A History of the American People

partly secularized in 1779, when the professorships of Hebrew and Divinity were turned over to
law and modern languages. The Presbyterians founded four new colleges in the 178os, including
Liberty Hall, which became the nucleus of Washington and Lee, and Transylvania Seminary, the
first institution of higher education beyond the Appalachians. By that date Yale was taking in a
freshman class of seventy, Harvard thirty-one, Princeton ten, Dartmouth twenty. Such early
foundations bred scores of satellites-sixteen Congregationalist colleges sprang from Yale and
twenty-five Presbyterian ones from Princeton, all before 1860. A total of 516 colleges and
universities were scattered over sixteen states by the coming of the Civil War. (Some of these
were short-lived: only 104 of this group were still flourishing at the end of the 1920s.) The state
universities began with Jefferson's University of Virginia, and some of them had humble
beginnings. Thus Michigan had one as early as 1817-the first in the West-but it was really a
glorified high school until 1837, when it was moved to Ann Arbor and endowed with state lands
proceeds. Another great state university, Wisconsin, was created at Madison in 1836. Curiously
enough, such institutions enrolled more students than the big foundations of the East: even by the
184os, a Western youngster had a better chance of going to college than a contemporary in the
Eastern cities (Boston and Philadelphia excepted). Thus New York in 11846, with half a million
population, enrolled only 241 new students at its two colleges.
Up to the 1780s, the overwhelming majority of college graduates went into the ministry,
though politics claimed a surprising number (thirty-three out of fifty-five men attending the
Constitutional Convention were graduates). During the 1790s, however, the balance swung in
favor of the lawyers, and by 1800 only about 9 percent went into orders, with 50 percent going
into the law. The influence of Germany, whose universities were the best on earth, was
enormous. Between 1830 and 1860, for instance, virtually every young professor at Yale had
spent a year in a German university. The rise of the Western university was very much
influenced by government land policy. If a proceeds-from-land-sales arrangement was in force, a
college would spring up overnight, and there was no difficulty in obtaining staff or attracting
students. The big breakthrough came with the Morrill Act of 1862, which enabled state
agricultural colleges to be founded using federal land funds, and in many cases these were
quickly broadened into general universities.
This enlightened Act also benefited women. There were a few women's colleges before that
date-Oberlin in Ohio, for instance, dates from 1833 and Georgia Female from 1838. But the
Morrill Act encouraged the admission of women to state universities-Wisconsin admitted them
from 1867 and Minnesota from 1869. By then some superb women's universities were
competing-Vassar (1861), Minnesota (1869), Wellesley (1870). By 1872 women were admitted
to ninety-seven colleges or universities and by 1880 they constituted one-third of all students,
though over 70 percent of them were condemned to (or chose) teaching. The real shortage was in
black higher education: only twenty-eight blacks had graduated by the time of the Civil War.
Thereafter a few black colleges came into existence: Atlanta in 1865, Lincoln and Fisk in 1866,
and Howard in 1867. By this time one in a hundred American adults was having a college
education.
By any statistical standards, America made enormous progress in the first half of the 19th
century in making itself `enlightened.' But not everyone agreed with De Tocqueville that the
country had succeeded. Fanny Trollope, herself a novelist and the mother of the more famous
Anthony, was in the United States 1827-31, trying to earn a living for herself in Cincinnati and
elsewhere. She had been married to a fanatical clergyman who had been unable to support her,
and in consequence she took a cynical view of religion: she thought America had far too much of