Little Martha Laurens, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, could, in her third year, "read any book"; and like many another child since her day learned to read holding the book upside down. Joseph T. Buckingham declared that when he was four years old he knew by heart nearly all the reading lessons in the primer and much of the Westminster Catechism.
Boys entered the Boston Latin School when as young as but six years and a half old. They began to study Latin frequently when much younger. Zealous and injudicious parents sometimes taught infants but three years old to read Latin words as soon as they could English ones. It redounds to the credit of the scholarship of one of my kinsmen, rather than to his good sense or good temper (albeit he was a minister of the Gospel) that each morning while he shaved, his little son, five years of age, stood by his dressing-table, on a footstool, and read Latin to his father, who had also a copy of the same book open before him, that he might note and correct the child's errors. And the child when grown to old age told his children and grandchildren that his father, angered at what he deemed slowness of progress, frequent errors of pronunciation, and poor attempts at translation, would throw the book at the child, and once felled him from the footstool to the floor.
Polly Flagg, One Year Old, 1751
It is told of Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, that he learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and could read the Bible before he was four years old, and taught it to his comrades. At the age of six he was sent to the grammar school and importuned his father to let him study Latin. Being denied he studied through the Latin grammar twice without a teacher, borrowing a book of an older boy. He would have been prepared for college when but eight years old, had not the grammar school luckily discontinued and left him without a teacher.
The curriculum at Harvard in olden times bore little resemblance to that of to-day. Sciences were unknown, and the requirements in mathematics were meagre. Still a boy needed even then to be clever to know enough Greek and Latin to enter at eleven. Paul Dudley did so in 1686. His father wrote to the president a quaint letter of introduction:—
"I have humbly to offer you a little, sober, and well-disposed son, who, tho' very young, if he may have the favour of admittance, I hope his learning may be tollerable: and for him I will promise that by your care and my care, his own Industry, and the blessing of God, this mother the University shall not be ashamed to allow him the place of a son—Appoint a time when he may be examined."
There were still younger college students. In 1799 there was graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown University) a boy named John Pitman, who was barely fourteen.
There is no evidence that the early marriages, that is, marriages of children and very young lads and girls, which were far from rare in England during the first years of our colonial life, ever were permitted in the new world. Nor were they as common at that date in England as during the previous century, for there had been severe legislation against them, especially against the youthful marriages of poor folk.