|
|
|
Exciting Emulation: Academies and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1780s–1820s
J. M. Opal
| When James Morris returned to South Farms, in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, from Continental army service, he found his native parish "a stench in the nostrils of all good men." Rude, grasping, and hopelessly provincial, the local farmers seemed quite unworthy of the nation he had fought to create. Thus the Yale-educated Morris channeled his energies into teaching the parish youth. Beginning in 1783, he examined his students (girls and boys) in front of the South Farms meetinghouse, awarding books and other "premiums" to the best scholars. "This apparently excited a spirit of emulation," he recalled. Soon after, he officially established Morris Academy, which proved popular with the local youth—but less so with many parents. "It was said [that] I was making an innovation on the manners and customs of youth," Morris recounted. "I was blowing up their pride. They would feel themselves above their mates and they would feel above labor. There must be a stop put to all this." Some of his critics (Morris lumped them into a single, passive-voiced other) added the lurid charge that he was "too familiar" with his female pupils. This "spirit of opposition," which Morris ascribed to "envy," landed him before a tribunal of area ministers in 1794. Accused of disturbing the Christian peace, Morris escaped with a warning and went on to bring the "spirit of emulation" to some fifteen hundred pupils during the next twenty years.1 |
1
|
|
With much variation by year and town, the story of Morris Academy was replayed across the northern countryside. Elite provincials, such as James Morris, who sought to "excite" new forms of public spirit and personal drive among newly made citizens planted academies in their towns and villages. Over 150 academies emerged in New England during the half century after the Revolution; dozens more sprouted in the New York hinterlands. For farm and mechanic families, such schools offered access to higher culture and to new careers in the professions or other nonmanual trades. Academies thereby reflected and contributed to a general unsettling of social roles in the early national United States, one that grew out of deep-seated changes in the economy and society of the new republic. Yet many parents and citizens protested the cost of those schools—not only in tuition and lost labor but also in the subtler currency of youthful pride and ambition. Those passions offended certain religious and familial values and appeared to threaten the household as it adapted to an emerging market economy. And as the "exciting" practices that helped define academies spread to common schools, so too did moral objections against the very "spirit" that James Morris sought to foster.2 |
2
|
|
This article explores the growth, appeal, and motivational regimes of early national academies, linking those institutions to the rise of "emulation" as a cultural ideal and project in postrevolutionary America. It portrays emulation, not as the natural outgrowth of a market economy, but as an emergent idiom, a new formula for a distinct kind of personal change. My intention is to relate that formula and the schools that applied it to the ongoing debate over preindustrial mentalités and ultimately to tip the focus of that debate away from economic trajectories and toward competing treatments of the self in early national culture. For, a quarter century after James A. Henretta challenged scholars to seek out the "motivations, values, and goals" of countryfolk, historians continue to frame their studies of farm families around questions of market involvement. Did rural households in the years after the Revolution shun market entanglements in favor of a"competency"—a basic level of economic security built on the possession of farmland? Or did they embrace and indeed prompt the commercial upturn of the federal period? In other words, what was the relationship between household and market in the decades bracketing 1800, and who or what propelled the rise of a market economy and the "liberal" society linked to it?3 |
. . . |
There are about 13584 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
