The work of JONATHAN BOUCHER to which reference is made is A view of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution; in thirteen discourses preached in North America between the years 1763 and 1775 with an historical preface. London, 1797. The works referred to which relate more specifically to the history of education, receive mention in the Bibliography at the end of this volume. CHAPTER VI COLONIAL SCHOOLMASTERS AND SCHOLARS COLONIAL Society was not yet democratic. There was much. in it that pointed forward to democracy, but the leaders refused to believe the signs. Seventeenth-century America, like seventeenth-century England, presented well-marked social distinctions; the people constituted a succession of social planes. The highest and the lowest were lacking here, but the several grades of higher and lower were pretty sharply distinguished. The great body of the people were those known as Goodman or Goodwife So-and-so. Below these were common servants; above were families whose lords were entitled to the designation "Mr."1 At the top were the magistrates and ministers. The intermediate ranks were carefully graded; and seats were assigned in the meeting house accordingly, one pew being designated as “first in dignety, the next behind it to be 2d in dignety," and so on.2 Similar distinctions were observed in the colleges. At Yale, the practice of arranging the names of the students in the annual catalogue according to the rank of the parents was not discontinued till 1767; and at Harvard not till three years later. According to Mr. Dexter's interesting monograph on this subject, it appears that the problem of "placing" the several 1 Of the freemen of Massachusetts constituted before 1649, one in fourteen had the title Mr. Cf. WEEDEN, Economic and social history, I., p. 419. 2 Op. cit., I., pp. 74-75, 528-530, 699. The seating committee at Woburn, Mass., in 1672, was instructed by the town to respect "estate, office, and age" in the discharge of their function. At Stamford, Conn., in 1673, the seating was according to "dignity, agge and estate." Id., p. 280. Changes in the system of seating were indicative of change in social conditions. classes was a perplexing one to the college authorities, and became much more so as the eighteenth century advanced. Each class was placed late in the freshman year, and such placing continued unchanged throughout the college course except as students were occasionally degraded by way of punishment for some irregularity or other. "Contrary perhaps to a prevailing impression, there was never any disposition to exalt the ministerial order above laymen of distinction. . . . Practitioners of medicine had not [by the middle of the eighteenth century] . . . gained a secure position as professional men. . . . The legal profession had gained an earlier and fuller recognition. . . . Next to the three learned professions ought to come that of the teacher; but not so in the regard of these college authorities. . . . Considerations of ancestral distinction, of family estate, of paternal position, and the like, entered into each case in ever-varying combinations, precluding the possibility of any cut-and-dried system."1 In the eighteenth century, wealth came to be a prominent factor in the determining of family rank; but in the earlier days, particularly in New England, no badge of nobility, other than civil office, was more universally recognized than superior education and ministerial standing. If these remarks relate more particularly to New England, it will be remembered that in the other colonies also definite gradations of social rank still persisted, and were recognized as a matter of course.2 In this state of society, no public secondary school seems to have been even thought of for the great body of citizens -the middle or lower middle class. It was thought desirable that all should know how to read. And a college training was needed by members of the directive class. The secondary school was not a mean between these extremes, 1 Op. cit., pp. 16, 18-19. 2 See the shrewd comment on the democratic practices common in New Jersey, as contrasted with Virginia customs, in FITHIAN'S Journal and letters, p. 285. but rather an institution subsidiary to the college; that is, a preparatory school in the narrower sense. Promising youth, whatever their social station, were encouraged to go to school. But their education was preparation for a place in an upper, that is, a ruling or at least a directing, class. The ecclesiastical origin of our education is recalled by the fact that that portion of the directive class for which the colleges and grammar schools were chiefly intended was the ministry of the churches. The good of the state was thought of in all of these foundations; but the thought of the church was uppermost, and it is doubtful whether our earlier colleges would have been founded at all, if it had not been for the desire to provide an educated ministry. Closely connected with this desire was the ambition to educate the red natives of the country in the Christian faith - an ambition which appeared in both whimsical and pathetic manifestations. Some of our novelists, exercising the freedom that belongs. to art, have reconstructed the school life of colonial days in a way that historians can only look upon with wonder and great admiration. Mr. Dempster, the Scotch tutor of George and Harry Warrington, and his successor, Mr. Ward, whom Mr. Whitefield had expressly recommended, are as much alive as any colonial schoolmasters yet remaining. Miss Johnston has abundant justification in colonial documents for so villainous a character as Bartholomew Paris, in her story of Audrey. The account of King William's school in Richard Carvel is good enough to be true; but in it Mr. Churchill has employed his own resources to make good a defect in contemporary records. David Dove, who figures in the early chapters of Hugh Wynne, was an historical character. He held a place of considerable importance among our eighteenth century masters, and possibly deserved gentler treatment than he has received at Dr. Mitchell's hands. But we are not wholly dependent upon fiction for our view of colonial schools and masters; and in a few instances even the literary setting-forth of the career of our old-time teachers will stand comparison with the narratives of the novelists. The schoolmasters of the colonial period may be roughly divided into three classes. There were a few men of scholarly preparation who made teaching the work of their lives, and kept up the best traditions of the free-school masters of Old England-of Mulcaster and Brinsley and Charles Hoole. Then there were young clergymen, and ministers of non-episcopalian denominations, recently from college, who taught school while waiting for a call to the pastoral office. Finally, there was a miscellaneous lot of adventurers, indented servants, educated rogues, and the like, all either mentally or morally incompetent, or both, who taught school only to keep from starving. The social standing of these masters was variable, being largely determined by their individual character. In so far as their position can be spoken of in general terms, it was probably highest in New England, where we sometimes find them and their wives assigned to very honorable places in the churches. The complaint against the schoolmasters of Maryland as a class has been referred to already. But we find exceptions in plenty both north and south. The head of our long line of really eminent masters is, beyond question, Ezekiel Cheever, and he is one of those who have been fortunate in having their praises worthily recorded. In his notable address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Boston Latin School, Phillips Brooks made Cheever and John Lovell stand respectively for the spirit of the earlier and of the later colonial period. Of these two representative men the first-named was born at London, in 1614. Tradition represents him as having been a pupil at St. Paul's school. He was among the earliest of the New Haven colonists, and began teaching school in the town of New Haven within a few months after his arrival. A dozen years later, he became master of the school at Ipswich; then of that at Charlestown; and in |