Education for Democracy 291missionary salesmen, called colporteurs, who fanned
out across the country preaching the gospel and sell-
ing or giving away religious pamphlets and books.
These publications played down denominational dif-
ferences in favor of a generalized brand of evangeli-
cal Christianity. They bore titles such asQuench Not
the Spirit(over 900,000 copies distributed by 1850)
andThe Way to Heaven. The American Bible Society
issued hundreds of thousands of copies of the Old
and New Testaments each year.
Mechanics’ libraries sprang up in every industrial
center and attracted so many readers that pressure
was soon applied to grant them state funds. In 1848
Massachusetts led the way by authorizing the use of
public money to back the Boston Public Library, and
soon several states were encouraging local communi-
ties to found tax-supported libraries.
The desire for knowledge and culture in America is
well illustrated by the success of the mutual improve-
ment societies known as lyceums. The movement
began in Great Britain; in the United States its prime
mover was Josiah Holbrook, an itinerant lecturer and
sometime schoolmaster from Connecticut. Holbrook
founded the first lyceum in 1826 at Millbury,
Massachusetts; within five years there were over a thou-
sand scattered across the country. The lyceums con-
ducted discussions, established libraries, and lobbied for
better schools. Soon they began to sponsor lecture
series on topics of every sort. Many of the nation’s
political and intellectual leaders, such as Webster,
Emerson, Melville, and Lowell, regularly graced their
platforms. So did other less famous lecturers who in the
name of culture pronounced on subjects ranging from
“Chemistry Applied to the Mechanic Arts” to a
description of the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs.Education for Democracy
Except on the edge of the frontier and in the South,
most youngsters between the ages of five and ten
attended a school for at least a couple of months of
the year. These schools, however, were privately run
and charged fees. Attendance was not required and
fell off sharply once children learned to read and do
their sums well enough to get along in day-to-day
life. The teachers were usually young men waiting for
something better to turn up.
All this changed with the rise of the common
school movement. At the heart of the movement was
the belief, widely expressed in the first days of the
republic, that a government based on democratic rule
must provide the means, as Jefferson put it, to “dif-
fuse knowledge throughout the mass of the people.”
This meant free tax-supported schools that all chil-
dren were expected to attend. It also came to mean
that such an educational system should be adminis-
tered on a statewide basis and that teaching should
become a profession that required formal training.
The two most effective leaders of the common
school movement were Henry Barnard and HoraceIn addition to common schools, thousands of female seminaries were built between 1820 and 1850, many of them by evangelical
denominations. During the Revolutionary Era, it was thought that half as many women were literate as men; but the Census of 1850 revealed
that women’s literacy equaled that of men.
Source:Girls’ Evening School, ca. 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.