THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer
III. SOME SOCIAL TRAITS OF YANKEES
Harriet Martineau, the English traveler who in 1837 published a book entitled Society in America, was deeply impressed with New England’s concern for education. “All young people in these villages,” she says, “are more or less instructed. Schooling is considered a necessary of life.[23] I happened to be looking over an old almanac one day, when I found, among the directions relating to the preparations for winter on a farm, the following: ‘Secure your cellars from frost. Fasten loose clapboards and shingles. Secure a good schoolmaster.’”
We do not know what almanac Miss Martineau consulted. But a glance at a file of the Farmer’s Almanack, begun in 1793 by Robert B. Thomas and circulated by him for more than half a century all over New England, shows her quotation to be fully justified in spirit if not in letter. As early at least as the year 1804, Mr. Thomas included in his directions for the month of November, the indispensable item of education in connection with other activities: “Now let the noise of your flail awake your drowsy neighbors. Bank up your cellars. Now hire a good schoolmaster and send your children to school as much as possible.”
The nation was young in 1804. Parts of it were new and for that reason had made but meager educational progress; other parts were backward for different reasons. But in the older states of New England popular education had flourished for one hundred and fifty years. This point, stressed by a score of writers, illustrated by legal enactments, court decrees, town records, and anniversary sermons, cannot be over-emphasized in a summary of the social contributions which the Yankees made to the new western societies they helped to build. Notwithstanding all that has been written to prove the priority, in this or that feature of American educational progress, of other social strains or geographical areas, history may confidently assign to the Yankee priority in the attainment of universal literacy on an extensive scale.
Once the Puritan had convinced himself that the temptation to ignorance came from “ye old deluder Satan,” whose fell purpose was to keep men from a knowledge of the Scriptures and thus the more readily win them for his own, he hesitated not to require the maintenance of schools in all towns and neighborhoods under his jurisdiction. He was also concerned to recruit an “able and orthodox ministry” to take the places of the aging pastors who had come from England and to supply the needs of new settlements. Harvard College could turn out the ministers, if it had properly prepared young men to work upon. So the larger towns were required to maintain grammar schools in addition to the common schools. Thus we have, as early as 1647, provision for schooling from the lowest rudiments up through the college course.
The original religious motive for maintaining these schools persisted. But other motives were added as the Puritans perceived how notably secular interests, as well as religious, were served by schooling. For one thing, young persons who could read, write, and cipher had a distinct advantage in worldly matters over those who could not. Cheats and “humbugs,” of whom every community had its share, made victims of the ignorant, while they fled from the instructed even as their master, Satan, was supposed to flee from them. Many New England stories were designed to carry the lesson, especially to parents, that the best legacy children could receive was good schooling, without which wealth and property would quickly melt away.[24]
Apart, also, from such negative worldly advantages as we have named, one who had enjoyed good schooling might thereby hope to share in many special social privileges from which the unlettered were debarred. New England life on the religious side centered in the church, on the civic side in the town. Each of the two institutions required a full set of elective officers, ranked according to the importance of the offices filled, and all of these were chosen from the instructed portion of the community. To be a deacon in the church or a selectman on the town board might not be financially remunerative, but it imparted a dignity to the individual and a social status to the family which caused these offices to be highly prized. The older theory was that only good churchmen could fill either type of office. Gradually, the town offices, which paid something in cash and yielded considerable political power, came to be sought with increasing frequency by men who might have no interest in the church. “Jethro Bass” was typical, not unique, in his scheming to be chosen selectman, and the training offered by the district school was looked upon as a minimum basis for such preferment. Said the Farmer’s Almanack for November, 1810: “Send your children to school. Every boy should have a chance to prepare himself to do common town business.”
The great majority were satisfied with the elementary training afforded by the district schools, kept for a few months in winter. But the presence of learned men in every community and the existence of secondary schools and colleges tolled a good many on the way to advanced instruction who had no plans for professional careers. From farm, factory, and counting-room, even from among those before the mast, went boys to academy and college, while female seminaries springing up here and there took care of the educational interests of selected groups of girls. Such schools were not free, but their benefits were easy to attain, the principal requisite being pluck and a willingness to work both at earning money and at the studies. Girls and boys alike could usually earn their way by teaching in the common schools. Thus the educational system propagated itself, with the result that men and women of intelligence, culture, and refinement became widely dispersed through Yankeedom, and learning was recognized as an aid to the good life as well as a guarantee of the successful life. This was a fundamental condition of that literary flowering which marked the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It insured the poets, historians, orators, and novelists an audience which waxed ever larger as province after province in the West was added to New England’s spiritual empire.
Let us not, however, picture to ourselves a Yankee society wholly suffused with intellectual and spiritual light. The Yankees had no such illusions about themselves. Listen to Timothy Dwight’s description of a class of New Englanders who could not live “in regular society. They are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are impatient of the restraints of law, religion and morality, grumble about the taxes by which rulers, ministers and schoolmasters are supported—at the same time they are usually possessed, in their own view, of uncommon wisdom; understand medical science, politics, and religion better than those who have studied them through life....” He represents the type as the pioneering or forester class, who had “already straggled onward from New England” to far distant settlements, and whose going he was not disposed to lament. “In mercy,” he says, “to the sober, industrious, and well disposed inhabitants, Providence has opened in the vast western wilderness a retreat sufficiently alluring to draw them from the land of their nativity. We have many troubles even now, but we should have many more if this body of foresters had remained at home.”[25]