The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

MCGUFFEY AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE should provide us with a way of distinguishing among the very different things we call “history” — the temporal past, the past inherited as culture, the recorded past, the past interpreted. The true past is veiled in mystery, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all. Insofar as we receive it, it is liable to record itself in us culturally as assumption too fundamental to be reached by inquiry, or as memory so painful it must be rationalized, falsified, or suppressed. It is liable to being reconstrued to bear the blame for present vice or failure, or simplified and brutalized to allow a sense of relative progress. Records, of course, are biased toward the literate and the official and must always be assumed to be flawed by the methods and circumstances of record keeping, and the accidents of preservation and accessibility. The interpreted past incorporates all these difficulties and adds new distortions having to do with the motives, enthusiasms, sensibilities, talents, and scruples of interpreters. In dealing with a group like the abolitionists, who were profoundly self-aware and intent not only on making history but also on molding it, one finds all problems compounded.

The interested observer notes certain anomalies in the American use of American history. Here is an example. The New England Primer is fairly inevitably referred to as the great characteristic and formative expression of the New England mind. No one, in my experience, pauses over the fact that it was put together entirely from British materials by an English printer briefly resident in Boston, or that it was sold and used in England and Scotland into the nineteenth century. In other words, the Primer is offered as an instance of the cultural peculiarity and isolation of New England, when in fact it proves that New England was culturally and religiously very intimately connected with Britain. The Primer includes the Westminster Catechism, a finely honed document full of a long history of conflict and debate. The convention is to place the Primer as if at the beginning of our history, never alluding to the history with which it is so consciously burdened, and of which the New England settlers were so powerfully aware. I do not wish to say every historian has done this, simply that my own reading has not found an exception. Here again, the interested nonspecialist must linger over the great difference between information that is accessible but somehow inert and information or its like that actually affects thinking and writing. To say that certain work has been done is about equivalent to saying the South Pole has been visited. Another tribute to human diligence. On to other business.

I am the first to concede that much more work is produced in every field than anyone could hope to take in, but I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere, and is both stranger and more easily remedied. Where I have found the New England Primer mentioned, I have never found evidence that the writer has read it, no quotes or allusions except the inevitable “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all.” It is a volume that can be read twice and pondered thoroughly in the space of ninety minutes, and since it is widely assumed to be the spirit in embryo of perhaps the most influential strain of American culture, one might expect simple curiosity to be motive enough to lead the occasional scholar to look into it. I am bold enough to suggest that somehow, as a culture, we disable simple curiosity, and that the history we write, allude to, repeat, and assume is profoundly conditioned by omissions of just this kind. To say that a certain text is essential to the development of American culture or consciousness is as if to say: Do not bother reading it. You know all you need to know. The book is crude or vexatious and in any case it is faithfully summarized in cliché and canard.

Generations of New Englanders read these lines in their Primers:

Defraud not him who hired is,

Your labour to sustain;

And pay him still without delay,

His wages for his pain,

And as you would another man

Against you should proceed,

Do you the same to them again,

If they should stand in need.

Impart your portion to the Poor

In money and in Meat

And send the feeble fainting Soul

Of that which you do eat.

This is a paraphrase of scriptural passages, for example Deuteronomy 24:14–15, “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates. At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it, for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it, lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee.” Or Job 31:17, in which Job declares that he has never “eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless has not eaten thereof.” The bit of doggerel from the Primer is written in the language of social consciousness one finds in William Blake a hundred years later. Those familiar with English social history will recognize it as the language of the early left.

Modern assumptions about the Old Testament, now an unread classic, make it seem an improbable source for economic and social idealism. In fact, it is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed. Its influence is thought to have made New Englanders severe, yet Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), who is taken to personify their severity, preached an absolute obligation to assist the needy — before their need became urgent, before they were compelled to seek help, despite any question of their own worthiness or of the responsibility of relatives or others to assist them. Such assistance was to be given to them in addition to the support they received from the towns, since “it is too obvious to be denied, that there are in fact persons so in want, that it would be a charitable act in us to help them, notwithstanding all that is done by the town.” Taking as text the passage in Deuteronomy 15 that says, among other things, “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thy hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land,” Edwards says, “God gives us direction how we are to give in such a case, viz. bountifully, and willingly … We may also observe how peremptorily this duty is here enjoined, and how much it is insisted on. It is repeated over and over again, and enjoined in the strongest terms … The warning is very strict. God doth not only say, Beware that thou do not actually refuse to give him, but, Beware that thou have not one objecting thought against it, arising from a backwardness to liberality. God warns against the beginnings of uncharitableness in the heart, and against whatever tends to a forbearance to give … We are particularly required to be kind to the unthankful and to the evil; and therein to follow the example of our heavenly Father, who causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” No doubt Edwards would take a very fiery view indeed of present attitudes to the poor, of our “backwardness to liberality,” so ignorantly based on a supposed reclaiming of traditional values. But his hearers would have known the words of Isaiah: “the liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand” (32:8).

Or consider these lines from another unread classic:

[W]hatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, “He is a stranger”; but the Lord has given him a mark that ought to be familiar to you, by virtue of the fact that he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say, “He is contemptible and worthless”; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions. Now if he has not only deserved no good at your hand, but has also provoked you by unjust acts and curses, not even this is just reason why you should cease to embrace him in love and to perform the duties of love on his behalf. You will say, “He has deserved something far different of me.” Yet what has the Lord deserved? While he bids you forgive this man for all sins he has committed against you, he would truly have them charged against himself. Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.

That is from the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), the major theological work of John Calvin, not a man known among us for generosity of spirit. But then we do not do him or the many generations immersed in his thought the courtesy of reading him. No more do we hesitate to interpret their works and ways in light of assumptions that are smug and dismissive. Any reader of the Institutes must be struck by the great elegance, the gallantry, of its moral vision, which is more beautiful for the resolution with which its theology embraces sorrow and darkness. Again, if we looked at Calvin, we might perhaps understand why he engrossed so much of our culture for so long, and we might even have grounds for a new understanding of our tradition.

I raise these issues because they are important and because they are relatively straightforward. The New England Primer was or was not the product and expression of New England civilization. John Calvin did or did not encourage acquisitiveness, this-worldliness, intolerance, contempt for humankind, stoicism, and so on. Provision for the poor, by governments and by individuals, was or was not a feature of the ethic and practice of early America. Significantly misleading things are said and assumed about figures very accessible to scrutiny, whose reputations would greatly benefit from the slightest attention, and about texts that are never consulted though they are perfectly available.

All this is by way of preparation for a discussion of certain other texts which are always described as central to the development of American culture and which are very little read and little considered — the McGuffey readers. For those who have not looked into them, it may be useful to know that, as with the New England Primer, those who studied them were not assumed to be children. The fourth, fifth, and sixth readers were meant to be used in high school or college, but lessons that appear in the fourth reader in one edition will appear in the second reader in another. The content of the readers reflects the irregularity of education and the uneven spread of literacy as well as a great scarcity of books. As with Calvin, as with the Primer, it is as if we know so much about McGuffey’s readers that we need know nothing at all about them. But in fact they are documents of remarkable interest, not least because they are an early and influential cultural product of the Middle West, a highly distinctive and crucial region which is very generally assumed to have neither culture nor history.

I am tracing a lineage here. McGuffey is the intellectual descendant of Calvin’s Institutes and the New England Primer, an active Presbyterian minister and a professor of ancient languages and moral philosophy. He has not escaped the hereditary curse. He is believed to have created or codified a common American culture, and in doing so to have instilled shirtsleeve values of honesty and hard work in generations of children. Moral, cheerful, narrow, and harmless — insofar as such traits are consistent with harmlessness — his texts supposedly expressed and propagated the world view of the American middle class. The historian Henry Steele Commager, who edited a reprint edition of the Fifth Reader of 1879, says in his introduction, “For all its preoccupation with religion, the morality of the Readers was materialistic and worldly. It taught a simple system of rewards and punishments … Nothing was left to the imagination, nothing to chance, and nothing, one is tempted to say, to conscience … It was a middle-class, conventional, and equalitarian morality … Industry, sobriety, thrift, propriety, modesty, punctuality, conformity — these were the essential virtues, and those who practiced them were sure of success. Success, too, for all the patina of morality that was brushed over it, was clearly material.” He concludes, mysteriously, “If [the Readers] did not themselves provide the stuff of culture and morality, they were one of the chief instruments for weaving this stuff into the fabric of American life.” Commager discusses only William Holmes McGuffey, never mentioning that the fifth and sixth readers were always and only edited by his brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey.

I read a few of these books, and I came away persuaded that something else was going on with them. So I looked a little way into the matter and I found that William McGuffey was associated with a radical group in Cincinnati, and that the excerpts he collected and published for the most part anonymously are the work of writers he knew through this circle of radical reformers, or of writers sympathetic to them. According to Commager, “McGuffey, and his collaborators and successors, lived in the midst of the greatest reform era in our history … But the Readers show no awareness of this ferment of ideas, confess no temptation to challenge existing institutions, and reveal no inclination to enlarge the concept of social or political responsibility.” But consider the following partial list of contributors to various editions of the fourth reader and the causes with which they were associated. If the reforms that engaged them do not seem radical now, it is because they succeeded. The high percentage of women among the writers McGuffey excerpted — it is significantly higher than in other readers of the period — is characteristic of the prominence of women in reform circles.

Dr. Daniel Drake, McGuffey’s father-in-law, was an early public health and medical educator who supported universal compulsory education. Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish writer who championed education of women. Ann Taylor was a British writer who supported the Sunday school movement, an early major advance in popular education. Jacob Abbott was the founder of the Mount Vernon School, a girls’ school which offered as rigorous education as any available to boys, and which was entirely governed by its students. James Thomas Fields was an abolitionist publisher and editor in Boston. Elihu Burritt was an American abolitionist and pacifist who founded the internationalist League of Human Brotherhood, based in London. Thomas Grimké, brother of the famous early antislavery writers and lecturers Sarah and Angelina Grimké, was founder of the American Peace Society, which advocated total nonresistance to violence. Rev. Lyman Beecher, father of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was an early and crucial antislavery activist. Rev. Samuel Lewis worked with McGuffey for the creation of common schools in Ohio and founded with him the Western College for Teachers, a professional organization meant to support teaching standards. He was also the Anti-Slavery Party candidate for state senate, for congress, and for governor. Sarah Josepha Hale founded the first women’s magazine and was an early women’s rights activist. Rev. William Ellery Channing wrote a public letter of sympathy in 1836 to James G. Birney, an abolitionist printer in Cincinnati whose press was destroyed by a mob despite the efforts of Henry Ward Beecher to protect it. In 1837, Channing joined a public meeting in Boston to mark the killing in Alton, Illinois, of the abolitionist printer Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, whom Rev. Edward Beecher had attempted to protect. Channing became an active abolitionist, healing the breach between Unitarianism and theological traditionalists like Lyman Beecher, who had opposed it. John Greenleaf Whittier, a close associate of William Lloyd Garrison, was the secretary of the Abolition Society of Philadelphia. In 1839 the offices of his Pennsylvania Freeman were sacked and burned by a mob. From 1847 to 1859 he was an editor of the National Era, the antislavery periodical that first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Caroline Norton was an English writer on the status of women. James Russell Lowell was associated with the Anti-Slavery Standard, edited by the great early abolitionist writer, Lydia Maria Child. Horace Greeley was an abolitionist, labor-reform advocate, and socialist. Harriet Martineau was a British writer on slavery and social reform, author of a little book titled The Martyr Age in the United States (1839), which celebrates by name and in detail the abolitionist community then centered in Cincinnati. Her title reflects the fact that the reforms they espoused — abolition first of all — were not popular. It should be noted that the writers associated with antislavery were involved from an early period, like Channing, or from the beginning of their careers, like Lowell, or both, like Whittier. Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America includes Southern writers in sufficient numbers to make their absence from the McGuffeys worthy of note. It is surely worthy of note, also, that when literary writers are included, they have activist credentials.

Abolitionism seems still to be somewhat tarnished by criticisms of it made 150 years ago. It was said then to be an enthusiasm of New Englanders who had no direct experience of slavery and who were not economically dependent on it. Abolitionists were said to exaggerate the horrors of the institution and to simplify the problems and consequences of putting an end to it. There is a tendency to exaggerate regional differences — New York freed the last of its slaves in 1827. It is true that New England outlawed slavery early, though perhaps this fact does not imply a lack of understanding of its nature. It is true that the North flourished without slavery, but there was much evidence from an early period that slavery in fact depressed the development of the South. That is to say, however entangled in slavery, the South was not, strictly speaking, dependent on it either. In any case, such criticisms overlook the degree to which abolitionism foresaw a reform of the whole of society, not simply the suppression of slavery in the states of the South. The impact of the movement is underestimated for this reason. It must be said also that the erosion of rights of black and white Northerners entailed in measures to protect slavery in the South, most notably in the Fugitive Slave Law, made many in the North intensely aware of the consequences of allowing slavery to continue. Yet it is true at the same time that the virulence of public reaction to antislavery activity in the East appears to have been a reason for the deployment of abolitionist resources and energies into the Middle West.

The salient of abolitionism I touch on here was largely the work of people from New England and New York who were Puritans by culture and descent and who saw their movement into the Middle West from the 1830s onward as a reenactment and in effect a vindication of the Puritan settlement in America in the seventeenth century. Notable among them were the numerous family of Rev. Lyman Beecher. They included also Rev. Josiah Grinnell and John Brown. One consequence of their mission was a revival of New England Congregationalism, centered in Iowa. Another consequence was the creation of schools and colleges throughout the Middle West which have greatly affected the cultural development of the region. A third, somewhat indirect, consequence was the publication of the McGuffey readers, the project of W. B. Smith, a publisher who came to Cincinnati from New Haven and who was a member of the congregation of Lyman Beecher.

The cultural colonization of the Middle West by abolitionists was a straightforward consequence of the Second Great Awakening. In 1821, in upstate New York, a Presbyterian minister named George Washington Gale converted (in the phrase of the period) and educated for the ministry a young lawyer named Charles Grandison Finney. Finney’s gifts as a revivalist set off an outpouring of religious fervor throughout the Northeast, and gathered to him a band of converts of exceptional gifts and dedication, many of whom became passionate abolitionists. Among his converts was Arthur Tappan, a New York textile merchant and philanthropist who sheltered and guided the development of the antislavery movement through its long early years by dint of sheer openhandedness. The son of a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, Tappan made a fortune importing British textiles, primarily silks, which were a product of the same industrial system that received the products of American slave labor. He poured this wealth into antislavery causes with a liberality that bankrupted him once and that led Southerners to put bounties on him. He was called “the most mobbed man in America.”

George Washington Gale founded an experimental college called the Oneida Institute (never to be confused with the Oneida Community), organized according to the Manual Labor System which would be characteristic of other schools founded under his influence, for example Knox College in Illinois and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Under this system, students and faculty did the work the college required, feeding hogs or planting vegetables or running the printing press. The system was intended to enhance the health and usefulness of educated people, and to remove economic barriers to education and class distinctions within it, by allowing and obliging students to pay their way by work. The Institute served to prepare Finney converts for divinity school. Its student body was racially integrated and deeply committed to abolition. Arthur Tappan supported the school financially and he sent his sons there.

When the first class of Oneida students were ready for divinity school, Tappan undertook to provide one for them. He sent a student, Theodore Weld, to find a good site for a school in the Middle West, and Weld chose Cincinnati, where Presbyterians had already started the Lane Theological Seminary. Tappan promised to support the school if Lyman Beecher would go to Ohio and serve as its president. He also undertook to pay Beecher’s salary. Beecher moved his family from Connecticut to Cincinnati in 1832, where they remained for eighteen years. In the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Lane Theological Seminary was taken possession of as an anti-slavery fortification by a class of about twenty vigorous, radical young men, headed by that brilliant, eccentric genius Theodore D. Weld; who came and sustained themselves there ostensibly as theological students under Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe, really that they might make of the Seminary an antislavery fort.”

How all these powerful personalities interacted is not very clear. There was tension of a predictable kind between Beecher, a great intellectual of the period, and the populist Finney (though this difference is easily exaggerated — Beecher, a Yale graduate, was the son of a blacksmith, and a revivalist himself. Finney, a lawyer, lacked formal training for the ministry, but his writings were published and studied in Britain and Germany). It was after contact with Finney that Beecher agreed to leave the East and the eminence he enjoyed there to shepherd Finney’s converts through divinity school. In the event, most of the students left Lane Theological Seminary in a body, to protest attempts by the trustees to forbid abolitionist activities and discussion — Weld and the Oneida graduates had converted all their fellow students to antislavery, using Finney’s revivalist methods, and they had given themselves over to setting up schools for the black population of Cincinnati and teaching in them, printing tracts and mailing them into the South, lending their horses to fugitives from Kentucky, and, worst of all, simply socializing with local black families. Cincinnati was already a big city with a painful racial history and a penchant for mob violence, and the seminary was threatened. Beecher is blamed for failing to intervene to prevent the trustees from acting, but the situation might well have been truly untenable. Only a few years earlier, the city had attempted to deport its entire black population to Canada. It was usual there, as elsewhere, for resentment to find targets of opportunity.

Beecher eventually had the trustees’ rules rescinded, and his school and his circle remained an important center of abolitionism. The so-called Lane Rebels lived in Cincinnati, teaching one another and continuing their antislavery activity, supported by Arthur Tappan, till Tappan discovered Oberlin College, then in the planning stages. He moved the students to Oberlin, funded the school, and brought in Charles Grandison Finney as professor of theology. “In a great forest, in a mud hole” as Finney described it, the college could institutionalize the radicalism of the Lane Rebels without giving unbearable offense. Oberlin students, most notably the great Theodore Weld, taught and evangelized all over the Middle West, turning public opinion against slavery.

Rev. George Washington Gale came west, too, and founded Knox College, a school so Puritan it did not observe Christmas and so radical that it did celebrate the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies. Colleges with strong religious affiliations and reformist social agendas proliferated through the Middle West, little intellectual communities that put into practice their belief in educating women, in forbidding the use of alcohol, in expediting the escape of fugitives from slavery, in enlarging the influence of religious revivalism. This last brought educated people into intense contact with the scattered and transient population of the region, and made them feel moral responsibility for national policies, in a setting where history had not yet hardened around them.

In the manner of colonists, these people came west to do what they could not do at home. Arthur Tappan had tried to assist the founding of a school for young black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, and a college for black men in New Haven, and both attempts had ended in mob violence. Theodore Weld preached abolition all over Ohio, and absorbed threats and abuse, and made converts. But in Troy, New York, crowds injured him so badly that he never recovered his health. In the East, major institutions encouraged opposition to abolition. But the abolitionists’ educating and institution-building, their preaching and publishing and propagandizing, were unrivaled in the Middle West, virtually unanswered, except by mobs, whose excesses they had learned to exploit to excite public sympathy. When Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman’s son, went back to accept a pulpit in Brooklyn, New York, he brought the experience of an Ohio abolitionist, educated in the skills of political evangelization, who had worn guns to protect an antislavery publisher, who raised money in Northern churches to arm New England colonies in Kansas. His sister Harriet clearly knew the skills of evangelization as well as he did. Both of them undertook to shape public opinion, in one degree or another to make history by interpreting present and collective experience. By any reckoning, they succeeded.

Thus I arrive at last at my starting place, William Holmes McGuffey and his readers. It is hard to know much about McGuffey. He was a westerner by the standards of the time, born in western Pennsylvania in 1800, rescued from childhood poverty by a benevolent schoolmaster, a teacher himself at age fourteen. He became a college professor and then a Presbyterian minister, and lectured and preached for decades, leaving neither lecture nor sermon behind him because he did not write them down. He came to Cincinnati from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and served for several years as president of Cincinnati College. He was influential in the creation of a public school system in Ohio, the first such system in the country.

William B. Smith approached Catherine Beecher, who ran a school for girls, with his plan for a series of readers. She declined and suggested McGuffey. Catherine may have been the most conservative of Lyman Beecher’s children. She was an abolitionist, however, like her father, Smith’s pastor. So far as I have discovered, there is no actual evidence to indicate the kind and degree of affinity that existed between McGuffey and the Beecher circle, beyond a commitment to establishing and strengthening public education. Catherine Beecher went on to establish the National Board of Popular Education to send women teachers into the western territories, an undertaking complementary to McGuffey’s. Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher and professor at Lane, traveled to Prussia to report on education there, for the purposes of McGuffey’s design of a system for Ohio. Clearly this circle did not make clean distinctions between preaching, teaching, and reform, and among them education was a political and visionary enterprise, designed to establish new norms of thought and behavior. Of course the laws that forbade the education of slaves were a great proof of the liberating force of education.

Certainly McGuffey’s most remarkable achievement was to have put together texts that were enormously popular in both the Middle West and the South before, during, and after the Civil War. When supplies of the books were cut off by the war, bootleg editions were printed in the South. There was little in the way of cultural consensus in this period. It was by no means clear in the early 1830s, when the McGuffeys first appeared, what kind of economy would develop in the Middle West. Forms of slavery were legal in Illinois. And of course the struggle for Kansas and the lower Middle West was precisely a struggle about which economic system would prevail there. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that “Cincinnati was herself to a large extent a slaveholding city. Her property was in slaveholding states. Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at the time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoining slave states.” The rhetorical battles that preceded the Civil War were waged in the language of Scripture, splitting the churches, so even those bonds between interests and loyalties and regions were strained or severed. In the circumstances, the McGuffey readers must be considered a work of considerable tact.

Yet they can be interpreted in the polemical terms of the period. To the extent that it is fair to say McGuffey’s texts establish modest well-being as a norm of life, they are positioning themselves on the side of the controversy also associated with the spread of literacy and the establishing of schools. To the extent that these texts portray wealth and standing as the reward of individual effort and character, they are promoting values that are the clear antithesis of the values invoked to justify slavery, whose apologists found norms in what are called aristocratic cultures and precedents in feudalism. Americans are terribly imprecise in their use of economic terms, perhaps because fragments of old polemic have outlived their occasion. So they see McGuffey’s smallholder republic as early capitalism, and the colonial economy of the South — a spectacular instance of the expropriation of the worker which existed to supply raw materials for the British and American industrial systems — as something else, something a little more poetical. McGuffey’s readers are assumed to be the sweetest statement of mean and minor aspirations, and no one reflects on them further.

In any case, it is easy to overstate the degree to which the books emphasize thrift and industry and so on. To the extent that they do, a context for these virtues is created by more numerous lessons urging kindness and generosity. In a story titled “Emulation” (Fourth Reader, 1866) a rich boy and a poor boy compete for first place in their school. When the poor boy cannot pay for his books, the rich boy buys them for him, then loses the competition. The story has no other moral than that generosity is to be admired. Far from proposing an ethical regime of minor worldly virtue, of self-interest enlightened by piety or benevolence or at least contained by limited aspiration, the lessons are rather ethereal. Their insistence on generosity and kindness is in turn given context by frequent references to death, and to the Bible, which, in the words of one poem, “in teaching me the way to live / Teaches how to die.” In other words, the things of this world are very much overshadowed by ultimate things in McGuffey’s readers — not surprisingly, since the man was a minister active in a culture where piety and evangelization were so routinely associated with education. It is surprising over against the modern reputation of the readers, however.

The great issue of the status of African-Americans during and after slavery is never alluded to in the readers, nor for that matter are African-Americans, or slavery itself, except in an adulatory essay titled “The Character of Wilberforce,” which appeared in the 1837 edition and was removed in 1844. Wilberforce, the British emancipationist, was a hero of the antislavery movement in America. This is not a mere failure to notice the existence of non-Europeans. Indians are represented rather frequently and sympathetically, and their dispossession and destruction are lamented, though they were then ongoing. If the readers neither reflected nor formed public opinion as it is manifested in the history of the period, this only reinforces the argument that they were the product of a special view of society, comparatively candid, humane, moral, and critical.

McGuffey’s readers are consistently contemptuous of war, before and after the Civil War. What may look to us like an evasive and calculating handling of explosive issues may have seemed to McGuffey conciliatory, as well as expedient, and therefore consistent with a belief in nonviolence shared by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, and not inconsistent with abolitionism. After a payment by W. B. Smith of twenty-five dollars, when he agreed to assemble the readers, McGuffey never received another penny for them, though he supervised numerous revisions. So cynicism seems not to have been a factor in the silences that made the texts acceptable in the South, and for that matter in the Middle West.

I have noted before that the South did not respond to the prolonged abolitionist onslaught of publication, evangelization, and institution-building in the Middle West with similar efforts of its own. Oddly enough, in the circumstances, there was not even a publisher of schoolbooks in the South itself. People so education-minded as McGuffey and his circle in Cincinnati might very well consider how such a vacuum should be filled. For them, education was the method as well as the substance of reform, yet education in the Middle West, as well as in the South, would have to take account of intense hostility to the antislavery movement.

It is interesting to consider what else besides slavery is missing from McGuffey’s readers. Factories and cities come to mind, an interesting omission for a man living in the so-called London of the West, also known as Porkopolis. Foreign countries, especially Germany, are given respectful notice, but there seem to be no immigrants — and this despite the large and growing German presence in the Middle West. No one in the readers seems to be transient, though the books were distributed into an unsettled frontier. As Mrs. Stowe wrote, “The little western villages of those days had none of the attractions of New England rural life. They were more like the back suburbs of a great city, a street of houses without yards or gardens, run up for the most part in a cheap and flimsy manner, and the whole air of society marked with the impress of a population who have no local attachments, and are making a mere temporary sojourn for money-getting purposes.” In fact, the world of the readers suggests rural New England in its fondest memories of itself. This is a consequence of the fact that, under cover of his own westernness, perhaps, McGuffey was publishing New England writers for whom primitive New England served as a norm or an ideal.

Abolitionists set great store by the fact that slavery is not mentioned by name in any of the country’s founding documents. To them this meant that these documents anticipate the end of slavery and refuse it the implication of acceptability and permanence that would come with acknowledging it by name. The McGuffey readers acknowledge neither slavery nor the factory system outright, but they teach an ethic so consistently opposed to both of them that they are arguably the subject of the books, in the same way that life in nineteenth-century society is the subject of Walden, and the preoccupation of Brook Farm and of Oberlin College. Just as the intention of individual stories in these collections is exemplary, so the intention of the readers altogether is also exemplary.

For years, reasoning about our cultural origins seems to have gone this way: We are a capitalist civilization, therefore the influences that formed us must have encouraged capitalism. From which it follows that these influences, to be understood aright, must be seen as protocapitalist. Putting aside the doubtful language, the simplicity of this approach to history is bald and barbarous and tendentious. We begin with our conclusion, then dismiss as aberrant or insignificant whatever does not support it, including, as it happens, those same formative influences, which are often invoked and never quoted, and, coincidentally, do not yield themselves to this kind of reading. I have no conclusion to offer in place of the old one, except that history is very strange and beautiful and instructive in the absence of all conclusion. The reform movement I mention here was centered around people who were theologically conservative even in the terms of their time, many of whom took their theology jot and tittle from Jonathan Edwards. While teaching at Lane, Lyman Beecher was tried for heresy, in part because he taught that Edwards’s was the only theology worthy of attention. Precisely the same energies that produced the revival that swept Mount Holyoke College during Emily Dickinson’s time there produced Mount Holyoke College itself, and the unprejudiced admission of women to Oberlin College, and the unprejudiced admission of blacks to Oberlin College, and the proliferation of schools, especially in the Middle West, meant to promote and to normalize just such reforms.

All this runs contrary to expectation. Yet if one reads Calvin, the New England Primer, and Edwards, as these reformers did, it all seems logical enough. Our historiography is too ridden with expectation, which in its workings is like bias or partisanism, incurious and self-protective. That expectations change or vary a little hardly matters, since they are crude in their nature. I wish it could be as if we knew nothing. Then we would be freer to wonder where those audiences came from whose intelligence and patience and humanity taught and encouraged Abraham Lincoln to speak as he did, and why national leadership — Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and so many others — emerged from the Middle West during the crisis of the Civil War, and where the Middle West acquired its special tradition of intellectualism and populism, moral seriousness and cultural progressivism.

The McGuffeys undertake to correct the provincialisms of pronunciation of frontier America, and are therefore a sort of compendium of dialect of their period and region — “Do not say geth-uz for gath-ers; un-heerd for un-heard.” The readers in fact seem at least as intent on teaching those who use them to speak as to read. In 1834, Daniel Drake delivered a once famous address at Miami University in Ohio titled “A Discourse on the History, Character and Prospects of the West,” which suggests a relationship between the content of the readers and their great emphasis on spoken language, and with the style and method of the Beechers and others in the reform community. Drake asked, “Ought not the literature of a free people to be declamatory? Should it not exhort and animate? If cold, literal and passionless, how could it act as the handmaid of improvement?… In despotisms, it is of little use to awaken the feelings or warm the imagination of the people — here an excited state of both, is indispensable to those popular movements, by which society is to be advanced. Would you rouse men to voluntary action, on great public objects, you must make their fancy and feelings glow under your presentations; you must not carry forward their reason, but their desires and their will … Whenever the literature of a new country loses its metaphorical and declamatory character, the institutions that depend on public sentiment will languish and decline.” This address was published by W. B. Smith in Cincinnati in 1835, the year before he began the publication of the readers.

We now would no doubt worry over demagogues and mob rule, in the face of so much declaiming. The religious revivals of the time looked to many contemporaries like mass hysteria, dangerous to those caught up in them, and to religion, and to the whole structure of democracy. Yet these passions fueled what was indeed the greatest period of reform in American history. Perhaps reform was effectual, and no doubt it seemed desirable, because people at large could be moved to such extremes of generosity and hope. And what did they hope for? The universalization of literacy and of modest prosperity, to judge from the readers. And the normalization of democratic attitudes and manners, which were a novelty in the world at that time. We have not ourselves achieved these things, nor do we hope for them.

Democracy is profoundly collaborative. It implies a community. It seems to me we have almost stopped using the word in a positive sense, preferring “capitalism,” which by no means implies community, and for which, so far as I have seen, our forebears found no use at all. It is possible to imagine that, in a society where democracy was the thing valued and longed for, there could be a reasonable presumption that people would wish to act toward one another in good faith, to promote, as they used to say, the general welfare. That would no doubt go far toward ensuring the wholesomeness of collective passions. Our new ethic is retrojected into the past, onto poor Reverend McGuffey’s readers, which were themselves a generous, democratizing work, like McGuffey’s other great project, the creation of a public school system. There is no reason to expect the survival of institutions which were the products of an ethos we have effaced and lost. But history is a little forgiving. We need only be ready to put aside what we think we know, and it will start to speak to us again.