Mr. Mann felt that a great public issue had been raised which should be answered carefully and fully. In three public statements he answered the criticisms and pointed out the errors in the argument (R. 322). The Bible, he said, was an invaluable book for forming the character of children, and should be read without comment in the schools, but it was not necessary to teach it there. He showed that most of the towns had given up the teaching of the Catechism before the establishment of the Board of Education. He contended that any attempt to decide what creed or doctrine should be taught would mean the ruin of the schools. The attack culminated in the attempts of the religious forces to abolish the State Board of Education, in the legislatures of 1840 and 1841, which failed dismally. Most of the orthodox people of the State took Mr. Mann's side, and Governor Briggs, in one of his messages, commended his stand by inserting the following:
Justice to a faithful public officer leads me to say that the indefatigable and accomplished Secretary of the Board of Education has performed services in the cause of common schools which will earn him the lasting gratitude of the generation to which he belongs.
THE ATTEMPT TO DIVIDE THE SCHOOL FUNDS. As was stated earlier, in the beginning it was common to aid church schools on the same basis as the state schools, and sometimes, in the beginnings of state aid, the money was distributed among existing schools without at first establishing any public schools. In many Eastern cities church schools at first shared in the public funds. In Pennsylvania church and private schools were aided from poor-law funds up to 1834. In New Jersey the first general school law of 1829 had been repealed a year later through the united efforts of church and private-school interests, who unitedly fought the development of state schools, and in 1830 and 1831 new laws had permitted all private and parochial schools to share in the small state appropriation for education.
After the beginning of the forties, when the Roman Catholic influence came in strongly with the increase in Irish immigration to the United States, a new factor was introduced and the problem, which had previously been a Protestant problem, took on a somewhat different aspect in the form of a demand for a division of the school funds. Between 1825 and 1842 the fight was especially severe in New York City. In 1825 the City Council refused to grant public money to any religious Society, [11] and in 1840 the Catholics carried the matter to the State Legislature.
The legislature deferred action until 1842, and then did the unexpected thing. The heated discussion of the question in the city and in the legislature had made it evident that, while it might not be desirable to continue to give funds to a privately organized corporation, to divide them among the quarreling and envious religious sects would be much worse. The result was that the legislature created for the city a City Board of Education, to establish real public schools, and stopped the debate on the question of aid to religious schools by enacting that no portion of the school funds was in the future to be given to any school in which "any religious sectarian doctrine or tenet should be taught, inculcated, or practiced." Thus the real public-school system of New York City was evolved out of this attempt to divide the public funds among the churches. The Public School Society continued for a time, but its work was now done, and, in 1853, surrendered its buildings and property to the City Board of Education and disbanded.
THE CONTEST IN OTHER STATES. As early as 1830, Lowell, Massachusetts, had granted aid to the Irish Catholic parochial schools in the city, and in 1835 had taken over two such schools and maintained them as public schools. In 1853 the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church made a demand on the state legislature for a division of the school fund of the State. To settle the question once for all a constitutional amendment was submitted by the legislature to the people, providing that all state and town moneys raised or appropriated for education must be expended only on regularly organized and conducted public schools, and that no religious sect should ever share in such funds. This measure failed of adoption at the election of 1853 by a vote of 65,111 for and 65,512 against, but was re-proposed and adopted in 1855. This settled the question in Massachusetts, as Mann had tried to settle it earlier, and as New Hampshire had settled it in its constitution of 1792, Connecticut in its constitution of 1818, and Rhode Island in its constitution of 1842.
Other States now faced similar demands, but no demand for a share in or a division of the public-school funds, after 1840, was successful. The demand everywhere met with intense opposition, and with the coming of enormous numbers of Irish Catholics after 1846, and German Lutherans after 1848, the question of the preservation of the schools just established as unified state school systems now became a burning one. Petitions for a division of the funds deluged the legislatures (R. 323), and these were met by counter-petitions (R. 324). Mass meetings on both sides of the question were held. Candidates for office were forced to declare themselves. Anti-Catholic riots occurred in a number of cities. The Native-American Party was formed, in 1841, "to prevent the union of Church and State," and to "keep the Bible in the schools." In 1841 the Whig Party, in New York, inserted a plank in its platform against sectarian schools. In 1855 the national council of the Know-Nothing Party, meeting in Philadelphia, in its platform favored public schools and the use of the Bible therein, but opposed sectarian schools. This party carried the elections that year in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Kentucky.
To settle the question in a final manner legislatures now began to propose constitutional amendments to the people of their several States which forbade a division or a diversion of the funds, and these were almost uniformly adopted at the first election after being proposed. No State admitted to the Union after 1858, except West Virginia, failed to insert such a provision in its first state constitution. [12]
VI. THE BATTLE TO ESTABLISH THE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL
The elementary or common schools which had been established in the different States, by 1850, supplied an elementary or common school education to the children of the masses of the people, and the primary schools which were added, after about 1820, carried this education downward to the needs of the beginners. In the rural schools the American school of the 3 Rs provided for all the children, from the little ones up, so long as they could advantageously partake of its instruction. Education in advance of this common school training was in semi-private institutions—the academies and colleges—in which a tuition fee was charged. The next struggle came in the attempt to extend the system upward so as to provide to pupils, free of charge, a more complete education than the common schools afforded.