★ 5 ★

RENAISSANCE OF THE COLLEGES, 1820–1840

IN THE 1820S THE COLLEGE ONCE AGAIN BECAME THE focal point of American higher education. Interest in the colleges took three forms: the desire to improve and perfect the basic pattern of the American college; the desire to fundamentally change that model; and efforts by diverse groups in American society to found colleges that they could call their own. The emergence and proliferation of separate professional schools gave the colleges a clearer mission, but just how this mission ought to be accomplished provoked experiment and controversy. But the welling popularity of colleges could not be gainsaid. The number of functioning colleges jumped from 28 in 1815 to 80 in 1840; the number of students grew from 2,566 in 1820 to 8,324 in 1840. By the latter date, the United States was becoming what historian David Potts has called “a land of colleges.”1

An economic transformation of the country accompanied and stimulated the growth of colleges. In 1819 the country experienced an economic panic and its first domestically generated depression. After the recovery, the United States experienced rapid economic growth until the Civil War, interrupted principally by the panic and depression of 1837–1843. The United States remained a preindustrial society in which education played little role in the economy but was, nonetheless, a beneficiary of its secondary effects. Above all, it was affected by the expansion of the country and the revolution in transportation.

In 1800, 300,000 Americans lived beyond the Appalachians; in 1820, 2 million. By then most of the settled territories were still considered frontier, but the onset of the transportation revolution in the 1820s began to change that. In 1818 the National Road linked Maryland and Ohio, and steamboats had begun to ply the Mississippi. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, connecting the Eastern seaboard with the Great Lakes and generating a flurry of canal building elsewhere. And in 1830 the first steam locomotives heralded future railroads. As these means of transport complemented the river arteries of the trans-Appalachian region, the products of these fecund lands reached markets in the East, and imported and manufactured goods from the East found consumers in the West. This trade shaped a distinctive American economy, comprising hugely profitable cotton plantations in the South, textile factories in New England, and a few growing urban entrepôts.2

However, the vast expanse of country harbored a market economy of small-scale producers of agriculture-based goods. In the words of historian Robert Wiebe, “very little in the American economy built upward…. Almost everything spread outward.” This “commercial hinterland … tended to replicate the same mixture of small-scale activities in each largely autonomous region: processing farm products and manufacturing for local markets, wholesaling and jobbing, financing and transporting.”³ These activities were conducted by a burgeoning population of middle-class or protomiddle-class farmers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, and other workers needed to produce, distribute, and finance goods and services. Wiebe called these clusters “island communities.” Their founders and entrepreneurs may have had little education themselves, but a cash economy required literacy and numeracy. Moreover, as they prospered, they sought greater educational opportunities for their sons and, before long, daughters. The relentless geographic and economic expansion of the United States thus expanded the population of potential students for colleges and educational institutions.

The growth of colleges and student numbers was scarcely inevitable. In Western Europe and, particularly, Britain, economic modernization did not affect higher education for some time. There, well-developed national systems of secondary education provided rigorous classical education but also served as stringent gatekeepers to universities. In the United States, common schools were locally organized and open only part of the year, and the secondary space was filled by a hodgepodge of private schools and academies.⁴ As was seen in chapter 4, the early western colleges operated more as secondary schools before being able to offer a college course. American colleges thus had a far greater role in providing access to education than did European universities. This condition would persist throughout the nineteenth century, contributing to their popularity but also to the ambiguity surrounding their roles.

NEW MODELS FOR COLLEGES

Before America became a land of colleges, other forms of higher education emerged as alternatives and sometimes challengers to the traditional college course. The rise of professional schools represented one alternative, and the early attempts to form inclusive universities represented another. Other initiatives sought to broaden curricula to include more practical subjects and widen participation to the more practical minded. Some of these institutions were formed in the first two decades of the century, when the college curriculum was still in flux. The most distinctive of these was the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Launched by President Jefferson in his first year in office and chartered in 1802, West Point is often linked with his Enlightenment views and patronage of science. However, his motive in this case was political—to provide a Republican counterweight to Federalist domination of the armed services. Rudimentary mathematics was the only academic subject taught in the early years, and poorly educated Republican recruits were favored over better-prepared Federalists. Officially part of the Corps of Engineers, during the first decade cadets learned little beyond military tactics and field fortification. Moreover, the academy was beset with administrative turmoil, both in Washington and at the Point, causing it virtually to cease functioning from 1811 to 1813. Congress intervened with legislation in 1812 that raised educational standards: It established professors in science, mathematics, and engineering as well as instructors in French and drawing; admissions standards were set for age (15 years) and education; and the corps of cadets was organized.5

At this juncture, Captain Alden Partridge emerged as the dominant figure at the Academy. Partridge had graduated from the Academy in 1806 after attending Dartmouth for 3 years, and he remained at the Point as instructor and sometime acting head. Now he was promoted to professor of engineering, the country’s first, and then superintendent. The vainglorious Partridge was popular with the cadets, whom he relished leading on parades and military exercises, but detested by the faculty for his authoritarian streak. Administrative chaos prevailed until a successor was named in 1817 (without informing Partridge). Refusing to obey the new superintendent, he was court-marshaled but then allowed to resign. Partridge departed with the conviction that the kind of military education he had fostered at West Point could be replicated to train citizen soldiers and provide needed instruction in practical fields. He soon embarked on a career of educational entrepreneurship to promote this model.

Sylvanus Thayer, the new superintendent (1817–1833), is officially recognized as the “Father of the Military Academy.” Although some reforms had been implemented earlier, he molded an effective and enduring “Thayer system.” A graduate of Dartmouth before entering the Academy, Thayer had briefly observed the most advanced military education at France’s École Polytechnique, which taught a concentrated course in mathematics and engineering as a foundation for later studies at “schools of application.”6 Inspired by that example, Thayer instituted a curriculum that made West Point the nation’s first and foremost school of engineering. Achieving this required more than changing the curriculum.

Thayer’s first challenge was to reestablish discipline after the laxness of the Partridge regime. Here he accomplished what colleges of the day could not: he imposed a strict regime of structured activities that occupied the entire day. His use of military punishments, especially courts-martial, and his own authoritarian style caused some backlash; his tenure was marked by occasional student riots. Responsibility for all academic matters was confided to the Academic Board—consisting of the faculty, chaired by the superintendent, and reporting to the Secretary of War. This was arguably the first example of shared academic governance, particularly after the autocratic Thayer departed. The Board approved dividing the class sections by proficiency, so that more capable students could study more advanced material—another first in American higher education. The most important curricular reform was establishing a 4-year course: a student’s first 2 years were largely devoted to mathematics and French; the third year comprised physics, chemistry, and topographical drawing; and fourth-year students concentrated on engineering, with a smattering of collegiate subjects, including moral philosophy. Until 1824, the seniors studied only military engineering, but that year, with some prodding from Washington, civil engineering was introduced. West Point quickly became the nation’s principal source of civil engineers, who were badly needed to assist the transportation revolution.7

West Point differed from other colleges in significant ways.⁸ The superintendent had far less power than a college president, governing instead with the academic board. The chain of command went through the army chief engineer, the secretary of war, to the president. In the populist politics of the Jacksonian era, the academy bore the unpopularity of both the professional military and higher education. The hostility of President Andrew Jackson himself drove Thayer from office, but the academic board managed to insulate the school from frequent political attacks. Most of the faculty that Thayer assembled persisted long after his departure. West Point combined academic conservatism with a commitment to academic quality. Two professors had followed Thayer’s path to Europe to study military education, and the faculty was generally well qualified. Frequently criticized for overemphasizing math and engineering, the academic board responded in 1854 by adding a fifth year of study to incorporate humanistic subjects and additional military training. From Thayer until the1840s, the West Point curriculum substituted useful French for the classical languages, taught the most advanced mathematics and physical science, and had the most effective course in engineering.

Elsewhere, interest grew in military/engineering education for the nation’s expanding infrastructure, but without West Point’s faculty and captive audience, both teacher supply and student demand were tenuous. The most energetic promoter was Alden Partridge, who remained an inveterate foe of Thayer and West Point. In 1820 he recovered from his discomfiture to found the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in his native Norwich, Vermont. This incongruous amalgam of military, collegiate, secondary, and practical instruction reflected Partridge’s messianic mission to create a trained civilian militia, to employ military discipline for training and education, and to allow cadets (i.e., students) freedom to study any subject at their own pace. The academy was open to students as young as nine, and it granted only certificates for completing studies in its many subjects. And, it was a success of sorts.⁹

In 1824 Partridge descended the Connecticut River to Middletown, where he convinced local citizens to provide land and buildings to relocate the academy. On its new campus, the academy swelled to more than 300 students and 20 ostensibly qualified professors and instructors. But Partridge himself seemed to be the only force that could hold this enterprise together, and he was often absent on proselytizing tours. After just 4 years the collapsing academy retreated back to Norwich, abandoning the Middletown facilities, which soon became home to Wesleyan University (1831). Partridge regrouped nonetheless and in 1834 obtained a state charter for Norwich University, which continued to offer both military and civil engineering courses, although on a much diminished scale.10 Although Partridge was called a “consummate clown” by one observer, he inspired the founding of numerous private, mostly ephemeral, military academies or institutes in the North and the South. An indigenous tradition of military academies developed in the South, where state-supported military academies were also founded, beginning with Virginia Military Institute (1839) and the Citadel (1842). None of these schools, however, approached the effectiveness of West Point in teaching science and engineering.¹¹

Another anomalous institution that reflected popular enthusiasm for science was the Rensselaer School, opened by Amos Eaton in 1825. A graduate of Williams College (1799), Eaton only became a passionate promoter of science after a disastrous law career. He retooled as a “graduate student” with Silliman at Yale before engaging in surveying and lecturing in the Albany area. The patronage of Stephen Van Rensselaer allowed the school to be incorporated in 1824. Eaton and one other professor offered a 1-year course focused on geology and natural history, leading to a “bachelor’s of natural science.” Their courses were apparently the first to allow students to participate in scientific activities, as opposed to attending lectures, and graduates tended to become enthusiastic teachers and practitioners. Although Eaton had great ambitions, the school remained a modest, 1-year course given by Eaton himself, with some assistance from former students. In 1835, a 1-year course in civil engineering was added, and the name was changed to Rensselaer Institute. The school benefited from the backing of local notables, including Union president Eliphalet Nott, who became the absentee president in 1829. Nott resigned in 1845 when Union began offering its own engineering course. The school barely survived the death of Eaton in 1842 but revived to launch a successful 3-year engineering course in 1851 as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.12

During the 1830s, engineering professors were sometimes hired and lectures offered in liberal arts colleges, including Geneva (Hobart), Pennsylvania (Gettysburg), William & Mary, New Jersey (Princeton), and the universities of New York, Alabama, and Pennsylvania. The long depression of 1837 to 1843 seems to have undermined these initiatives, but other factors were no doubt in play. It proved difficult to retain competent engineers on college faculties, and the lectures they gave could not alone provide adequate training. After the depression, however, engineering education would finally take root beyond West Point.¹³

★ ★ ★

When the University of Virginia opened in 1825, it was both a new model for American higher education and a belated realization of the old dream of republican universities. The latter model had preoccupied founder Thomas Jefferson since the reforms of William & Mary during the Revolution. After becoming disillusioned with his alma mater, the idea of a separate state university for Virginia developed in his mind for 20 years. The University of Virginia embodied Enlightenment ideals of secularism, republicanism, and useful knowledge. But much had transpired since the Early Republic, and Jefferson’s university was also shaped by his own political battles against Federalists, organized churches, and his enemies in the North. Jefferson carefully manipulated key faculty appointments, library acquisitions, and the curriculum in order to foster the right brand of Democratic Republicanism. He outmaneuvered the churches to exclude them from the university and from any official role in Virginia higher education. But above all, the University of Virginia emerged in his mind as a sectional institution. He deeply resented that Virginians sent their sons to be educated in the North. Harvard was the great rival and nemesis that turned Virginia students into “fanatics & tories.” The Missouri crisis of 1819–1820 over extending slavery in the West reinforced these sentiments but also elicited sympathy in the state for securing the appropriations needed to finish constructing his spectacular campus. Jefferson could not wait for the University of Virginia to develop into a good university: it had to be launched as the South’s finest, a fitting rival of Harvard and Yale.14

The University of Virginia was thus created by Jefferson’s drive and vision. Working through his agent in the legislature, he captured the state’s Literary Fund, at the expense of public education, and secured authorization for the university in 1818. He led the commission that outlined a plan of studies in 1819. And, as head (rector) of the Board of Visitors, he controlled the design of the campus, its construction, and the hiring of its teachers. Jefferson’s vision differed from the German universities that were emerging as centers of professional training and specialized scholarship.¹⁵ Rather, his was an Enlightenment vision that valued breadth of knowledge. The university was launched with eight designated professorships (all it could afford), each responsible for a “school”: ancient languages, modern languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy and medicine, moral philosophy, and law. These were subjects taught at other American universities, but Jefferson specified that the professors cover impossibly broad subject matter. The professor of ancient languages, besides instructing in Latin and Greek, was to teach Hebrew, rhetoric, belles lettres, ancient history, and ancient geography. The single professor of medicine was charged with subjects covered by six professors in full medical schools. When Jefferson’s recruiter tried to hire European professors, he had to compromise on these broad competencies that no single individual could cover. Five professors were hired abroad, and Americans were found for natural history and moral philosophy. The chair in law could not be filled until 1826. The university opened with a young but highly competent faculty. Its distinctiveness was not in the subjects the faculty was charged to teach, but the manner in which they would be taught.¹⁶

Jefferson designed a campus of classical beauty that is admired to this day. The enormous rotunda, modeled on the Roman Pantheon, faced a broad lawn, flanked on either side by the professor’s pavilions, with student residences close by to the rear. However, the imperfections of the academic system immediately became apparent. Students were free to enroll in the schools of their choosing, with study in three schools per session envisioned as the norm. Professors were enjoined to lecture as well as provide suitable out-of-class exercises. Rigorous examinations were given to those who wished to “graduate” from a school, but no degrees were offered until 1831.17 It was the most liberal approach to learning heretofore devised in American higher education, an idealization of Jefferson’s own experience at William & Mary, but it was little appreciated by its clientele.

The class list for the University of Virginia read like a who’s who of the state’s most distinguished families. Even with an annual state appropriation of $15,000, it was the most expensive college in the country, and the sons of wealthy planters predominated (after 1845 the state provided a small number of scholarships). These students brought to the university the culture of the plantations, including drinking, gambling, guns, and an exaggerated sense of honor, often invoked against the professors. Disturbances and flagrant abuse of the faculty occurred almost immediately. The first student riot in 1825 provoked a famous meeting of the Board of Visitors, where three former presidents—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—expelled five perpetrators, including Jefferson’s great-great-nephew. The disorders did not attenuate until the late 1840s, after a student had shot and killed a professor (1840) and prolonged rioting required the militia to restore order (1836, 1845). The southern state universities generally were prone to such disturbances, but none matched Virginia’s infamy. These excesses were exacerbated by the privileged status of its students, their considerable freedom, and weak academic discipline. Two-thirds of Virginia students attended for 1 year or less. Very few completed a diploma; lacking such a goal, the majority put little effort into their studies.

The principal historian of the university expressed some sympathy for the frustrations faced by students, if not for their inexcusable behavior.¹⁸ Jefferson’s plan created what today would be called an upper-division university; that is, it taught material that other colleges offered to the junior and senior classes. Yet, standards of admission were lenient, and few Virginia students had adequate preparation for that level of studies, especially in Latin and Greek. Discouragement no doubt boosted the high rate of attrition. Given the difficulty of getting to and from Charlottesville, the university session (academic year) originally had only one break and none at all in the oppressive summer months. And, despite the liberality of the regime, students chafed at the requirements to wear uniforms and to surrender control of their money as well as a disciplinary code that was periodically tightened.

Despite the notoriety of student misbehavior, the university sought to maintain high academic standards. Faculty had to be knowledgeable in order to lecture their subjects 6 hours per week for 10 months of the year. They were very well paid for their efforts and tribulations. As faculty turned over, the new appointees maintained that high level of competence. They appear to have been completely occupied with teaching duties (and a gracious social life) and were genuinely devoted to upholding academic standards. The university had no president, another Jeffersonian innovation, but a rotating chairmanship of the faculty instead. The professors thus bore collective responsibility for academic matters, and they were usually backed by the Board of Visitors. The Visitors, for their part, took a close interest in the university and consciously sought to uphold Jeffersonian ideals. After Jefferson’s death in 1826, James Madison chaired the board as rector until 1836. The professors gradually adjusted their schools to prevailing realities. Most extended their courses to 2 years, so that “juniors” were introduced to subjects and “seniors” were taught more advanced material. Examinations for those who wished to “graduate” held students to a high standard. For the minority of students who took their studies seriously, the university offered a rigorous course of instruction by devoted teachers. Students quickly augmented classroom learning by forming debating societies. However, in a case of southern sensibility preempting intellectual ideals, they were forbidden to speak on controversial topics. Although Jefferson had been the guiding spirit, Virginians created a university that suited the state’s elite families: prestigious bordering on pretentious, it accommodated both serious academic study and the artifices of Southern gentility. As a model for American higher education, it could scarcely be replicated.

★ ★ ★

Virginia’s putative northern rival, the University in Cambridge, faced its own frustrations in its endeavor to improve on the model of the American college. During the prosperous early years of his tenure, President Kirkland (1810–1828) was able to indulge the Anthologists’ vision of creating a university that could support “a few men of genius in the pursuit of letters.”19 Kirkland, like Jefferson, recognized the superiority of European universities, but instead of seeking European professors, he sponsored four prospective faculty to study there between 1815 and 1820, principally at Gőttingen. The brilliant Edward Everett was appointed professor of Greek at age 21 and immediately dispatched to Germany, where he became the first American to earn a German PhD. His traveling companion and fellow student at Göttingen was George Ticknor, who was subsequently appointed to a new endowed chair in modern languages. A Harvard tutor, Joseph Cogswell, spent 5 years in European study, and he was joined in 1817 by a promising young graduate, George Bancroft. Upon returning, all became disillusioned in attempting to introduce the spirit of Germanic learning into the prevailing college pedagogy. Bancroft, who assumed continental airs, was hounded from his tutorship by relentless student harassment after one miserable year. He and Cogswell both left in 1823 to found the highly regarded Roundhill preparatory school. Edward Everett was demoralized by “too much … contact with some little men and many little things” and soon escaped by getting elected to Congress (1824). Only Ticknor endured; his professorship spared him from the drudgery of conducting recitations and disciplining students.20

Although somewhat removed from the fray, Ticknor was personally frustrated by his inability to control the students admitted to his lectures or examine them on the content. He became convinced that the college course at Harvard and other American colleges needed radical reform. He objected to the single fixed course: students did not study subjects, but books, or parts of books; the recitation method precluded real teaching; and the few lectures were no better since students neither prepared nor were examined on the material. Finally, dividing the class into sections alphabetically, instead of by proficiency, reduced pedagogy to the lowest common denominator. Ticknor may have been more knowledgeable about different practices in higher education than any contemporary American. Besides European-wide experience, he visited his old Dartmouth roommate, Sylvanus Thayer, at West Point, where he admired the academic as well as the military discipline. He met and corresponded with Jefferson about education and in 1824 received a personal tour of the nearly finished University of Virginia. His own views seemed to meld these two near opposites: lofty ambition to admit advanced learning to the college but hard-headed discipline to control student behavior and allow effective teaching. Ticknor advocated reform soon after he began teaching, but his opportunity came when the college was rocked in 1823 by perhaps the worst disturbance in its history.

Under the kindly Kirkland, Harvard students increasingly tested and transgressed college rules. But the class of 1823 carried revelry and defiance of authority to new levels. The “Great Rebellion” was caused nonetheless by an internecine conflict between a united majority of “high fellows” and a “Black List” of students whom they viciously abused for opposing their mayhem. The enmity of the rebels reached a fevered pitch over parts in commencement, and ensuing acts of violence and intransigence resulted in forty-three of the class of seventy being dismissed from the college.21

The governing boards and the public were now convinced that something was terribly wrong at Harvard. Ticknor took the lead in organizing discussions of reform and pressing his previous views. Two years of meetings and reports produced 153 new “Statutes and Laws of the University in Cambridge,” which embodied several of the measures advocated by Ticknor. He elaborated and praised them in a subsequent pamphlet. “In the first place … Harvard College is now … thrown open to all who wish to obtain any of the instruction it offers, whether they seek to obtain an academic degree or not.” Second, the laws sought to reduce vacations and keep students on campus and at their studies, practices Ticknor admired at West Point. “A third important change, and one which may be useful in many colleges … instruction … shall be given by departments; and … students shall, to a certain degree, have a choice of the studies they are to pursue.” Finally, “a fourth important change … the divisions of the classes for recitations and teaching shall be made according to proficiency,” which should provide a “broad cornerstone for beneficial changes in all our colleges.”²² With a partial course, electives, and grouping sections by merit, Ticknor believed that Harvard had broken the mold of the traditional course and illuminated the way for a reformation of American colleges. But he was soon disillusioned.

Harvard College teachers proved reluctant to institute these curricular reforms. Ticknor’s Gőttingen comrades had all departed, and most remaining professors were uninspiring pedagogues.²³ President Kirkland’s enthusiasm for university building—and for Ticknor—was by this time greatly diminished. The faculty dragged its feet about establishing departments, and public opinion seemed to regard sorting students by merit as undemocratic. The college soon made the practice optional, effectively ending this reform before it began. Nor was anything done to encourage nondegree students to take advantage of Harvard instruction, and virtually none appeared. Ticknor alone pioneered the new model as head of the department of modern languages. There he felt the results vindicated the reform. The most capable students advanced rapidly to read eminent European authors, and modern languages became the most popular department. But Kirkland had asked Ticknor to refrain from citing “what has been done or proposed by others”: the spirit of reform was extinguished in Harvard College.24

★ ★ ★

That spirit flared brightly, however, at the anti-Harvard—the new bastion of Orthodox Congregationalism in Amherst, Massachusetts. Started by a secession from Williams College in 1821, Amherst College had overcome the opposition of existing Massachusetts colleges to obtain a charter in 1825. It opened at the zenith of the Awakening in the Connecticut River valley, a Congregational stronghold that had hitherto looked north to Dartmouth or south to Yale. Its attendance mushroomed to more than 200, and Ralph Waldo Emerson called it an “infant Hercules.” In some ways early Amherst typified the new colleges that complemented the expanding agricultural economy. Students were drawn almost entirely from the region; 40 percent needed aid from the college Charity Fund or the American Education Society; many were mature students; most were deeply pious.²⁵ Like many new colleges, Amherst felt an impulse for improvement. In 1826 the faculty proposed, and the trustees approved, a bold plan of reform.

Unlike the innovations just reviewed, the Amherst proposal owed nothing to European inspiration. It stemmed rather from a conviction of public dissatisfaction with the colleges for not being “sufficiently modern and comprehensive, to meet the exigencies of the age and the country.” In the tradition of Franklin, Rush, and Webster, it asked why a college student should “be compelled to spend nearly four years … in the study of the dead Languages, for which he has not taste, [and] from which he expects to derive no material advantage …?” The proposal did not reject the classical course but rather asked that an equivalent course be created to offer instruction in French, Spanish, and other modern subjects, including a “department of theoretical and practical mechanics.” Such a course would be better adapted “to the taste and future pursuits of a large class of young men, who aspire to the advantages of a liberal education.” In a provision that reflected local realities, the proposal strongly urged the creation of a new department to teach the “science of education,” since “three fourths of [the students] expect to be teachers, in one form or another,” at some point in their careers.26

The Amherst Trustees instituted the parallel course in 1827, but problems quickly arose. The freshman class of 1827 was the largest yet for the college, and eighteen of sixty-seven students chose the modern languages course. However, the new French instructor proved incompetent, and the regular faculty found the teaching of additional subjects onerous. Students soon sensed that this instruction was inferior to the regular course. In 1828 no incoming freshmen opted for modern languages, and the trustees terminated the experiment. Students of modern languages were absorbed into the classical course, and the principal faculty advocate resigned.²⁷

The Amherst plan was one of many experiments with parallel, partial, or English-language courses in the 1820s. Despite the anticlassical rhetoric, it was a fairly conservative approach: It preserved unaltered the classical course; the classical languages were required for admission; and students in both courses took the same nonlanguage subjects. Unlike Harvard or Virginia, Amherst lacked the resources to offer a diversified curriculum. That “large class of young men” supposedly clamoring for a liberal education, or part of one, failed to materialize at Amherst or anywhere else, and the few who did attempt this course soon became aware of its cultural and pedagogical inferiority. The one college where a parallel course lasted was Union, where Eliphalet Nott created a “scientific” course—actually a misnomer—in 1828. His alternative was even more conservative, allowing students to opt for modern languages and history subjects only after the freshman year. With students taking many of the same subjects and receiving the same AB degree, no stigma seemed to attach to Union’s scientific course.²⁸

No lack of models for college education existed in the 1820s, but all were effectively marginalized, at least until the succeeding generation. Military education for engineers found an effective formula under Army discipline at West Point, but civilian imitations struggled before 1850, despite the best efforts of Alden Partridge. Thomas Jefferson’s idiosyncratic vision produced the monument he sought, but not a model for others; and its subsequent evolution moved it closer to the mainstream. Harvard, with the greatest academic resources in the country, could not reorganize itself to employ them more effectively, settling instead for a demonstration project in the department of modern languages. And, efforts to loosen the grip of classical languages and make college studies accessible to a larger population foundered at all major schools, save Union College. The traditional model of the American college, despite all strictures, possessed remarkable residual strength. Yet, unlike its adversaries, it seemed to lack forceful advocates—until 1828.

THE YALE REPORTS OF 1828

Alternative models to the traditional college course may have had few successes in the 1820s, but reverberations were felt at most new and established colleges in the form of tentative reforms, questioning of established practices, or, more often, serious breakdowns—most everywhere, that is, except at Yale.29 There, since the presidency of Timothy Dwight (1795–1817), the faculty had consistently sought to strengthen and enlarge the traditional, classical course. Each of Dwight’s professorial appointments had contributed. Jeremiah Day extended math instruction to trigonometry and surveying, besides algebra, authoring what became standard textbooks in those subjects. James Kingsley adopted an all-purpose Greek reader, the Collectanea Graeca Majora (1805). Benjamin Silliman soon emerged as the most renowned academic scientist for his work in geology and mineralogy. He delivered famed demonstration lectures in chemistry to juniors and seniors, attracted graduate students, and founded the respected American Journal of Science and Arts. After Day (1817–1846) succeeded Dwight as president, a professor of rhetoric and oratory was added, as well as another professor of math. Instruction in Latin and Greek was extended to the senior year (1824), and juniors were given an option of studying French, Spanish, or calculus (1825–1826).³⁰

What did not change was the form of instruction. The course of study, at Yale and elsewhere, was anchored by three recitations per day, interspersed with lectures, especially for juniors and seniors. Recitations during the first 2 years of study consisted of little else but Latin, Greek, and math. Considerable effort was devoted to writing and speaking through compositions, translations, disputations, and declamations. Students were examined orally twice a year. The president and faculty were, like their inspirational former president, devoted pedagogues, and Yale was the largest and most national American college. Graduate Julian Sturtevant, although a critic, later judged that “Yale was probably doing better work than any other college in the country.” The Yale faculty consequently bristled at charges that the colleges were relics of the past needing to be “new-modelled” for modern America. They reacted specifically to the charges of Ticknor, coming from old rival Harvard, and the Amherst faculty, the new rival to the North. The threat hit home when a trustee resolution, whether serious or contrived, proposed that the Yale course be altered by leaving out “the study of the dead languages.” A committee of the Yale Corporation then asked the faculty to respond, and the result was a two-part report written by President Jeremiah Day and professor James Kingsley, respectively.31

Day began stridently by denying that the college had been “stationary,” alluding to the developments described above. He then cut straight to the purpose of college: “to lay the foundation of a superior education.”³² This was achieved through “the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers and storing it with knowledge.” Mental discipline was by far the more important, and it could be developed only by bringing “all the important mental faculties … into exercise.” For Day, this meant the full college course, much as it existed at Yale, combining lectures, recitations, “written and extemporaneous disputes,” and examinations. The college course should not be expected to finish a student’s education but rather to teach him “how to learn.” Day then contrasted this “thorough education” with other existing or proposed alternatives. He rejected the idea of emulating German universities since, besides being impossibly costly, they offered advanced and professional education for which American colleges provided only a foundation. He then dismissed existing suggestions or efforts to offer an accelerated (“superficial”) course, a partial course, or the kind of vocational subjects advocated for parallel courses. The Yale course was superior to all these, and to try to incorporate any of them would diminish the quality and prestige, and hence the effectiveness, of a Yale education. In fact, “the multiplication of schools and academies in this country, requires that colleges should aim at a high standard of literary excellence.” Their role was to furnish the culture of an educated upper class: to produce “men of superior education, of large and liberal views, of those solid and elegant attainments, which will raise them to a higher distinction, than the mere possession of property.”

To complete this argument, James Kingsley attempted to establish that “familiarity with the Greek and Roman writers is especially adapted to form the taste, and to discipline the mind.” His claims that these subjects “form the best preparation for professional study,” or that modern languages cannot instill mental discipline, were no doubt more plausible to contemporaries than to modern readers. However, he too emphasized cultural arguments that reflected realities of the 1820s. The classical languages were still regarded as essential to a liberal education, and far from declining, in Europe they seemed to be “pursued with increasing ardor.” “Without a preparation in classical literature,” someone in educated company “immediately feels a deficiency in his education.” Kingsley concluded by explicitly contradicting Ticknor’s charges, without mentioning him by name: Yale examinations were rigorous and thorough; its recitations provided genuine teaching; and its graduates departed with an intellectual foundation for success and distinction.

The report of the Corporation Committee, responding to the faculty reports, was written by Governor Gideon Tomlinson and was so warmly supportive that it seems unlikely that the Corporation ever seriously envisioned dropping the “dead languages.” He added a point of his own, and one surely appreciated in New England, by observing that the neglect of the “learned languages” in France “immediately preceding and during the revolution” had “disastrous” consequences. Indeed, proponents associated the classical languages with upholding the social order. Tomlinson emphatically reiterated the principal arguments of Day and Kingsley and ended by capturing the essence of the Yale experience. For the past 25 years the classical languages at Yale had “received increased attention … and … classical and other attainments required as a qualification for admittance into the college, have been considerably augmented.” The effect had been to “elevate the character of the institution, and the standard of scholarship.” Yale students were now older and better prepared “more successfully to pursue the studies requiring maturity of intellect.” Far from abandoning classical studies, Tomlinson foresaw future admissions requirements being raised further.

The Yale Reports of 1828 have been generally interpreted by historians as a rearguard action to defend an obsolete curriculum, “a fossil of eighteenth-century classicism.”33 The authors of the Reports believed and argued just the opposite—that knowledge of the classics was a critical element in the quality of a person’s educational formation and that the contemporary trend was to strengthen, not compromise, such studies. Indeed, admirers of the scholarly attainments of Oxbridge or German universities noted the far more rigorous classical training possessed by students entering those universities. And all three authors suggested that the preeminent position of Yale College vindicated the steps it had taken to bolster the classical course. With this central contention the authors of the Reports were more prescient than the critics. The classical course would dominate American collegiate education for another two generations, invariably defended by appeals to mental discipline. The study of Greek, in particular, received increasing emphasis in following decades, both in Germany and the United States. To understand these developments, one needs first to grasp the power of the case that the Reports argued before asking why its weaknesses were conveniently overlooked by contemporaries.

The Reports was less a presentation of original ideas than a synthesis of notions that had been recently aired, separately or incompletely.34 The clear articulation that a college education was a foundation rather than a finished education must have struck contemporaries as at once obvious but also profound. It was especially true for Yale. In the year of the Reports, Yale College enrolled 325 students, the medical school, 68, the department of theology, 54, and the law school, 20, and there were 7 resident graduates—in other words, just over two-thirds of students were what Yale had only recently begun calling undergraduates. Moreover, three-quarters of Yale College graduates of that era pursued careers in the professions of law, clergy, medicine, or (the smallest group) education. Nearly all would pursue further education to prepare for these professions. Although it was noted in the last chapter that the relationship between college and professional school was breaking down, this was not the case for Yale students. The close alliance with the American Education Society reinforced the imperative of a thorough education—the phrase repeatedly invoked in the Reports. Also reiterated is the message that a classical education is the appropriate preparation for professional studies. Day asserted a new identity for colleges as undergraduate education focused on developing general mental faculties, and no other coeval forms of education could challenge that claim.

The means by which this was accomplished—instilling mental discipline—have long puzzled modern historians. Some have written this concept off as a relic of faculty psychology. On the other hand, modern neuroscience has documented how repeated activities can induce physiological change in the brain, which sounds to a layperson much like mental discipline. In fact, contemporaries understood perfectly what Day meant and continued to use the term as he had for the next half-century. Mental discipline was clearly a real phenomenon for Day and other educators, and it is given several formulations in the Reports to try to convey its essence.35 After teaching and examining students daily for 25 years, Day certainly had a clear idea of how students managed to master a body of material, organize it, and express it. He equated this with expanding mental powers, learning how to learn, or mental discipline, and he elicited widespread agreement among educators that this was what colleges sought to accomplish. However, a fallacy lurked in this argument: if classical languages are what is taught and mental discipline a result, then mastery of these texts was believed to be the cause of mental discipline. Of course, Kingsley attempted the more difficult task of proving that classical studies do this better than other subjects. Soon, critics of the Reports rejected his strained reasoning, maintaining that the thorough study of other subjects would also produce mental discipline. This latter belief gained adherents throughout the rest of the nineteenth century without swaying the convictions of the faithful.

Mental discipline was the key concept of the Reports because on it hinged the deeper claim for the quality of collegiate education. The authors were acutely aware of the competitive market for colleges. Day called for a “competition for excellence.” Both he and Kingsley warned that Yale’s standing would diminish if it should incorporate any of the less prestigious forms of education: “it will be deserted by that class of persons who have hitherto been drawn here by high expectations and purposes.” Yale had specific concerns in this respect. It was facing new competition on its home turf from Washington College (later Trinity) in Hartford (f. 1824) as well as Amherst, up the Connecticut River valley. Yale had also become the most national of American colleges: in 1800, Connecticut residents comprised 88 percent of its graduates, but in 1830, just 44 percent.³⁶ Moreover, Day emphasized the advantages of a classical over a vocational education for “young men intended for active employment”: “merchants, manufacturers, and agriculturalists … are the very classes which … have the best opportunities for reducing the principles of science to their practical applications.” “[T]he object of the undergraduate course, is not to finish a preparation for business, but to impart that various and general knowledge, which will improve, and elevate, and adorn any occupation,” which will impart “high intellectual culture.” The Yale Reports thus justified the value of a college education ultimately in cultural terms. And this was the message that, subliminally or explicitly, convinced contemporaries: a liberal education in the classical course, through mental discipline, instilled in individuals a superior culture that would enhance their capabilities and status in any career they might undertake.

If the Yale Reports had an Achilles’ heel (to use a classical allusion), it would be the actual teaching of the classical languages. Here Ticknor was probably closer to the mark than Kingsley. Julian Sturtevant, a Yale student in the 1820s, supported the notion of mental discipline but thought it was achieved through drill, not teaching. The tutors “could hardly be said to teach at all,” and Yale custom strictly forbade asking for guidance outside the classroom. He quotes Kingsley telling his class, “young gentlemen, you read Latin horribly and translate it worse.” Recitations were, in fact, devoted not to understanding or appreciating literature but rather to grammatical exercises—parsing, scanning, and translating words. Students prepared about twenty lines of Greek for each recitation and one to two pages of Latin. The tutors at Yale led recitations in all subjects for the first 3 years (Harvard tutors had been teaching single subjects since 1766) and were scarcely capable of conveying deeper learning. Even learned professors like Kingsley focused on grammatical exactness, not content. The expanded study of Greek after 1800, which Kingsley spearheaded, exacerbated this situation, since reading literary Greek made greater demands on students.37 The Graeca Majora was a large collection of extracts (explicated with Latin endnotes) that provided linguistic exercise without literary appreciation. Each class read different excerpts, so that there was little common learning. The Revolutionary generation had found inspiration in the content of classical literature, primarily Roman, and defended its study against critics on that basis.³⁸ The Yale Reports, in contrast, emphasized the process of studying the classical languages—in some ways an easier argument. That is, the classics in theory produced mental discipline even if badly taught in practice. This situation seems to have been the norm—so commonplace that most contemporaries failed to perceive any contradiction. Thus, Sturtevant found “the course of instruction in Yale from 1822 to 1826 … as very faulty and inadequate; yet it did exert a great and salutary influence over the student.”³⁹

But if language instruction was faulty at Yale, where it was strongest, what can be said for the rest of American colleges? The difficulty experienced by the newer colleges in establishing a full college course has already been described. Yet, they embraced the message of the Yale Reports and with it the teaching of Latin and Greek largely through grammatical drilling. The 1820s marked the beginning of a vast proliferation of American colleges, all predicated on this notion and scarcely capable of offering anything else. Although many experimented with minor innovations, the mid-nineteenth-century American college would be based on the premise that completion of an AB degree signified a liberal education based on a classical course and produced, in theory, mental discipline and high culture. To a large degree, the colleges would be judged by the extent to which they measured up to Yale’s standard of teaching Latin and Greek.

DENOMINATIONAL COLLEGES I

In 1820 and 1821, Baptists opened colleges in Waterville, Maine, and Washington, D.C. Soon, Episcopalians began instruction at new colleges in Connecticut, New York, and Ohio. The Dutch Reformed Church finally fashioned a permanent college in New Brunswick, as did evangelical Congregationalists in Amherst. Colleges by and for Friends outside of Philadelphia and Lutherans in Gettysburg followed. In 1830 the country’s largest organized church—the Methodists—abandoned their distrust of higher education by sponsoring major colleges in Middletown, Connecticut, and Boydton, Virginia.40 Although traditional in form for the most part, these institutions represented a distinct type of American college. While open to members of all faiths—a requirement of their charters—they were sponsored by churches primarily to serve a religious community. Although the education or preparation of ministers was sometimes a consideration, the chief motive was to preserve the community through the sheltered education of laypeople. This denominational defensiveness interacted with the enthusiasm of local boosters to promote the economic interests of their communities. Largely absent from this formula were state governments, other than issuing college charters on ever more permissive terms. The result was an accelerating proliferation of denominational colleges, the signature pattern of American higher education in the middle quarters of the nineteenth century.

From the time of Independence to 1820, a new college opened on average every 18 months. This rate increased in the 1820s to roughly one every 8 months and then doubled to three per year from 1830 to 1845. This rate doubled again in the next 10 years, and spurted to 10 new colleges per year in the half-decade before the Civil War. Of the approximately 180 colleges established between 1820 and 1860, just 10 were state controlled; almost all the rest were denominational colleges.41 Of course, the population of the United States was soaring during these years. College going registered gains from 1820 to 1840, rising from about 0.8 percent of a 4-year cohort of white males to about 1.4 percent. The depression slowed enrollment growth in the 1840s, but the robust growth of the 1850s recouped those relative losses with more students and more colleges. The average college size in 1840 had reached seventy-eight students, and it was the same again in 1860. Moreover, this proliferation of denominational colleges persisted for another 2 decades, so that the average size in 1880 was just eighty-eight students. Like no other nation, the United States expanded higher education by multiplying small colleges.⁴²

Several underlying factors help to account for American uniqueness. Political decentralization spurred this process. Just as the many German principalities each coveted their own university, the American colonies produced nine colleges, and the several states continued that pattern. However, when the states failed to exert authority over higher education, the religious fragmentation of the country compounded decentralization. No single denomination could claim 20 percent of the population of any state (1850), and the major denominations in fact harbored rival factions that increasingly sought their own colleges. A third factor, perhaps paramount, was the frontier—the inexorable settling of the vast interior of the continent. New colleges were not founded on the physical frontier between wilderness and settlement but rather on the real estate frontier of newly established (or projected) towns. These were the embryonic island communities described above. They sought and welcomed colleges not only as nodes of economic activity but also to fill educational and cultural vacuums. Most of these colleges began as academies, and nearly all included preparatory departments.43 The expansion of the United States encouraged the proliferation of denominational colleges, especially in the trans-Appalachian West.

Historian David Potts has characterized the founding of Baptist colleges as a “haphazard series of essentially local enterprises with only a partially religious character.” Indeed, local and religious factors intertwined in the hundreds of unique founding sagas. Localities played three types of roles. In some cases, local boosters took the initiative in founding colleges; colleges were also founded by concentrated religious communities to provide local education of the right kind; and, as standard practice, churches solicited offers and placed new colleges in towns that promised the most attractive financial package. As for religion, some early colleges were inspired by missionary zeal on the part of individuals or groups, but as churches formed regional organizations, these bodies decided when and where to establish colleges. The growth of denominational colleges exhibited overlapping processes of extension and elaboration.⁴⁴ That is, the establishment of colleges by previously excluded denominations represented the elaboration of the institutional base of higher education. Extension denotes the founding of colleges in newly formed communities—acts of faith in more ways than one. Home missionaries from the principal denominations tended to lead this process, either inspired individuals or products of Eastern theological seminaries. Real estate speculators played a role as well, particularly in the Midwest.⁴⁵ However, in settled areas, the elaboration process produced denominational colleges for new or smaller religious sects as well as additional colleges for the major churches.

None of these processes was entirely new. Princeton had secured the College of New Jersey with the most lucrative offer. Allegheny College (f. 1817) was founded with hopes for real estate development. The eighteenth-century Presbyterian colleges in Virginia were reactions of an excluded religious minority against an Anglican monopoly. And, missionary-ministers founded would-be colleges in Appalachia from western Pennsylvania to Tennessee. However, the denominational colleges of the mid-nineteenth century differed from past practices in their orientation toward laymen, their broader educational scope, and their degree of separation from actual churches. These traits reflected the spread of theological seminaries for ministerial preparation. In fact, these seminaries multiplied along with the colleges—some 66 founded between 1820 and 1860.46 Sometimes linked with colleges, the seminaries were smaller and more ephemeral, but they were clear testimony to the division of labor between clerical and lay education, and encouraged an arm’s-length relation between colleges and churches. With few exceptions, the churches provided no direct financial support for denominational colleges after founding. The colleges raised their own funds, largely through agents operating within the denominational community. Finally, although denominational colleges were a distinct type, the predominant nature of colleges founded after the depression of 1837–1843 shifted somewhat again, as will be seen in chapter 6. Such distinctions may appear subtle, but it would be far more misleading to lump denominational colleges together as a single phenomenon.⁴⁷ Inherently heterogeneous, they represent variations on a theme, both across denominations and over time.

The Methodists overcame their aversion to colleges in the 1820s. Although still a minority in the church, individuals in scattered localities from Maine to Illinois founded a variety of seminaries and precarious colleges. By 1830, the Annual Conferences (the regional governing bodies) actively promoted colleges. As overt anti-intellectualism waned, the Methodists feared that young men educated by other denominations were being lost to the church and the ministry. Education, furthermore, could be either “the most powerful auxiliary [of] infidelity and vice” or “a champion for Christianity.” The Methodist rationale soon shifted from defending the flock to emphasizing this latter mission. As the largest and fastest-growing church, occupying the evangelical mainstream, the Methodist colleges could assume an ecumenical posture. They welcomed students of all faiths or no faith, promised not to proselytize students, and included non-Methodists on governing boards. Still, the conferences and their network of churches provided the base of support. Sponsored colleges could appeal to the faithful as Methodist institutions and their agents were permitted to preach sermons and pass a collection plate. With such official stamps of approval, Methodists began aggressively to found colleges.⁴⁸

The establishment of the first prominent Methodist institution, appropriately named Wesleyan College, was negotiated with all the formality of an international treaty between Middletown, with an empty campus to fill, and the New York and New England Conferences, now committed to collegiate education. An agreement signed in 1830 transferred Alden Partridge’s former campus to the Methodists, who agreed to open a college the following fall. The president of the new institution was Wilbur Fisk, a highly respected principal of a Methodist academy and possibly the only college graduate (Brown 1815) among New England Methodist ministers. The college soon found an eager clientele. Antebellum enrollments fluctuated between 100 and 150, though it still suffered from pervasive penury. Students tended to be older and poorer than at other New England colleges, and three-fifths became ministers or teachers.49

The Methodists occupied other defunct institutions by taking control of Dickinson and Allegheny Colleges in 1833. At Dickinson, the dysfunctional relations of faculty and local trustees had persisted long after Charles Nisbet’s unhappy tenure. The resignation of the faculty in 1815 closed the college until 1821. Operations were again suspended in 1832. Negotiations with the Baltimore and Philadelphia Conferences resulted in Methodists replacing the former trustees. They resolved the former difficulties by making the new president chairman of the board. They named a professor of law, whose house conveniently adjoined the campus, and raised an endowment before opening the college in 1834. Dickinson was far healthier under Methodist direction, soon enrolling more than 100 students.

The third acquisition was a greater challenge. Allegheny College had been founded in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1817 by a group of local landowners, including newly arrived Timothy Alden, a Harvard graduate who aspired to found a town (“Aldenia”) and a college. Literally a one-man operation, Alden’s titles included trustee, president, professor, secretary of the board, keeper of the cabinet, and “Agent for soliciting benefactions of Alleghany College”—all for no salary. After graduating a class of four in 1821, including Alden’s two sons, the college dwindled and closed. Donations had provided a substantial library, but no operating funds. Efforts at resuscitation proved futile, and in 1831 Alden resigned all his posts. At this point the Pittsburgh Conference stepped in and negotiated control of the board and the college. Under Methodist auspices, the college became viable—barely. It reported 100 students in 1840, surely an exaggeration, with most in the preparatory school.⁵⁰ In this and other respects, Allegheny typified precarious western colleges.

Indiana Asbury College (later DePauw University) was a conspicuous success among the early colleges in the West. The Indiana Conference criticized Presbyterian dominance of the state college to rally support, and they obtained a charter in 1837 for a college in Greencastle—a poor and primitive settlement on territory purchased from the Indians just 18 years before. Early Methodist colleges had difficulty finding qualified instructors given the church’s dearth of college graduates. In 1838 they secured Cyrus Nutt, who had just graduated from Allegheny College, to teach the preparatory classes. Unable to hire professors, Nutt taught college courses as well, later recording that he “had to hear some thirteen classes each day, besides corresponding and acting as president.” In 1839 Matthew Simpson accepted the presidency (1839–1847). He had studied medicine before turning to preaching and was largely self-taught. When he sought to enroll at Allegheny, he was instead awarded an AM degree and hired to teach. In 1839–1840, Nutt and Simpson were able to offer a 4-year course to 22 college students, as well as instructing 43 “irregulars” and 58 preparatory students. Asbury benefited from strong support from the Indiana Conference, which mobilized Methodist ministers throughout the state to promote and take collections for the college. The college was chronically short of funds; nonetheless, these contacts helped to attract students. Within 15 years of opening, enrollment exceeded 400, though just 92 were in the college classes. The college soon acquired a reputation for accommodating indigent students. In one later class, one-third was entirely self-supporting, and another third earned most of their expenses.51

The undivided backing of the Indiana Conference made Asbury the peak of an informal Methodist educational system. As the Methodists embraced education, they founded schools of all types and levels. By one count, Methodists by 1860 had established 229 educational institutions, two-thirds still open, including 34 colleges. Methodism espoused fundamental middle-class virtues—a pious life, moral behavior, abstention from stimulants and frivolous activities—which together shaped solid citizens who were likely to prosper. Education was lauded for contributing on all counts. It raised the religious and intellectual level of the whole community, and it allowed individuals to live fuller lives. Methodist literature tirelessly reiterated these themes, and innumerable individuals exemplified them. Below the colleges were numerous academies, institutes, and coeducational and female seminaries, which, along with Asbury’s precollege instruction, prepared teachers and provided general education to a far-larger population. Asbury formed tentative links with some of these schools, in keeping with its own aspirations to become a true university. It developed fledgling programs in medicine, law, theology, and a scientific course, all before the Civil War. In this respect, it evolved into a quintessential “multipurpose college.”52

The Baptists were similar latecomers to collegiate education, but the middle-class educational values of the Methodists were less widespread and, in places, still scorned. They ministered to the common people and were originally more concerned with educating clergy, resulting in the early “literary and theological institutions” (Colby, Colgate, Denison, Shurtleff). Local boosters and benefactors, often non-Baptists, played important roles in launching many Baptist colleges. Eleven were founded before the denomination split in 1844 into Northern and Southern churches. Five of these were in the South, where state associations took the initiative to found most colleges (Mercer, Wake Forest, Richmond, and later Furman, but also Denison in Ohio). In the North, colleges more often reflected the combined initiatives of churchmen and laymen. Except for New York, Baptists established single antebellum colleges in most states, thereby concentrating potential enrollments, at least for students who could travel to them.⁵³

All the reformed, evangelical Protestant churches had more in common than they had differences, though they increasingly emphasized the latter. In 1801 the Presbyterians and Congregationalists had signed the Plan of Union, an agreement to cooperate in Christianizing the Northwest. (Early Presbyterian missionaries were by far the most active in the South Central region.) The Presbyterians had more adherents in the West, although they were a shrinking and embattled minority. Presbyterian ministers were thus prominent in the extension of colleges, including state schools. The result was many colleges dominated by Presbyterians but not controlled by the Church (e.g., Dickinson and Allegheny). As its official position stressed orthodoxy and conformity and was doctrinally opposed to the predominant evangelicalism, the Church became increasingly dissatisfied with this situation. It felt that colleges founded with Congregationalists were doctrinally unsound, tainted by the New Haven theology. It soon opposed cooperative benevolent ventures like the American Home Mission and American Education societies. Relations grew increasingly acrimonious even before the Presbyterian schism of 1837. Congregational professors at Illinois College, for example, were subjected to a heresy trial and, although exonerated, experienced intermittent harassment. These efforts to enforce orthodoxy proved counter-productive, especially when conducted by the Old School. Of seven cooperatively founded colleges, initially partly Presbyterian, all but Illinois reverted to Congregationalism.54 Pure Presbyterian colleges in the North, like Wabash in Indiana, opted for the New School and disapproved of slavery. But the schism caused Presbyterian communities to divide into two separate congregations, and support for colleges was split as well. Presbyterians, ironically the most aggressive college founders of the Early Republic, managed the transition to denominational colleges poorly, at least before the Civil War, by overemphasizing doctrinal orthodoxy and ministerial preparation rather than education for a wider constituency.

Congregationalism was the religion of New England, and Amherst College clearly fit the denominational model, launched to promote piety and education for a regional community. The spread of Congregationalism in the West was confined to those regions settled by New Englanders, the so-called Yankee Belt. The largest impact in the West was made by Oberlin Collegiate Institute (Oberlin College in 1850), which evolved from the revivalist movement.⁵⁵ The Oberlin colony was a Christian perfectionist community created in the Ohio wilderness by John Shipherd. Only slightly less radical than coeval utopian communities, members signed the Oberlin compact pledging to lead ascetic Christian lives and to advance missionary education.⁵⁶ The Institute, at the center of the colony, was the means for spreading Christianity in the greater Mississippi Valley. It encompassed all educational levels, from grammar school to the theology department, and embraced the contemporary fad for manual labor. In the hope of training as many teachers as possible, it was entirely coeducational.

Soon after Oberlin was founded in 1834, an upheaval in Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary had a decisive impact. Students there debated the morality of slavery and became active abolitionists. When the Seminary forbade such activities, they withdrew en masse. Shipherd invited them to join his inchoate Institute. Agreed in principle, they insisted that their allies, trustee Asa Mahan and professor John Morgen, join them. To finance such a move, Shipherd traveled to New York to appeal to the antislavery philanthropists, Arthur and Lewis Tappan. The Tappans offered generous support but stipulated that the famous revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney (who had not attended college) should also be added to the theology faculty. Finney made stipulations too: that African Americans would be admitted as students on equal terms and that the faculty would control the internal management of the Institute. The trustees had grave misgivings, especially over racial integration, but Shipherd prevailed. Oberlin gained immediate fame, with the country’s foremost revivalist preacher, and notoriety, for admitting women and African Americans—and also students. It became the largest college and educational institution in Ohio for the rest of the century and probably the largest single source of missionaries and educators for the West.57

The other principal concentration of Congregational settlement and educational initiative was in northern Illinois and adjacent areas of Wisconsin and Iowa. Illinois, Knox, Beloit, Ripon, and Grinnell colleges were cofounded with Presbyterians but assumed a distinctly Congregational character. Yale and Andover were the dominant influences, and these colleges aspired to uphold a high standard of classical education. Like Oberlin, they were assisted by maintaining financial ties with donors in the East. Congregational colleges thus tended to be the more academically rigorous western colleges.⁵⁸

The major denominations played the leading role in the extension of advanced education in the West, but these efforts were only the beginning of the story of denominational colleges. The elaboration process that became paramount in the three decades after 1840 produced a far greater proliferation of colleges, reflecting college formation by smaller denominations but also the fragmentation of the major denominations. Prior to 1840, significant colleges were founded by other denominations, often as necessary complements to theological seminaries. Pennsylvania College (later Gettysburg) was felt to be a needed companion to the Lutheran Seminary, and Marshall College similarly emerged from the German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg. Ohio Episcopalians also tried to sustain a seminary first before quickly adding Kenyon College. Roman Catholics were first to cross the Mississippi by founding Saint Louis University in 1832. The sponsors of denominational colleges continued to grow, but in other ways they were much alike.

Many denominational colleges initially felt some ambivalence toward the classical course, although such misgivings were manifest in diverse approaches. In this respect, the controversial scientific course attempted at Amherst was unusual for its publicity, not its intent. Early denominational colleges in the West often taught Latin and Greek in the freshman year but little afterward. Baptist colleges, as noted, sought to balance both theological and liberal arts courses. At Columbian (later George Washington), entrance requirements were set high for the classical course but kept flexible for theology. Shurtleff College took years to institute the classical course and still maintained an English language alternative. Among the Methodists the attention to lay education encouraged some initial experiments. Randolph-Macon College’s initial course mimicked the University of Virginia. At Wesleyan, Wilbur Fisk opened the college by grouping students according to ability and including a scientific course, as did McKendree College in Illinois, another Methodist pioneer. Oberlin voiced overt hostility to the “heathen classics” and substituted “Hebrew and sacred classics for the most objectionable pagan authors” (Seneca, Livy, and Horace).59 However, in all these cases the classical course was soon strengthened, and alternatives were either dropped or minimized. Doubters and critics never disappeared, but the classical course had powerful winds at its back.

First and foremost, the classical course defined the American college. That is, Latin, Greek, and mathematics were the core of a liberal education and the AB degree that colleges were chartered to award. Only with difficulty were they able over time to offer other types of degrees, but institutions that did not offer the classical course were something other than colleges. (This fact was a conundrum for female colleges, as will be seen.) The Yale Reports of 1828 bolstered these perceptions, providing cogent arguments for the superiority of the classical course. The American Education Society provided more tangible support with its insistence on and financial support for a “thorough education.” Soon, the western colleges asserted their own interpretation of quality by aspiring or claiming to offer an education “equivalent to that offered by the best eastern colleges,” an ideal endlessly paraphrased. This meant not just offering the classical course but extending the teaching of Latin and Greek to all 4 years.

Why, one might ask, did the old adage that bad money drives out good money in the marketplace not apply to colleges? Why did a college education that was shorter, cheaper, and less recondite fail to outcompete the longer, more arduous classical course? The behavior of currencies depends on their ability to purchase goods and services, but a college degree in the mid-nineteenth century had almost no purchasing power in labor markets. Rather, a degree represented the acquisition of a certain culture, as the Yale Reports claimed. And, more prestigious cultural goods trumped less prestigious ones. Thus, the denominational colleges found themselves pulled in two directions: the wish to serve their local and denominational constituencies by offering “useful” education and involvement in a tacit competition to emulate the standard of the eastern colleges. Their direction was largely determined by how and how well they managed to finance themselves.

★ ★ ★

Perhaps the greatest misconception about denominational colleges is that their finances depended on student tuition and that the need to bolster enrollments shaped their actions. The true situation was summarized by the Baptist college in Lewisburg (later Bucknell):

The receipts from tuition in the Collegiate Department cannot under the most favorable circumstances be expected to meet more than one-third of the cost of instruction. Taking all the colleges in the United States into account, … it is estimated the cost of instruction for each collegian per annum is not less than from $125 to $150. The usual charges are from $25 to $50 per annum. In the Theological Department tuition is free.60

Covering the gap between receipts from tuition and the costs of instruction was the continual challenge of the colleges and the source of their chronic penury. The two principal sources were endowments and fund raising. Colleges also resorted to loans and occasionally to nonpayment of salaries. The conventional wisdom, ca. 1840, was that an endowment of $100,000 was needed to operate a college on a sound foundation, and this figure was invoked as the goal of numerous campaigns. That amount might provide annual income of $6,000—not quite two-thirds of the $10,000 assumed as the typical annual budget. In fact, only a few antebellum colleges reached that figure, and almost none of the western colleges did. Rather, the quest itself made the situation worse.

New colleges typically received generous support from the towns that enticed them: a good piece of land and often funds for an initial building. They received a different reception when they sought repeated donations from the same townspeople to meet their ongoing needs. In addition, all the colleges founded in the 1820s and 1830s were severely tested by the depression that followed, which lowered donations of all sorts. In order to cast a wider net, colleges retained agents for fund-raising, as they had since early in the eighteenth century. The agents of the denominational colleges tended to be trained ministers, but many assumed the role of professional fund-raisers. Coreligionists were the most likely donors, and college agents traveled tirelessly to regional churches. They usually preached sermons and took collections as well as soliciting larger gifts from wealthier parishioners. As they extolled the virtues of their colleges, they elicited interest among potential students and promoted the college image. In addition, agents from the western colleges made periodic trips to the “money frontier” in the East, the only likely source of significant gifts. College agents were indispensable but also inefficient. Their incessant travels could consume half of the funds they raised. Many of the gifts took the form of pledges and promises that sometimes proved uncollectable. Still, colleges depended on their agents to pursue the holy grail of building an endowment.61

Nearly all the new colleges resorted to the dubious practice of selling future tuition scholarships. Initially these were offered at seemingly sound prices: the going rates seemed to be $100 for 5 years of tuition and $500 for a perpetual scholarship. Colleges apparently found few takers at those prices, especially during the depression. Following these difficult years, scholarship rates were drastically reduced in increasingly desperate fund-raising efforts. Wesleyan eventually offered 15 years of tuition (at $36) for $50; Ohio Wesleyan offered 8 years for $30. By 1860 both schools were receiving virtually no tuition income. Moreover, little of these funds ever reached endowments. Besides the agents’ cut and uncollectable pledges, the funds were more often used for expenses or to pay down debt.⁶² The denominational colleges were truly eleemosynary institutions, to use the language of the Dartmouth College case, sustained by Christian charity. Yet, the implicit competition to emulate the “best eastern colleges” required that they continually augment their faculty and facilities.

Another dubious practice of the early colleges was the adoption of manual labor, particularly in the 1830s. Originating in Europe and popularized by the radical Oneida Institute, it appealed to American evangelicals by promising healthful exercise (games, of course, were anathema), promotion of an egalitarian spirit, and a means for preministerial students, in particular, to support their education. In 1826 a Mechanical Association was established by enthusiasts at Andover Seminary, and a mechanical workshop was created. In 1829 Elias Cornelius of the American Education society made a lengthy address to this group praising the health benefits of manual labor and describing numerous examples of its successful implementation. Blessed from the summit of the Benevolent Empire, manual labor schemes were tried everywhere poor scholars sought a college education. The basic scheme called for students to work in shops or on farms, usually 4 hours a day, and thus defray their living expenses—the largest cost of college. Newer eastern colleges established shops for those students who wished to work. Western colleges generally incorporated more comprehensive arrangements but principally used farms. Oberlin, strongly influenced by Oneida, made manual labor a mandatory part of the fabric of the college, and almost all Baptist colleges signed on. However, disillusionment soon set in. Not all collegians were fit for prolonged labor, and time devoted to work definitely detracted from studies. Worse, these arrangements were inherently unprofitable. Collegians were not productive laborers, and the supervisors they required were an additional expense. Eastern colleges soon dropped their tentative commitments, and hard-pressed western college found manual labor unaffordable. Even at Oberlin, where it had powerful ideological support, manual labor disappeared in a decade. Beyond the perverse economics, the culture supporting evangelical egalitarianism was on the wane as well. By the early 1840s, Baptist educators concluded that “the system has become extensively unpopular.”63

The denominational colleges founded in the 1820s and 1830s were beset by the inherent difficulties of neophyte institutions. Their nature and their circumstances made these initial weaknesses hard to overcome. Chronic poverty was exacerbated by financial folly. Moreover, poverty interacted with their commitment to the classical course to diminish their educational effectiveness. The classical course, taught through recitations, could be offered with minimal personnel, both in numbers and qualifications, but it could not be taught well. The problems began with the students, many of whom by all accounts were woefully underprepared. In fact, their efforts to meet bare admission requirements in Latin and Greek often left them incompetent in their native English. Presiding over recitations did not require much academic preparation, nor did most college teachers have such. Professors of math and science might have MD degrees from proprietary medical schools; professors of languages and philosophy usually had attended a theological seminary. Instructors or tutors knew little more than what the students recited. Latin and Greek occupied two-thirds of the freshman year and half of the second year, at the least. These studies were followed by a variety of subjects taught briefly from textbooks for one or two terms. The result was anything but the “thorough” education promised in the Yale Reports. Students at best became barely competent in the ancient languages and acquired a smattering of knowledge from their textbooks. Colleges eagerly sought to raise the quality of their education and their reputations as well, but here they were locked into the paradigm of the classical course. College reputations depended principally on the rigor and mastery of Latin and Greek, on the number of professors, and on their professional stature. Thus, raising the prestige of a college meant extending the most problematic features: spending even more class time on the ancient languages and professing additional subjects superficially in the remaining time. The 1820s and 1830s saw an accelerating expansion of American colleges; however, while it was fairly easy to launch a college, these institutions faced inherent limitations to their development. Thus, the United States was on a path to being a land of small colleges.

HIGHER EDUCATION FOR WOMEN

In the mid-1830s, three separate initiatives brought women into the realm of higher education. In 1834 Mary Lyon began raising the funds that would launch Mount Holyoke Female Seminary 3 years later. When collegiate classes began at Oberlin that same fall, women from the female department joined male students in some classrooms—the first coeducational collegiate instruction. The following year an interdenominational revival in Macon, Georgia, produced a resolution to found an educational institution for girls, subsequently called Georgia Female College. Each of these initiatives presaged quite different efforts to raise the level of education available to women. Each was also a by-product of the ongoing spirit of the Second Great Awakening. And each was shaped by the increasingly distinct culture of its respective region—the Northeast, the West, and the South.

Female education had been sporadically available since the late colonial era. Timothy Dwight had introduced coeducation at his Greenfield Academy, for example, and many academies continued to teach both boys and girls. However, except for a few urban schools, like the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia, this education was rudimentary and poorly taught. Girls were taught domestic skills—sewing and needlework—and the little substantive content was conveyed through memorization. This situation improved markedly in the 1820s. Emma Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1822 to provide an academic education for future teachers. Although it firmly upheld the prevailing belief in separate spheres, it soon attracted several hundred students and became the center for a network of female educators. Female seminaries appeared in most American cities. The prevalence of the doctrine of separate spheres promoted this development but left much room for interpreting the proper education for the female sphere. Urban seminaries were expensive and offered a full menu of ornamental subjects—music, art, and, usually, French. But many also advertised an ambitious curriculum that included many subjects and textbooks taught at male colleges. Some aimed to instill mental discipline through mathematics and, in a few cases, Latin. These seminaries clearly strengthened their courses over time, driven by local competition or rising expectations.64 They presented a stark contrast to contemporary denominational colleges, being urban, proprietary, relatively expensive, and impermanent. Regardless of their educational philosophy or interpretation of the female sphere, they existed because increasing numbers of professional and middle-class families sought education for their daughters, and providing it could furnish a good living for proprietors. This pattern would continue to predominate in the South, but in New England the evangelical movement provided a different constituency.

Mary Lyon came from an impoverished rural background in central Massachusetts. She began teaching to support herself at age 17 but also sought further schooling whenever she could. In 1821 she committed all her savings to attend Byfield Seminary, conducted by Joseph Emerson. A Harvard graduate (1798) and ordained minister, Emerson was an inspiring teacher and religious mentor who treated his female students with complete equality. He instructed them in a liberal arts curriculum without Latin or Greek. He also eschewed ornamental subjects. Lyon’s one term at Byfield inspired her both spiritually and intellectually. She also found a soul mate in Zilpa Grant, Emerson’s talented assistant, whose background was similar to Lyon’s. They soon began teaching together, a cooperation that became full time in 1830 at Grant’s Ipswich Female Seminary. Ipswich proved an important precursor of Mount Holyoke. The women taught an academic curriculum like that of Byfield but fashioned it into a 3-year course and endeavored to steadily increase its rigor. They lived together with many of the students in a boarding house in which they instilled the discipline of daily duties with moral and spiritual guidance. Despite these achievements, Lyon regretted that the high cost (ca. $180/year) prevented women with backgrounds like her own from attending, but efforts to remedy this by obtaining an endowment failed. In 1834 Mary Lyon resolved to launch a school for women in central Massachusetts that would improve upon the Ipswich model.⁶⁵

Mary Lyon had four objectives: first, to provide an evangelical setting in which religious conversion would be encouraged; second, to keep costs low so that serious, mature, middle-class women could acquire an education to become teachers; third, to create a permanent institution for women’s education by acquiring an endowment; and fourth, to teach “an elevated standard of science, literature, and refinement,” as had been offered at Byfield and Ipswich.66

She set out to raise the funds for the institution by soliciting donations in and around Amherst, seeking numerous small gifts rather than soliciting wealthy patrons. She dismissed criticism that this was unladylike behavior and was well received in the evangelical community, by friends at Amherst College, and among educated women. She also employed a male agent, though fund-raising still proved to be an ongoing personal chore. By 1836 she had gathered funds to begin construction in South Hadley of what proved to be the most distinctive feature of her seminary. A single large building was designed as an enormous household to accommodate 90 women, soon enlarged to 200, in a semicloistered existence. To keep costs down she instituted a “domestic system” in which all the students performed the chores of cooking, cleaning, and washing. Lyon insisted that this was not a manual labor system, and indeed it proved highly effective in reducing costs and instilling esprit de corps. Teachers were paid a barely living wage, considering themselves volunteers in a great moral enterprise.

The seminary sought above all to educate women to assist in the evangelical mission of spreading Christianity and achieving conversions. As wives of ministers and missionaries or as teachers, Holyoke women could broaden and strengthen the evangelical cause. The religious atmosphere at Mount Holyoke was intense. Besides Sabbath worship, students heard a daily scriptural lesson from Mary Lyon, had two half-hour sessions of private devotion, and had additional “social prayer” circles. All students were classified as converted, “hopefully pious,” or (for a small minority) “without hope.” Every effort was made to bring about conversions, and annual revivals were the norm.

Mary Lyon fully embraced the prevailing notion of separate spheres and envisioned the role of educated women as complementing and expanding the mission of evangelical Christianity. However she scorned the norms of gentility cultivated in female academies and opposed ornamental subjects. She believed that the better the academic education of women, the more effectively they could fulfill their roles. Thus, Mount Holyoke sought to approximate the content of male colleges while foregoing degree-granting status. The original curriculum at Mount Holyoke was a 3-year English course, but Mary Lyon was committed from the outset to extending its content and rigor. Subjects were not divided by terms but rather taught in intensive 6- to 10-week “series.” Each session concluded with an extended period of examinations. Early on, Lyon envisioned incorporating Latin, first as an extra subject and, finally, in 1846 as a 1-year requirement. A 4-year course including Latin was established in 1861.

Comparing the content of male and female colleges is inherently frustrating.67 Women’s colleges, by continual upgrading, were a moving target, and men’s colleges covered the gamut from Yale to dreadful. For gauging the relative merits of a Holyoke education, the following points seem salient. Many female students were poorly prepared, but here the goal of setting high standards becomes evident. The school’s entrance exams were challenging, and many matriculates had to undertake extra studies to meet the standards of the junior (first-year) class. Four of the school year’s 40 weeks were devoted to examinations, which by all accounts were rigorous. The 3-year female English course approximated the subject matter of the third and fourth years of men’s colleges. For these subjects, roughly half of the textbooks used at Holyoke were the same as those used at Amherst College. The 7- to 10-week “series” or modules in which they were taught seem inherently superficial, but then so was collegiate instruction of boys. Perhaps the largest difference was in the faculty. Mary Lyon retained her most promising graduates as instructors, and although several made careers there, they obtained no further qualifications. In all likelihood, their lessons remained at a textbook level, although thoroughly taught.⁶⁸

From 1837 to 1850 Holyoke enrolled nearly 1,400 students and graduated one-quarter of them. Mary Lyon served her intended constituency: relatively mature students from the rural middle class of family-owned farms. Poverty no doubt forced many to attend for only short intervals; indeed, getting students to commit for a full year was a challenge early on. For most, education at Mount Holyoke was a career strategy of education and teaching to fill the interval between family home and marriage. More than 80 percent of graduates became teachers but most of them, not for long. A similar proportion married, and very few women taught after marriage. But many Holyoke women married ministers or missionaries, a virtual career that Mary Lyon had envisioned. The career pattern of Holyoke graduates (and nongraduates as well) paralleled that of Troy graduates; and their backgrounds are similar to the women who attended Massachusetts’s pioneer normal schools beginning in 1839. However, Mount Holyoke provided a more advanced education than those institutions, and the experience profoundly shaped at least some of its graduates. Holyoke women who did become educators carried this model to a number of “sister schools” that meticulously replicated the Mount Holyoke plan. The mystique of Mary Lyon’s vision was so strong in South Hadley that the seminary resisted calling itself a women’s college until the 1880s.69

★ ★ ★

Views on evangelism and women’s education form a direct connection between Mount Holyoke and Oberlin. The first two directors of the Oberlin female department had studied at Byfield with Emerson and Ipswich with Grant and Lyon. Within the Oberlin colony, however, these notions produced quite different results. In its perfectionist theology, the “elevation of female character” by provision of “all the instructive privileges which hitherto have distinguished the leading sex from theirs,” was integral to the elevation of humankind. Still, the Institute proceeded pragmatically. After 2 years of shared classes, the faculty and trustees reviewed the experience. They resolved that the “mutual influence of the sexes upon each other is decidedly happy in the cultivation of both mind and manners.” In 1837 four women were admitted to the classical course, and in 1841 three of them were awarded AB degrees, the first such degrees earned by women. This step was controversial even within the Oberlin colony. A committee evaluating the practice in 1845 found certain “Evils”—namely, that both genders seemed too fond of each other’s company and liable to premature engagements. But coeducation gained increasing support, becoming in fact a matter of institutional pride.

The social norms of separate spheres were attenuated in the Oberlin colony, which had social norms of its own. Its ideal for the relationship between male and female students was that of a Christian family. Dining together, for example, improved male behavior by precluding “all the grossness and vulgarity so often witnessed in college commons.” Divergent social roles were recognized in the exclusion of women from “preparation for public speaking and for public life.” Otherwise, the Institute stridently affirmed “the first and greatest right of women—the right to be educated, as being endowed with the intelligence equally as man—is fundamental to the system.” As the single American college proclaiming this right, Oberlin soon attracted women who sought to expand such rights.70

Virtually all Oberlinites supported the movements for abolition and temperance, but women were particularly active for “moral reform.” This widespread movement of the 1830s and 1840s sought to combat “licentiousness” by condemning premarital physical contact, immodest dress, dancing, reading novels, and the theater. The Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society was one of the largest and most active in the country and included those students most committed to women’s rights. Drawn to Oberlin in the mid-1840s were Lucy Stone, determined to make her mark as a public lecturer, and precocious Antoinette Brown, who aspired to the ministry. Both challenged the liberal limits of female behavior, especially the taboo against public speaking. After several skirmishes, Stone made a concerted effort to read her essay at the male commencement ceremonies. Although she failed, Oberlin would concede this point in the next decade. Brown was allowed to study theology after graduation—but not to enroll! In 1853 she was ordained as a Congregational minister in South Butler, New York, the first woman minister of a major denomination. Oberlin found that its support of coeducation rapidly encouraged feminism, of which it disapproved. Nonetheless, Oberlin graduates played leading roles in the radical women’s rights movement that coalesced with the 1848 convention in Seneca Falls.⁷¹

★ ★ ★

Both Holyoke and Oberlin attracted a self-selected minority of women to their halls. The female colleges of the South, in contrast, were mainstream institutions accommodating the daughters of planter and professional families. Although Georgia Female College was the first to obtain a charter, it was but one of a host of similar institutions. Previous attempts at collegiate status had fallen short. As early as 1821, plans for the University of Alabama called for establishing a female branch, and soon after a state institution of higher education for women was proposed in the Georgia legislature. These early gambits failed, but they reveal a sentiment that not only was the time ripe, but female higher education was worthy of state support. The private establishment of the South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute in 1828 brought southern women to the threshold of higher education. Compared with these tentative steps, the initiative in Macon stands out for its decisiveness. Prominent citizens led the effort to raise funds for an endowed institution, and the Georgia Methodist Conference backed the effort. They acquired land and commenced construction on an enormous college building with a columned facade that resembled a state capitol. Classes began in 1839, and 168 students enrolled for the first term. However, raising the funds needed to expunge the debt proved difficult during the depression, and by 1841 the college faced bankruptcy. Local backers and the Methodists came to the rescue. In 1844 it was rechartered as Wesleyan Female College under the control of the Georgia Methodist Conference.

A coeval institution found similar sponsorship. The Judson Female Institute in Marion, Alabama, was founded in 1839 by Baptists and wealthy local patrons who sought a quality institution. It recruited Milo P. Jewett, who had been a professor at Marietta, to lead the institution and constructed a school building almost as impressive as Macon’s. In 1843 the trustees deeded the school to the Alabama Baptist Convention. As denominational female colleges, these two institutions were unusual. Outside of Quakers and Moravians, few denominations owned or operated institutions for women, although in the South a few other female schools were associated with churches. Some form of sponsorship was generally needed in order to raise funds for the faculty and building required for an effective college. Nonetheless, the majority of female schools were proprietary ventures.72

Early Southern female schools straddled the ill-defined boundary between seminaries and colleges and deliberately muddled their mission by adopting ambiguous names, like institute, academy, or high school. Frequently, the first 2 years offered college preparatory material and the last 2, college subjects. Although the level of offerings rose over time, it was not driven, as it was in the North, by the wish to provide a solid academic preparation to future teachers. In the South, higher education aimed to develop literary and artistic refinement in women who expected to marry at a young age but not work. This situation made the South particularly receptive to female education since it posed no challenge to the social order. Southern colleges offered an abundance of supplementary instruction in “feminine accomplishments”—music, art, and embroidery. Foreign languages were also taught as extra subjects for extra fees. Virtually all aspects of these schools were intended to contribute to the exalted conception of southern womanhood.73 Students entered young, often at 14 or 15 years of age. They generally attended close to home, which encouraged the proliferation of schools. Whether church related or not, attendance was expensive. The numerous extra courses made fees quite variable, but one reliable estimate put a year’s average cost at $230. This price in itself would have limited higher education to the wealthy. It was also one reason that few students remained long enough to graduate. Most students matriculated for a single year and many more, for only two. At four major antebellum female colleges the graduation rate was 15 percent. Not surprisingly, most of these girls were indifferent students, more invested in their futures as southern belles than in academic learning. In fact, the South offered no careers open to women of that class. The female teachers at these many schools often came from the North and seldom remained for long or else were wives of proprietors. The female colleges of the South and kindred institutions educated a large number of women, even if briefly. While these opportunities were no doubt squandered on some, for others this experience helped to prepare them for the unanticipated challenges of life after the Civil War.⁷⁴

★ ★ ★

The 1820s and 1830s marked the takeoff years for the American college. A contested model at the outset, its putative rivals failed the test of experience no matter how seemingly cogent their rationales. The Yale Reports and the American Education Society buttressed the traditional model of the classical course, but its implacable momentum derived as much from the proliferation of denominational colleges that were scarcely equipped to offer anything else. The depression following the panic of 1837 was a hiatus of sorts, as widespread financial hardship caused a lull in college growth. But once the economy had stabilized, American higher education developed at an accelerating pace, only temporarily slowed by the crisis of the Civil War. However, this development took distinctive paths that had become evident even before the financial panic. The established colleges in the Northeast augmented their wealth, their faculties, and their academic breadth. At the same time, their students found the freedom to begin developing an extracurricular life of their own invention. The state universities of the South formed ever closer bonds with the region’s dominant political and economic class. In the West, denominational colleges multiplied in varied but similar patterns. In the mid-nineteenth century, the monolithic classical college gave rise to a more diverse array of institutions.

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1 College counts by author. There are no definitive numbers of colleges, given closings, reopenings, and “false” colleges: Colin Burke, American Collegiate Populations (New York: New York University Press, 1982); David B. Potts, Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s “Reports” of 1828 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

2 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), passim.

3 Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), 259.

4 Fritz K. Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 206–59; R. D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–37; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).

5 Theodore J. Crackel, West Point: A Bicentennial History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 53–80; James William Kershner, Sylvanus Thayer: A Biography (New York: Arno Press, 1982), 100–38.

6 Kershner, Thayer, 73–99; on the École Polytechnique, Robert F. Hunter and Edwin L. Dooley Jr., Claudius Crozet: French Engineer in America, 1790–1864 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).

7 Kershner, Thayer, 81–106; for the negative side of Thayer’s early years, Hunter and Dooley, Claudius Crozet, 16–30: Crozet was an École Polytechnique graduate and Napoleonic veteran who became professor of engineering under Partridge but felt he was mistreated by Thayer.

8 James L. Morrison, ‘The Best School in the World’: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986): Morrison emphasizes the similarities in the student experience, in and out of class, a graduation rate of ca. 50 percent, and a philosophy of a single course to shape the mind; however, the differences are significant: 102–13.

9 William A. Ellis, ed., History of Norwich University, 1819–1911, 3 vol. (Montpelier, VT, 1911), I, 1–90; Gary Thomas Lord, “Alden Partridge’s Proposal for a National System of Education: A Model for the Land-Grant Act,” History of Higher Education Annual, 18 (1998): 11–24.

10 Norwich University was chartered in association with the Universalist Church, which had sought a college: Ellis, History of Norwich, 7–10; David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, 1831–1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 3–6, quote p. 5.

11 Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Rod Andrew Jr., Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1939–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Dean Paul Baker, The Partridge Connection: Alden Partridge and Southern Military Education, PhD Diss., University of North Carolina, 1986, chapter 6.

12 Samuel Rezneck, Education for a Technological society: A Sesquicentennial History of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY: RPI, 1968).

13 Terry S. Reynolds, “The Education of Engineers in America before the Morrill Act of 1862,” History of Education Quarterly, 32, 4 (Winter 1992): 459–82. See chapter 6.

14 Philip Alexander Bruce, History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919: The Lengthening Shadow of One Man, 5 vol. (New York: Macmillan, 1920); Cameron Addis, Jefferson’s Vision for Education, 1760–1845 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), Jefferson quote (1820), p. 93.

15 Edward Everett, “University of Virginia,” North American Review, 10 (Jan. 1820): 124–27.

16 The schools are described in Bruce, History, II, 81–197.

17 The master’s degree, created in 1831, was awarded for earning diplomas in several schools. An MD was offered as well, and bachelor’s degrees, in 1848. However, few degrees were awarded: up to the war, the university awarded 40 bachelor’s degrees and 107 master’s. Students who earned a diploma in any school were entitled to be “graduates of the University of Virginia”: Bruce, History, III, 61–65.

18 Bruce, History, passim.

19 [John Kirkland], “Literary Institutions—University,” North American Review, 7 (July 1818), 270–88, quote p. 277.

20 Richard Yanikoski, Edward Everett and the Advancement of Higher Education and Adult Learning in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts, PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1987, quote p. 18; David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Thomas Adam and Gisela Mettele, eds., Two Boston Brahmins in Goethe’s Germany: The Travel Journals of Anna and George Ticknor (Lanham, MD: Rowen & Littlefield, 2009), 1–94.

21 Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Great Rebellion in Harvard College, and the Resignation of President Kirkland,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions: 1927–1930 (April, 1928): 54–112.

22 George Ticknor, Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted in Harvard University (Boston, 1825), reprinted in Potts, Liberal Education, 35–40.

23 Robert McCaughey, “The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University 1821–1892,” Perspectives in American History, VII (1974): 239–332. Ticknor, in contrast, was an adopted Boston Brahmin.

24 Tyack, George Ticknor, 112–23, quote p. 121.

25 American Quarterly Register (Apr. 1829): 224; David F. Allmendinger Jr., Paupers and Scholars (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975).

26 The Substance of Two Reports of the Faculty of Amherst College to the Board of Trustees, with the Doings of the Board Thereon (Amherst, 1827), quotes pp. 5–9; reprinted in Potts, Liberal Education, 162–84. Many Amherst students taught school to fund their own education.

27 W. S. Tyler, History of Amherst College during Its First Half-century (Springfield, MA, 1873), 172–73. Amherst became conservative and declined precipitously during the depression: Claude M. Fuess, Amherst: The Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 122–26.

28 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962), 110–35; Wayne Somers, ed., Encyclopedia of Union College History (Schenectady: Union College Press, 2003), 200–201.

29 “Introductory Essay: A Land of Colleges,” David B. Potts, Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7–12: the fullest analysis of the Yale Reports of 1828.

30 Roger L. Geiger, “Context for a Compelling and Cogent Case” in Ibid., 227–34; historical data on Yale from George W. Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University, 1701–1976 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

31 Potts, “Introductory Essay”; Julian Sturtevant, An Autobiography (Chicago, 1896), 90–91.

32 All quotations from Yale University, Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College; by a Committee of the Corporation and the Academical Faculty (New Haven, 1828), reprinted in Potts, Liberal Education, 85–140. Note the plural Reports.

33 Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 48. For additional views, see Stanley M. Guralnik, Science and the Antebellum College (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), 29–32, n. 37.

34 Potts, “Introductory Essay,” 36–37; e.g., the Amherst Report asserts that its parallel course “should require as great an amount of hard study, or mental discipline”: p. 13.

35 Also see Potts, “Introductory Essay,” 33–35.

36 Quarterly Register (Apr. 1829), 226; Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 161–62.

37 The Greek New Testament that was studied before 1800 was written in the simpler, Koine Greek, whereas the literature of classical Greece was in the more complex Attic Greek.

38 Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 29–49; Lyman Bagg, Four Years at Yale (New Haven, 1871), 558–68.

39 Sturtevant, Autobiography, 84–85, 90–91. The Yale authors boasted of adapting and improving the course of studies over time, but after 1828 innovation largely ceased: A professor of Greek was added in 1831, and tutors were finally allowed to specialize by teaching single subjects, but the only additional subject added in the next 15 years was two terms of law for seniors. Ironically, Yale’s greatest strength was in physical science, where it was preeminent during this period (see chapter 6).

40 These dates for opening may differ from the dates claimed for founding or charters. These institutions are:

Colby College	1820	Baptist
Columbian College	1821	Baptist
Amherst College	1824	Congregational
Rutgers College	1825	Dutch Reformed
Wesleyan University	1831	Methodist
Haverford College	1832	Quaker
Pennsylvania College	1832	Lutheran
Randolph Macon College	1832	Methodist

41 Count by author from various sources, ignoring short-lived colleges. Cf. Burke, American Collegiate Populations; Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1932]).

42 Author’s calculations: Roger L. Geiger, “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1880,” in American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 127–52.

43 Burke emphasizes the colleges’ role in “educational upgrading”: “almost every antebellum college in the West and South began as one of those ill-defined institutions, an academy”: Collegiate Populations, 37.

44 See Geiger, “Multipurpose Colleges.”

45 Colleges, too, sometimes engaged in real estate ventures in the hope of generating income: Daniel T. Johnson, Puritan Power in Illinois Higher Education Prior to 1870, PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974, 42–61, 76–94; David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995), 86–100.

46 In 1860 there were 61 theological seminaries with 2,000 students; more than half of “frontier” seminaries were attached to colleges, but the majority were organized independently: Gerald G. Winkleman, Polemics, Prayers, and Professionalism: The American Protestant Theological Seminaries from 1784 to 1920, PhD Diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1975, 144–57.

47 Roger L. Geiger, “Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges,” in American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century, 1–36; Potts, Baptist Colleges, 4–9 and 9n.

48 Sylvanus Milne Duvall, The Methodist Episcopal Church and Education up to 1869 (New York: Teachers College, 1928), 64–78, quote p. 75.

49 Potts, Wesleyan, 7–49, 238–39.

50 Charles Coleman Sellars, Dickinson College: A History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 195–208; Saul Sack, History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania, 2 vol. (Harrisburg, 1963), I, 65–67, 74–79. Jonathan E. Helmreich, Eternal Hope: The Life of Timothy Alden Jr. (New York: Cornwall Books, 2001): Alden hoped to develop the town of Aldenia on land he owned; one scheme to rescue the college, proposed by an emissary from Alden Partridge, would have created a military academy, but terms could not be agreed upon.

51 George B. Manhart, DePauw through the Years: Volume I, Indiana Asbury University, 1837–1884; DePauw University, 1884–1919 (Greencastle, IN: DePauw University, 1962), passim, quote p. 19; James Findlay, “Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830–1860” in Geiger, ed., American Colleges, 115–26. Nutt and Simpson were light on credentials, not ability; both had distinguished careers.

52 Duvall, Methodist Episcopal Church, 66–72, 93–99; Manhart, DePauw, 40–60, 88–110.

53 Potts, Baptist Colleges; Tewksbury, Founding, 111–19.

54 Namely, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, Rockford, Ripon, Pacific, and Western Reserve; Illinois remained predominantly Presbyterian: Tewksbury, Founding, 91–103; Johnson, Puritan Power, 114–40; Charles E. Frank, Pioneer’s Progress: Illinois College, 1829–1979 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 1–46.

55 Robert S. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College from Its Foundation through the Civil War (Oberlin College, 1943): the Oneida Institute (f. 1827) was a precursor that conflated revivalism, abolition, manual labor, vegetarianism, temperance, and ministerial education: 1–101.

56 Christian perfectionism is associated with the revivalist preaching of Charles Grandison Finney and postulated the possibility of overcoming original sin by leading an exemplary life: Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 460–61, 476–78.

57 Geoffrey Blodgett, Oberlin History: Essays and Impressions (Oberlin College, 2006), 5–28; Lawrence Thomas Lesick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980).

58 Tewksbury, Founding, 119–29.

59 Fletcher, Oberlin, 366–67.

60 Report of the Board of Trustees of the University at Lewisburg (July 27, 1858), University Archives, Bucknell University. Tuition tended to be higher in the South (Randolph-Macon, $70, vs. Wesleyan, $36) and the proportion of tuition revenues was probably higher as well.

61 James Findlay, “Agency, Denomination”; Potts, Baptist Colleges, 196–206.

62 Potts, Wesleyan, 13, 58; Charles A. Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 1987, 206–7.

63 E. Cornelius, “Union of Study with Useful Labour,” Quarterly Register (Nov. 1829), 57–70: the American Education Society turned negative sooner: “Manual Labor Schools,” Quarterly Register (Aug. 1833), 31–33; Kenneth H. Wheeler, The Antebellum College in the Old Northwest, PhD Diss., Ohio State University, 1999, 111–25; Potts, Baptist Colleges, 215–24, quote p. 224.

64 Anne Firor Scott, “The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly, 19, 1 (Spring 1979): 3–26; Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 82–93 et passim; Doris J. Malkmus, ‘We Were Ambitious for Ourselves:’ The Coeducation of Rural Women, 1790 to 1861, PhD Diss., University of Iowa, 2001.

65 Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 9–27; Andrea L. Turpin, “The Ideological Origins of the Women’s College: Religion, Class, and Curriculum in the Educational Visions of Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon,” History of Education Quarterly, 50, 2 (May 2010): 133–58.

66 Quote from Mount Holyoke Prospectus, 1835; the following draws on Green, Mary Lyon, passim.

67 Compare Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, 2 vol. (New York: Science Press, 1929), esp. I: 552–62, II: 160–84; Roger L. Geiger, “The ‘Superior Instruction of Women’ ” in Geiger, The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 183–95.

68 Mary Lyon, who had received instruction from Amos Eaton, taught a 9-week series on chemistry to second-year students: Carole B. Shmurak and Bonnie S. Handler, “ ‘Castle of Science’: Mount Holyoke College and the Preparation of Women in Chemistry, 1837–1941,” History of Education Quarterly 32, 3 (Fall 1992): 315–42.

69 David F. Allmendinger Jr., “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life-Planning, 1837–1850,” History of Education Quarterly, 19, 1 (Spring 1979): 27–46; Margaret A. Nash, “ ‘A Salutary Rivalry’: The Growth of Higher Education for Women in Oxford, Ohio, 1850–1875,” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 183–95; Andrea L. Turpin, “Memories of Mary: Changing Interpretations of the Founder in the Secularization Process at Mount Holyoke Seminary and College, 1837–1937,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, vol. 28 (2011): 33–61.

70 Fletcher, History of Oberlin, 373–85.

71 Antoinette Brown was not enrolled in order to keep her name off the public matriculation list: Ibid., 290–315.

72 Shirley A. Hickson, The Development of Higher Education for Women in the Antebellum South, PhD Diss., University of South Carolina, 1985, 33–43; Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 57–60.

73 Hickson, Higher Education for Women, 123–77; Farnham, Southern Belle, 33–67, 120–45.

74 Hickson, Higher Education for Women, 66, 259–60; Farnham, Southern Belle, 97–119.