CHAPTER XV
[1] Representing not over one tenth of the population, the Protestants in France had from the first been subjected to much persecution. In the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (1572) over one thousand had been massacred in Paris and ten thousand more in the provinces. After some warfare, a treaty was made, in 1598, under which the so-called "Edict of Nantes" guaranteed religious toleration for the Protestants. In 1685 this was revoked, and their ministers were given fifteen days to leave France. The members were, however, forbidden to leave. Many, though, got away, escaping to the Low Countries, England, and to America.
[2] The culmination of this dissatisfaction came in 1649, when Charles I was beheaded and "The Commonwealth" was established under Cromwell. During the troubled times which followed (1649-60) much damage was done to the churches of England by way of eliminating vestiges of "popery."
[3] Some of these went back to England—many after the establishment of the Protestant Commonwealth under Cromwell (1649). It has been estimated, for three of the early colonies, that the population by decades was approximately as follows:
1630 1640 1650 1660
New Netherlands………….. 500 1000 3000 6000
Massachusetts……………. 1300 14000 18000 25000
Virginia…………………. 3000 8000 17000 33000
[4] The name and the form came alike from old England, where an irregular area known as a "town" or a "township," constituted the unit of representation in the shiremoats and the membership of the church parish. Almost every town and parish officer known in England was created by the new towns in New England, with practically the same functions as in the old home.
[5] "The settlers were in the first freshness of their Utopian enthusiasm, and their church establishment was the very heart of their enterprise. It became therefore a matter of primary importance to educate preachers. For ages preparation for the ministry had consisted mainly in acquiring a knowledge of Latin, the sacred tongue of western Christendom. Though the Latin service was no longer used by Protestants, and the Vulgate Bible had been dethroned by the original text, and though the main stream of English theology was by this time flowing in the channel of the mother tongue, the notion that all ministers should know Latin had still some centuries of tough life in it." (Eggleston, E., The Transit of Civilization, p. 225.)
[6] For example, the town of Boston, in 1641, devoted the income from Deere Island to the support of schools, and Plymouth, in 1670, appropriated the income from the Cape Cod fishing industry to the support of grammar schools (R. 194 c).
These are among the earliest of the permanent endowments for education in
America.
[7] See The Development of School Support in Colonial Massachusetts, by George L. Jackson, for a careful study of the different early methods of school support.
[8] The Puritan emigrants to New England represented a sturdy and well- educated class of English country squires and yeomen. They came of thrifty and well-to-do stock, the shiftless and incompetent not being represented. All had had good educational advantages, and many were graduates of Cambridge University. It has been asserted that probably never since has the proportion of college men in the community been so large.
[9] Martin, Geo. H., The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public-School System, pp. 14-16.
[10] The charging of a tuition fee to those who could afford to pay was a common European practice of the time, nevertheless the public authorities —at that time a mixture of civil and church officials—provided the school, employed and licensed the teacher, determined the textbooks to be used, and laid down the conditions under which the school should be conducted. The schoolmaster assisted the church by participating in the Sunday services. The elementary school of the Dutch, which was copied in the New Netherland, was thus a combination of a public and parochial, and a free and pay school.
[11] This was, of course, much more true of New York City and Island than of the outlying Dutch villages. In these latter a public school was for long maintained.
[12] Draper, A. S., Origin and Development of the New York Common School System.
[13] Among the German Lutherans, who constituted nearly one fourth of the total population of the colony, a school is claimed to have been established alongside the church by each of the congregations "at the earliest possible period after its formation." The close connection between these Lutheran congregations and their schools may be seen from the following contract, dated at Lancaster, in 1774:
"I, the undersigned, John Hoffman, parochial teacher of the church at Lancaster, have promised in the presence of the congregation, to serve as choirister, and, as long as we have no pastor, to read sermons on Sunday. In summer I promise to hold cathechetical instruction with the young, as becomes a faithful teacher, and also to lead them in the singing and attend to the clock."
[14] The seventeenth-century Virginia legislation relating to education is as follows:
1643. Orphans to be educated "according to the competence of their
estate."
1646. "If the estate be so meane and inconsiderate that it will not
reach to a free education, then that orphan [shall] be bound to
some manuall trade … except some friends or relatives be willing
to keep them."
1660-61. "To avoid sloth and idleness … as also for the relief of
parents whose poverty extends not to giving [their children]
breeding, the justices of the peace should … bind out children
to tradesmen or husbandmen to be brought up in some good and
lawful calling."
[15] "Perhaps the most remarkable, because the most widespread and complex illustration of the educational genius of Calvinism is to be found in the American colonies, where the various European streams of Calvinism so converged that the seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly Calvinists—not merely the Puritans of New England, but the Dutch, Walloons, Huguenots, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish, with a considerable Puritan admixture in Anglican Virginia and Catholic Maryland." (Foster, H. D., in Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. I, p. 498.)
[16] "To illustrate how omnipresent this religious atmosphere was, I cannot do better than to cite the occasion when Judge Sewell found that the spout which conducted the rain water from his roof did not perform its office. After patient searching, a ball belonging to the small childeren was found lodged in the spout. Thereupon the father sent for the minister and had a season of prayer with his boys that their mischief or carelessness might be set in its proper aspect and that the event might be sanctified to their spiritual good. Powers of darkness and of light were struggling for the possession of every soul, and it was the duty of parents, ministers, and teachers to lose no opportunity to pluck the children as brands from the burning." (Johnson Clifton, Old-Time Schools and Schoolbooks, p. 12.)