and discovered he was scheduled to deliver his philippic from a Unitarian pulpit.(20)

May found his parishioners a hardy, practical lot—all forty families of them. They were mostly farmers. Those who had graduated from agriculture to more urban concerns still were not adverse to a hard day of manual labor. Fresh from the city, May was astonished one day to find a principal parishioner, a former state senator and a man of substance, so dirty from burning off a woodlot that he refused to shake the preacher's hand.(21) The Hon. George Sharpe, however, had something more sophisticated on his mind than the shape of the back forty. He entertained a grave concern about the state of the common schools, a concern in which May joined when he was elected to the board of school visitors for the town(22) and first saw the schoolhouses.

May had come to Connecticut well-briefed on the reported glories of its common education and the magnificent school fund of $1,200,000 set aside by the state's legislature in 1795. He discovered, however, that the very existence of the fund dampened general interest and degraded education. Since 1795 the state's population and the number of schools had almost doubled, but Connecticut citizens, secure in the knowledge of their famous fund, persistently refused to tax themselves to pay for the increase. The fund was there. Why pay extra taxes? The fund should pay for some kind of teacher. Why raise the salary to get a good one? The fund must support a school where citizens wanted one. Why not have one at every front door?(23)

Thus, in Connecticut early foresight had led to latter day degeneration. Districts multiplied as funds available for each dwindled. The average male teacher commanded the munificent wage of $12 a month, something less than the common laborer. The unfortunates doomed to "board round" were more apt to get $6. As a result the corps of teachers consisted to a considerable extent of incompetents, ignoramuses, and drifters too footloose to hold down one job for 12 months of the year. The replacement rate was monumental.(24)

Jammed into Connecticut schoolhouses averaging 20 feet square were as many as 50 or 60 children together with their rulers, inkstands, pencils, maps, benches, desks, stove, or fireplace, woodbox, coats, hats, and 50 or 60 lunchboxes smelling of pork and cheese.(25) Wind whistled through the chinks in the winter; sun beat through curtainless windows in summer. Students alternately froze or sweltered depending on their distance from window or fire. The oldest students slumped on backless benches; the youngest dangled their feet, unable to touch the floor. Ventilation was miserable; headache and nausea and lassitude, the most frequent afflictions.(26)

Usually plopped square in the middle of the district, schools commonly occupied the cheapest available land, be it adjacent to marsh, pond or prison. Playgrounds were almost unknown. Less than half the schools in the state had toilets of any description.

The general quality of the teaching was pitiful; globes, blackboards and slates, almost unknown. "In short," concluded a committee reporting to the Connecticut General Assembly, "the great object seems to be to go through with a certain amount of processes and commit to memory a certain amount of words. . . with a kind of confused idea that knowledge will be the necessary result. The number of children who are trained to think. . . is by no means large."(27)

May moved in briskly on the disreputable situation in his district; he probed conditions of school houses, furniture, books and teacher qualifications. Everything disappointed him. He said so. Prodded by this new gadfly, the school committee stirred from its lethargy and took a more punctilious look at its teachers. The next batch of candidates were examined scrupulously. A paltry lot they were, to be sure. The committee rejected six of the fifteen applicants who could neither write nor figure accurately. The composition of a simple English sentence threw them into a panic and, huffed May, they knew no more of the geography of the earth than of the Mecanique Celeste. Yet they had all come well recommended as having taught acceptably in other towns.(28)

The Brooklyn committee thus earned a reputation for strictness. Subsequently, the worst of the incompetents gave the place a wide berth. Committeemen moved in to supervise the schools more thoroughly. The pastor was apt to appear in any classroom in the township. The pace of education in Brooklyn quickened perceptibly.

Still the large body of citizens remained obdurate. For this practical, hard-headed people, education was a casual thing to be fitted in between hoeing and harvesting or for a few weeks during the winter lull in the fields. In one school, May ascertained, half the pupils attended school about half the time, the rest less than one day in ten.(29) Parents refused to buy books, turned down invitations to visit schoolhouses, and stayed away from school society meetings when committeemen were to be elected. Taxpayers clutched their purses and turned away.(30) Parents who wanted their children to have decent educations sent them to private schools.

Taking to the lecture platform and to print, May pleaded the cause of public education. He made his debut on the national scene when a lecture delivered before the Brooklyn Lyceum in 1828 was printed with an editorial commendation in a promising new publication, The Journal of Education.(31)

Shrewdly he evaluated the current situation. These parsimonious New Englanders did care for their children, but a good many seemed to respect a hard-earned dollar more. If an appeal to love did not work, why not try fear? May stumped the countryside with a judicious balance of the two. These tight-fisted Puritans feared the rising lower classes. They feared revolutionists would overthrow the government. They feared their own sons would squander their inheritances. May played shrewdly on all these apprehensions.

May's situation in Connecticut paralleled that of the handful of hardy souls over the country who strove at this early date to shake the citizenry into a concern for education. Few Americans saw positive value in common schooling; many were afraid of it.

The common man, on the one hand, was all too apt to distrust education and the educated class. His own folk hero was the unlettered backwoodsman. Education was a pastime for the wealthy man; teaching, for the failure. The common man and his children had the crops to harvest with no time for foolishness.(32)

The elite, on the other hand, feared the rising democracy, and feared education would make the masses even more powerful and unruly. Prosperous advocates of laissez-faire considered education a private matter. They opposed socialization of education and fought the taxation of all for the benefit of some who happened to have children.(33)

May proved typical of those who undertook, with varying degrees of success, to prove that education could be all things to all men. His cogent arguments for his Brooklyn constituency would be repeated and elaborated on time and again in the years that lay ahead.

The first and most important people to reach were the wealthy and well-born, the substantial citizens and community decision-makers. In a forceful appeal, ostensibly intended for all "parents and guardians" of Brooklyn children but aimed at all the affluent, May made his case to the upper classes.

"Be not unwilling to afford your children the advantages they may derive from a good teacher, for at least three or four months in the year, even if you do not happen to draw from the Public Fund so much money as will defray the whole expense," said May. "You cannot part with your own money for a better purpose than to educate your children."

Any amount of inheritance, he warned, would be wasted on a child not educated to "correct view of life, integrity, industry, benevolence and piety." Without these qualities, heirs would only waste the substance their fathers labored so long to earn.(34)

There was more, and no one could be more skillful than the Brooklyn pastor in playing on the gentry's fear of social upheaval and depression. If the "stability of our civil institutions and the prosperity of our favored country depend, as we all say they do, upon the wisdom and virtue of our . . . men in; power, ought you not all to exert yourselves to the utmost, that hereafter the country may be in the hands of truly good and wise men, by doing all in your power to educate thoroughly the rising generation?(35) In a democracy, he pointed our shrewdly, no one can predict who will rise to power. "If we could foresee who were to be the people of power and influence," May later summarized this argument, "we could educate them alone." But since we cannot, our only security is in the "thorough intellectual and moral culture of the whole people."(36)

Only the education of all the people, he argued, can insure against the major social ills, crime, poverty, intemperance, mobocracy, and revolution.

These appeals were useful in persuading the rich, the well-born, and people who objected to schooling other people's children. They would have been very pleasing to a subsequent co-worker of May's in central New York, one George Geddes, who held education the only answer to the evils of "Radicalism, Agrarianism, Fourierism and emigration."(37)

Quite a different vein proved appropriate in addressing the average citizen. He must be persuaded that education could make him more prosperous, happy, and secure in his democratic freedoms.

If the poor could only be led to see, May would say again and again, that a depressed social status stemmed from a faulty education! Proper education for all would insure that only those devoted to vice would be poor and that none could become rich because "every man could have his own competence and would be wise enough to want no more."(38)

Down through the years he would maintain the right of every individual, regardless of his social and economic status, to an education. Such an education May held an inalienable right.(39) "It is incumbent upon us to see that no one grows up a stranger to true liberty and the path to real happiness, and that no one shall be compelled by the poverty of his parents to live in darkness and sin."(40)

Finally, May assured both rich and poor, a good education affords the most eminently practical way to insure the best for every class. May, restless when exposed to too much music, art, or Shakespeare,(41) could easily grow eloquent over the utilitarian aspects of education. Surely, the prevention of poverty and suffering, vice and crime, was "both more merciful and more practicable," than the correction or relief of these evils after the fact.(42) "A very large proportion of murderers." he observed, "have been brought up in ignorance."(43)

Advancing these social justifications for improved education via lecture platform or periodical absorbed much of May's time during his ministry. In 1833, however, he would plunge into direct combat in defense of his ideas in an episode that would bring him both fame and notoriety on the national scene.

Footnotes

(1) Details of this convention, of the attitude of the citizens and of May's part in it, are drawn from May's autobiographical fragment in the May Memoir, pp. 118-123, as well as from other sources subsequently cited.

(2) This evaluation of the Brooklyn convention as first of its kind was made by Henry Barnard, editor of The American Journal of Education. See Samuel J. May to Dr. Thomas Robbins, August 17, 1855; #3730, Henry Barnard Papers, New York University Archives. Also A Brief Account Of His Ministry Given In A Discourse Preached To The Church Of The Messiah In Syracuse, New York, September 15, 1867, By Samuel J. May (Syracuse: 1867), p. 48. Also May to Henry Barnard, September 1, 1855, Barnard Papers, New York University.

(3) A copy of this circular is preserved with the Henry Barnard Papers. Inscribed on it in May's handwriting is "This circular was written by Samuel J. May." May had sent it to Barnard and asked for its return. Barnard, fortunately, rarely returned anything to anybody. The circular was preserved with his correspondence. May's own correspondence, diaries, and other papers, intact at the time of his death, have disappeared. His letters to others must be sought through libraries and collections over the country. Only Cornell University has a few of the diaries and small collection of family letters.

(4) Mumford, May Memoir , p. 118.

(5) A Brief Account Of His Ministry. . . By Samuel J, May ( Syracuse: 1867), p. 48.

(6) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 119.

(7) This evaluation comes from an unsigned biography of Samuel J. May published in The American Journal of Education (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), p. 325. Inclusion in the biographical sketches of the Journal, says Thursfield, was "a mark of some distinction, of recognition by an outstanding judge of leadership in education," p. 118.

(8) Samuel J. May, The Revival of Education, An Address To The Normal Association, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, August 8, 1855. (Syracuse: J. G. K. Truair, 1855), p. 19.

(9) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 77. May even resisted the advice of George Cabot, who spoke presumably on this occasion to a lesser being than was his wont.

(10) Ibid., p. 77.

(11) Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 126.

(12) The First Ecclesiastical Society of Brooklyn had been split by the Unitarian Controversy soon after it broke out in Boston in 1815. Eventually the members of the Brooklyn church espousing the new doctrines became dominant. A typical controversy over possession of the church property resulted in the Unitarian members taking over the church physically and locking the others out of the church from 1817 to 1819. The ousted fragment founded a new orthodox church down the street in a smaller meetinghouse. Richard M. Bayles (ed.), The History of Windham County, Connecticut (New York: W. W. Preston and Co., 1889), p. 591.

(13) Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 126.

(14) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 77.

(15) Ibid., p. 78.

(16) This is the way May was described by the township historian, Bayles, Windham County, p. 591.

(17) Details of his physical appearance including the "roman" nose come from May's U. S. Passport issued November 6, 1858. It is now preserved in the General Records Division of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

(18) A picture of May's first cousin, Samuel Sewall, shows a decided family resemblance, particularly about the mouth and chin. Nina Moore Tiffany, Samuel E. Sewall, A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1898), frontispiece. The earliest daguerreotype of May, dated 1848, is in the files of the Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse.

(19) This characteristic was always marked by his biographers. One of the best was James Freeman Clarke who found that May "united a courage which . . . shrunk from no respect for views differing from his own . . . ." Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1878) p. 206.

(20) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 99.

(21) Ibid., p. 82.

(22) It was customary in New England to commit the schools to the care of the ministers, often the only village residents with a claim to formal education. May's neighbors elected him as soon as they were sure he was there to stay. Mumford, May Memoir, p. 86.

(23) May, Revival of Education, p. 16.

(24) Ibid., p. 17.

(25) These humble products were the boast of Brooklyn. No other township its size produced so much in the whole commonwealth. Bayles, Windham County, p. 580.

(26) "Common Schools in Connecticut," American Journal of Education, V (1858), p. 141-7. This article was drawn from a report to the Connecticut General Assembly by representatives of 1600 Connecticut school districts in 1828.

(27) Ibid., p. 147.

(28) May, Revival of Education, p. 17.

(29) Samuel J. May, J. A. Welch, and George Sharpe, Address to the Parents and Guardians of Children Respecting Common Schools in Windham County (Brooklyn: Monitor Office, 1832), p. 3. The names of two other prominent citizens were appended to this report, but as usual, May was the responsible ghost.

(30) Ibid., pp. 2-4,

(31) Samuel J. May, "Common Errors in Education," American Journal of Education, IV (May and June, 1829), pp. 213-225. This was a different and earlier journal than Barnard's of the same name.

(32) Sidney Jackson, America 's Struggle for Free Schools (New York: American Council on Public Affairs, 1941), p. 33.

(33) Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (New York: Scribner and Co., 1935), pp. 194-200.

(34) May, Sharpe and Welch, Parents and Guardians, p. 10.

(35) Ibid., p. 10.

(36) Samuel J. May, "The Importance of Our Common Schools," Lectures Delivered Before The American Institute of Instruction At Pittsfield, August 15, 16 and 17, 1843. (Boston: William D. Ticknor and Co., 1844), p. 231.

(37) Teachers' Advocate, I (February 4, 1846), p. 220.

(38) "An Address Delivered by the Reverend S. J. May at the Opening of a New and Highly-Improved District Schoolhouse in Hanover, Massachusetts., June 20, 1839," Common School Journal II, 14, pp. 226-7.

(39) May, "Importance of our Common Schools," American Institute Lectures, p. 225.

(40) May, "Opening of a Schoolhouse," Common School Journal, p. 220.

(41) ". . . some twenty or more ladies and gentlemen met here," he wrote in his diary January 10, 1870, "and spent three hours reading King Lear. Too much of a good thing." Or see his diary for December 7, 1859: "Spent forenoon in arranging letters from Europe and in framing and hanging pictures. Almost as tiresome work as visiting picture galleries."

(42) May, "The Importance of Our Common Schools," American Institute Lectures, p. 225. For May's views on the individual and personal objectives of education, see below, Chapter VII; for the religious objectives, Chapter IX.

(43) Samuel J. May, "Capital Punishment: Six Reasons Why it Should Be Abolished," New York Tribune, July 25, 1851.