Revolutionary Reader: Reminiscences and Indian Legends

by Sophie Lee Foster

Only the sons of men of means could avail themselves of these advantages. Therefore the great mass of those who became more or less prominent picked up whatever they knew as best they could. In Virginia, Patrick Henry, Washington and others had the limited opportunity and means of the old "Field or Plantation School" which was the only road to the rudest forms of knowledge. These were generally taught by men of fair education, but adventurous life, who were paid by the planters within a radius of eight or ten miles.

A notorious pedagogue, by the suggestive name Hobby, celebrated in Virginia annals for the brisk coercive switching of the backs of his "boys" as the most effective road to knowledge, is made famous in history as the rudimentary educator of the great man whose beginning of life's journey dates from this day. Washington's parents having removed from the place of his birth when a child resided within a journey of thirteen miles of the despotic jurisdiction of Hobby, and thither the boy walked or rode daily except Sundays in all kinds of weather, even being obliged to row across the Rappahannock River to Fredericksburg, where this vigorous applier of the ferrule held forth.

At eleven years, the death of Washington's father put an end to even this limited supply of "schooling." But the young man fortunately had a mother who was one of the few educated women of that period. We learn from a primitive record that Mary Ball, the name of Washington's mother, was educated by a young man graduated from Oxford, England, and sent over to be assistant to the rector of the Episcopal parish in which she lived. At the age of fifteen she could read, write and spell. In a letter preserved she wrote to a young lady friend: "He (her tutor) teaches Sister Susie and me and Madame Carter's boy and two girls. I am now learning pretty fast."

It was Governor Berkeley who, in a letter to his friends in England, boastingly "thanked God that there were no schools and printing in Virginia."

Washington was always methodical, and what he undertook was done well. This trait he inherited from his mother, as she was a woman worthy of imitation. From her stern disciplinary character and pious convictions her son learned self-control and all the characteristics of address and balance, which carried him through the most intricate and discouraging experiences of his career.

The tastes of Washington in childhood were instinctively military; all his amusements pointed that way. At twenty-one his first mission to the French at le Boeuf, fixed his career as a fearless man of action. The rescue of Braddock's Regulars from destruction by the savages was his baptism of fire; the rest, a manifestation of human greatness put the stamp of military prowess upon him. Virginia furnished more of the leaders of the first rank in the contest with the Crown than any other one colony, and yet some of the men who contributed most to the incisive work of the conflict had few opportunities of education.

For instance, Patrick Henry, who electrified the issue in his famous epigram which struck the fulminate of the combat for independence: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell and George the Third" (Treason, treason being shouted), rejoined, "if this be treason, make the most of it." This same authority, being criticised by aristocratic loyalists for his lack of education, replied: "Naiteral pairts are more acount than all the book lairning on the airth."

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a man of higher education. The private schoolhouse ten feet square on the Tuckahoe plantation, thirteen miles west of Richmond, in which Thomas Jefferson and his kinsman, Thomas Marr Randolph, were educated, in part by a private tutor, was in a good state of preservation when I had the pleasure of visiting Tuckahoe at the time of the international review at Hampton Roads.

What we today call free school education began in a simple form under the Quakers of Philadelphia in the earliest years of the Provincial government of Penn, the first proprietary. Thomas Holme in bad rhyme and not much better grammar tells about these schools in 1696. In what the Germans would call the hinterland the school was at a low ebb. There being no towns there were no facilities to get enough scholars together to make the pay of a teacher worth the while. The Germans, the dominant element, when educated at all, were under the tuition of teachers of parochial schools of the evangelical denominations and sects of their own, frequently pastors or missionaries in the language of the Fatherland. In Pennsylvania among the emigrants who came over in colonies there was a preacher and a schoolmaster. This was particularly so among the Dutch, Swedes and Germans. The English Quakers began schools in Philadelphia very soon after the foundation of that town. In the interior schools were rare as the settlements were scattered.

Reading was not founded until 1748, therefore education had not made headway at the time when the men prominent in Berks affairs during the Revolution were at the educational age. Yet those who figured during that period in prominent places held their own with any of their city contemporaries. Among the people generally, according to the oath of allegiance list, handwriting was evidently not widespread, judging from the number of "his (cross) mark," substituted for signatures in 1777-1778.