First Law to Educate Poor Children Signed
March 1, 1802
The same earnest solicitude for public education which made itself manifest in the settlement of the New England Colonies in an unusual degree does not run through the early history of Pennsylvania, yet, outside of the Puritan settlements, there was no other colony which paid so much attention as Pennsylvania to the mental training of youth.
During the seventeenth century the general character of the province, as regards the intelligence of its people, stood deservedly high. The school-house, with its inevitable concomitant, the printing-press, never at any time ceased to exert its wholesome influence in training up a population which as regards sobriety, thrift, and all the substantial qualities that flow from instructions, has never been surpassed by any other great community.
William Penn, who was one of the most accomplished scholars of his time, never wearied in pointing out to the colony the advantages of public education. The Constitution which he proposed for the infant Commonwealth contains the direction that virtue and wisdom must be propagated by educating the youth, and that after ages would have the benefit of the care and prudence of the founders in this respect.
It was one of the provisions of the great law of April 25, 1683, that “schools should be established for the education of the young” and those in authority did not long delay in carrying it into practical effect.
On December 26, 1683, the subject of education was brought up in the Provincial Council, when it was agreed that there existed a great necessity for a schoolmaster. Accordingly an agreement was entered into with Enoch Flower, who promised that in conducting such an establishment as was needed he would charge only four shillings for teaching English each quarter, six shillings for reading, writing and costing accounts. A scholar who boarded with him would receive his tuition as well as his lodging, meals and washing for £10 a year.
This was the first regular English school in Pennsylvania. There had been schools during the ascendancy of the Swedes and the Dutch. The former are known to have maintained schools at Chester and Tinicum as early as 1642, and the Dutch records show that in 1657 Evert Pieterson came over from Holland, and in the capacity of “schoolmaster, comforter of the sick and setter of Psalms,” sought twenty-five pupils.
In 1689 George Keith was engaged at a salary of £50 a year, the use of a house, and the profits of the school for one year, to open a grammar school in Philadelphia. This institution was a flourishing one for many years. Here the children of the poor were instructed free of charge, the schoolhouse being located on Fourth Street, below Chestnut, and conducted under a charter which had been procured by Edward Shippen, David Lloyd, John Jones, Samuel Carpenter, Anthony Morris, James Fox, William Southby and others.
Darby became the seat of a school in 1692. One was established in Germantown in 1701, with the learned Pastorius at its head.
No church or sect was more active in education than the Moravians, and schools were established at Germantown, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Lititz. Christopher Dock, “the pious schoolmaster of the Skippack,” taught a Moravian school in Germantown, and is the author of the first book on school teaching published in America.
During the sixty years following the establishment of Keith’s school there was no attempt made to start schools that would be free to all and not marked by the distinction between the rich and poor children. This democratic principle was not clearly formulated and advanced until it was taken up by Benjamin Franklin in 1749, when he distributed gratis a pamphlet which soon became productive of important results in the establishment of the future University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that time most of the schools in the province were conducted either under strictly private auspices or under the patronage of religious denominations.
March 1, 1802, Governor Thomas McKean signed the first law for the education of the children of the poor gratis, although both the Constitution of 1776 and that of 1790 provided for the establishment of “a school or schools in every county.” Owing to the lameness of this law, it remained a dead statute so far as some of the counties of the State were concerned.
The City and County of Philadelphia had been erected into “the first school district of Pennsylvania” in 1818, and in 1822 the City and County of Lancaster were erected into “the second school district.” These, termed the Lancasterian methods, were the beginnings of that glorious system of free education which has been a blessing to our great Commonwealth.
Up to 1830, the great free-school system, as we now have it, was still in embryo. The people began to awaken; public meetings were held all over the State, resolutions were adopted, comparisons with other States were made. The result was that on March 15, 1834, “An Act to Establish a General System of Education by Common Schools” was passed. Only a single member of the House and three Senators voted nay.
Late in 1834 the enemies of free schools attacked the measure all over the State, and the Senate voted to repeal the act of 1834, but Thaddeus Stevens saved the measure in the House. By 1848 this school law had grown much in favor, but it was not until 1874 that the last district in the State accepted the law. State Superintendent Wickersham then said in his annual report: “For the first time in our history the door of a public school house stands open to receive every child of proper age within the limits of the State.”
The progress of education after 1850 was very rapid. The crowning acts to make elementary education universal were the free textbook law of 1893 and the compulsory attendance law of 1895.
Pennsylvania on Paper Money Basis When
Bills of Credit Are Issued
March 2, 1722–23
The first bills of credit, or paper-money, issued in the English American colonies were put forth by Massachusetts, in 1690, to pay the troops who went on an expedition against Quebec, under Sir William Phipps.
It was Governor Sir William Keith who first introduced the people of Pennsylvania to the pleasures and benefits of an irredeemable paper currency.
There had been great and long-standing complaint about the deficiency of a circulating medium, for the use of wampum had ceased, and foreign coin had never become plenty. The course of exchange ran heavily against the Province, and those who possessed money made enormous profits by the purchase and sale of bills.
The merchants of England did not ship bank-notes or coin to the Provinces. They paid for the produce which they purchased here with English goods, and settled the balances by shipments of sugar, rum, etc., from Barbadoes and other places in the West Indies, and by Negroes and indentured servants.
There seems to have been more hard money in Philadelphia than in New England, for Franklin, a paper-money man, notes in his autobiography how his fellow-workmen in Boston were surprised when he returned to his brother’s place in 1724 from Philadelphia. Franklin displayed a handful of silver, which was a rare sight, for they only had paper-money in Boston.
When Franklin first visited Philadelphia, in 1723, he noticed with surprise the free circulation of metallic money among the people of Pennsylvania. The whole of his own money then consisted of a Dutch dollar and a shilling’s worth of coppers.
But this condition soon changed for James Logan, in writing to the Proprietaries late in 1724, says, “No gold or silver passes amongst us.”
The Proprietary demanded sterling money in payment of quit-rents, no matter what the depreciation of the provincial currency. This was their right since they had nothing to do either with the emission of the currency or its depreciation.
As early as 1729 Logan wrote, “I dare not speak one word against it. The popular phrenzy will never stop till their credit will be as bad as they are in New England, where an ounce of silver is worth twenty shillings of this paper. They already talk of making more, and no man dares appear to stem the fury of popular rage.” Logan at that early date thought the king should arrest the delusion by proclamation.
The peltries, grain, flour, ships, cooper-stuff, and lumber of Philadelphia were always good for hard money with a good mercantile system. But the people were not satisfied.
It is quite likely that wages and small debts were paid almost entirely in the way of barter instead of money, and this, by the losses it occasioned produced discontent. The capitalists opposed a change in the currency, the farmers, laborers, and small trades people favored it.
In the language of petitions sent to the Assembly at this time, the friends of paper money contended that they were sensibly “aggrieved in their estates and dealings, to the great loss and growing ruin of themselves, and the evident decay of the province in general, for want of a medium to buy and sell with,” and they therefore prayed a paper currency.
The people of Chester County, on the other hand, asked to have the value of the current money of the Province raised, the exportation of money prohibited, and produce made a legal tender, so as to obviate the necessity for paper money. They did not want a regular State issue, but nevertheless, like men of more modern greenback times, they wanted an inconvertible paper money, a non-exportable currency, as if that were a blessing.
On March 2, 1722–23 an act was passed to issue £15,000. Governor Keith, in consenting to and promoting this experimental load, had been encouraged by the popularity of a similar measure matured by Governor Burnett of New Jersey.
Pennsylvania was the very last of the middle colonies to embark in the paper money manufacture; but once embarked, she plunged in rapidly and deeply.
This first small loan of £15,000 was to be redeemed within eight years. In 1723 £30,000 was issued; in 1740 the issue reached a total of £80,000.
Benjamin Franklin, who had urged and used his personal influence for this currency became alarmed and wrote, “I now think there are limits beyond which the quantity may be hurtful.” He was right.
In 1755 Pennsylvania had £160,000 currency out; and in 1783 the State’s irredeemable currency had been increased by various issues until it reached $4,325,000, a sum simply ruinous to all values.
The general plan of these loans was good. No bills were loaned but on good security. The friends of the system were many.
Paper money was also issued at times by individuals. In May, 1746, Joseph Gray gave notice that Franklin had printed for him £27,100 in notes of hand of 2 d., 3 d., and 6 d., “out of sheer necessity for want of pence for running change. Whoever takes them shall have them exchanged on demand with the best money I have.”
In 1749 the scarcity of small change was so great that the inhabitants petitioned for relief, and a committee of the Assembly was appointed to bring in a bill for the issue of £20,000, mostly in small bills.
An association was formed for issuing paper money to relieve the pressure for change. Eight reputable merchants issued five-pound notes to the amount of £20,000, payable at nine months with five per cent interest. It was soon evident that anyone might do the same thing, and the community be flooded with valueless currency. It was also at the same time a new way of borrowing capital. A petition signed by two hundred tradesmen was presented to the Assembly, which forbade it.
In 1763 the whole paper-money system of the colonies, including that of Pennsylvania, was outlawed by act of Parliament, when Franklin wrote a pamphlet, protesting against the act.
This outlawing of colonial money had much to do with prejudicing the people of the colonies against the rule of Parliament.