1.12 Antebellum Education, ambition and family in George Cole's World
Supplement to Endnotes
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When George Cole was about fifteen years of age, Emily Chubbuck, a student at the Utica Female Seminary, penned the novel Allen Lucas: The Self-Made Man, a didactic tale about young men and education. Chubbuck had been a teacher in upstate New York roughly the same period that Cole finished his own primary schooling. She apparently got the grist of her narrative from her experiences in rural towns and villages in Cole’s world. The story’s protagonist, Allen Lucas, is a young son of a modest farmer who under the guidance of a sensitive and gifted teacher acquires a hunger for knowledge. Throughout the story, education magnifies childhood ambitions and drives a wedge between sons and their families.[1]
The story begins in a classroom where the new teacher, Mr. Dawson, tries to motivate lackluster or unmotivated students by telling a story about a young injured eagle that was raised by goslings. Though the eaglet came to realize its true nature, the teacher warned them, it had waited too long. Tied to the earth with its “nature degraded,” the bird became “a slave of circumstances.” The teacher’s tale awakens the ambitions within Allen as he realizes he is “not too old” to learn to fly -- and by implication, that he was an eagle among a household of goslings (the double meaning of gosling as both a young goose and a foolish, inexperienced person wouldn't have been lost on Chubbuck’s readers). Instead of poring over the tattered books that parents often supplied their children, Allen brings home books lent to him by Mr. Dawson and begins dreaming about the possibilities of his future profession. It is when Allen brings home a mathematical “puzzler” to his baffled parents that it becomes clear to the son that his school teacher “must know a great deal more” than his untutored father. There was no going back. The farmer’s son had “tried his powers, and he never could grow weary of exercising them; he had taken one draught of the waters of knowledge….He had given a little glance to the field spread out before him and his heart swelled….”
Because he does not want to overburden his parents, though, Allen decides against continuing on to an academy. He instead chooses to use his hands -- to become a carpenter and an architect. Allen’s schoolmate, Robert May, also from an indigent farm, is a naturally gifted scholar who comes to expect sacrifices from father and sisters to scrape together enough funds to send their gifted brother and son to an academy and college. Robert has ambitions to end up in Washington. He remains fixed upon his plan of attending an academy and later a college so that he can choose a profession that “offers the best opportunity for rising in the world.” Robert breaks off an engagement with his sweetheart in order to marry the daughter of a prominent judge. This marriage of expediency and ambition, as explained by Robert in a letter to his jilted lover, was actually honorable as it “gratified” his “ruling principle”-- referring to the ruling and weaker passions.
The ruling principle leads to a loveless marriage. His heart grows cold and his face begins to exude loneliness and death. But Allen, the hero of the story, returns home, accepts a smaller sphere of influence, and becomes a steward over his community.[2]
Chubbock wrote this story for American youth after extended experience teaching in district schools. But it partly reflected her own struggle with education and family. She grew up on the eastern edge of the Finger Lakes where as a girl she worked twelve-hour days in a woolen mill to bring money to her sometimes destitute parents. In the words of Chubbock’s biographer, her father -- who had brought his family from New England to central New York -- though gifted with intelligence, had “failed to combine with it much of that practical shrewdness and energy so necessary to worldly prosperity.” Her parents were pious but poor. Emily Chubbock’s brief account of her own childhood, though, revealed “the hidden springs of her character and destiny.” The “springs” were district school and religious education. Most of all, she was transformed by books.
Her parents were desperate financially, but Chubbock claimed that her siblings were “well supplied with choice books, a luxury which even in our deepest poverty we never denied ourselves.” She had been taught “from the cradle” to consider knowledge, “next after religion, the most desirable thing.” Even though she had to dig firewood from the icy ground in winter months, while her father was far off distributing newspapers, she came from a home that instilled education. We were “never allowed to associate with ignorant and vulgar children.” Poverty defined her family far less than her parents’ aspirations for their children, manifested by the books in their home.
At the mill, the eleven-year-old Chubbock worked in “noise and filth,” with “bleeding hands and aching feet.” Education was her escape. In her recollections, the winter of her twelfth year was worth noting: “December, 1828. The ice stopped the water-wheel, and the factory was closed for a few months.” This entry about a frozen river meant that she had entered district school until the ice thawed in March. Chubbock recalled that many of the mill girls were “great novel readers.” She borrowed their books (promising not to tell her mother) and was flooded with daydreams of herself living out the stories of heroines. She entertained dreams about attaining great beauty or wealth. But, perhaps because she and her town were altered by the religious revivals sweeping through central New York, this pushed her toward hope in Christ.
When Chubbuck was fourteen, her family again relocated, this time to a small village called Morrisville where she took lessons in natural philosophy, rhetoric and fell under the sway of a “dangerous teacher” who introduced her to David Hume, Thomas Paine and the poetry of the scandalous Lord Byron. Chubbuck never abandoned the faith of her parents, “though she felt [her] confidence in the Bible weakened” and had lost “to a great extent” her religious impressions. Education was an essential part of the Christian’s conversion. Yet it could easily mar one’s character.
Her brother, Walker, purchased a share in the town library which afforded Emily the privilege of borrowing one book every week. Some of the books did not harmonize with the teachings of her parents. Her father’s hands trembled when he found Emily’s private notes that she had composed while reading Paine’s “Age of Reason,” an essay hostile to biblical Christianity. She “partly” assured him that she had not been changed by it arguments. When a local academy opened up in 1831, Emily and her sister Harriet sewed into the night to pay for tuition, clothing and food. But following her physician’s orders during a grave illness, she quit the academy. When her parents attempted later to persuade her to return to the mill, she resisted and at the age of fifteen obtained permission from several farmers to teach school to some twenty children. From this she would go on to teach hundreds of children in Brookfield, Syracuse, Hamilton and other places. She finally got accepted into the Utica Female Seminary where the director encouraged her to write didactic stories for youth.[3]
In one of those stories, Allen Lucas, she ties herself in knots trying to simultaneously praise education while warning young men of its path toward excessive ambition and ultimately a loss of gratitude and affection toward one’s parents and ancestors. Chubbuck had felt the rub between the world her parents inhabited and the one that she found through books. But she seems to have been particularly disturbed with what education meant for boys. [4]
A similar story of family division defined much of Abraham Lincoln's life. He, though, seems to have had little support from his father, Thomas Lincoln. Abraham had access to a few books from his step mother. But many adults around him disapproved of his constant reading and lack of zest for manual labor. The young Abraham seems to have been burdened by, perhaps ashamed of, his father’s illiteracy. Books became a central way for Abraham to distance himself from his own flesh and blood. As a young boy, he supposedly penned this
couplet:
“Good boys who to their books apply / Will all be great men by and by.”
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The upstart lawyer and rising politician could not reconcile his ambitions with the meager achievements of his father, a humble, “wholly uneducated man” who introduced young Abraham to a world of humility and pain. After Lincoln struck out on his own in 1831, remaining within a hundred miles from his father, he rarely returned during the two decades of his father’s remaining life. When the rising “great man” of Illinois did visit his family, he seemed to wither from touching his own roots. The strained relationship was certainly more complicated than a literacy gap between father and son. Lincoln, though, had cut himself free from a world of harsh physical conditions through beautiful words on paper and the smattering of formal education he received in his youth. Though family repeatedly urged him to return to see his dying father during his last months, Lincoln put it off, citing various reasons, finally admitting that to return would be “more painful than pleasant.” After Lincoln gave half-hearted excuses, Thomas died a few days later. Lincoln did not attend the funeral.[5]
Tensions like those between Lincoln and his father caused Chubbuck to fear what education was doing to the ties of family. The ambitions of sons could strain homes with fathers who were suspicious of book learning, as well as ones where humble parents sacrificed to elevate their children through schooling and academies. The fictional Allen Lucas returned to his village and kin. But many would not.
When, in the 1830s, Jefferson’s vision of state-administered education finally began to take root in the North -- first in Massachusetts -- it was understood partly as a fulfillment of previous hopes from Jefferson and others: public schools would form good republicans and future leaders by discriminating for talent. But for the great antebellum champion of public education, Horace Mann, schools would help tamper down the ambitions stoked by the Revolution itself. It was no small irony that America’s first and most prominent education reformer hoped to use education to check swelling aspirations.[6]
Architects of the Republic had hoped to utilize education to groom deserving elites while liberating children from backwards parents. Mann hoped that the schoolhouse would curtail unhealthy ambitions.[7] He worried that the Revolution had set off a long delayed tidal wave of materialism and ambition that seemed to hang over the tender nation. He began sounding alarms that became fixtures in advice manuals for young men. Where the passions of the self were once checked by small religious villages, or the abusive, coercive powers of Kings, Sultans and Popes, the Revolution, warned Mann, had left parts of humanity uncontained. He mistakenly saw the Revolution, though, as a passive force in this process. For him, the ideas of the Revolution were not to blame. Instead, the War of Independence had removed the tyrannical and repressive forces that once kept human passion bottled up. The heroic generation of 1776 had unwittingly removed the cork off the bottle.
Mann warned that Americans of his day could not afford to take false assurance in the relatively restrained behavior of the founding generation. George Washington’s generation, he argued, had not fully experienced the free-fall into the age of the unrestrained self. “Strong hereditary and traditional feelings of respect for established authority” kept Washington’s peers in line. Over the history of the world, Mann continued, only a handful of individuals -- Nero or Alexander the Great -- had the power to pour out the “lava of their passions.” But now, five decades after the fact, with the self-controlled Patriots taking their places in the nation’s graveyards, millions of boys stood poised to explode with “full volcanic force” into a “free, unbarred, unbounded career, which is here opened for their activity.” With nothing to check their “latent capabilities of evil” the rising generation would be corrupted, if not swallowed up by its own ambitions.[8]
But Horace Mann’s life crusade for state-funded common schools seems to have increased the “volcanic force.” It is unclear how much rural schools (like the one the Cole children attended) were directly affected by the educational reforms between the 1830s and the Civil War. Still, the halting reforms brought about changes in curriculum and policy that could have only added to the tensions between duty to family and the ambitions of self-made men. Mann and fellow reformers worked to remove the practice of parents supplying textbooks. They lengthened the seasonal sessions and hours and set out to replace locally selected teachers with state-accredited employees. Central to their crusade, reformers dismantled the “monitorial system” of rural schools where older children helped teach younger ones, and replaced it with graded levels based on age and merit. As a result students learned to see education as more competitive than cooperative. By the Civil War, schools throughout the North had been consciously fitted to prepare rising generations for the heaving marketplace outside the school’s walls. Classrooms and readings emphasized self-control, industry and practical knowledge. Textbooks more uniformly linked success to thrift and private property, and poverty to vice and poor character.[9]
Antebellum education, both private and early public forms, played a fundamental role in inspiring America's youth with ambitious visions. The makeshift rural schoolhouses originally built as an extension of father’s and mother’s dominion, first prodded many young boys to lift their eyes beyond the farm. Chubbock’s story, and Mann’s worries, revealed the widely shared fear that education led to excessive ambition and ultimately a loss of gratitude and affection toward one’s family. Abraham Lincoln is only the most famous of countless young men who used books and education to ensure that they would not die with dirt beneath their fingernails, especially dirt from their father’s farm.
The revolutionary ideals of merit helped change the ways that Americans measured themselves; but education, in its many forms, fostered the culture of measuring up and being measured. In the end, the schoolhouse multiplied the “unbounded careers” -- and the ambition of young men -- that Horace Mann hoped it would quell. It instilled middle-class values of self control and the hope of mastering one’s fate, essential for the wildly expanding market. It helped form a nation of young men who -- to use Walt Whitman’s words -- walked through life with “dimes on their eyes.”[10]
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