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The Origins of Public Education in Baltimore, 1825–1829

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Tina H. Sheller
Tina H. Sheller*
Affiliation:
Maryland Historical Society, University of Maryland
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Extract

The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century witnessed nationwide agitation for public schools. While our understanding of this movement is far from complete, it is apparent that the receptivity of American communities to this institution varied considerably. Theoretically, large cities experiencing the shift to capitalist modes of production and the accompanying social disorder should have been most receptive to the common school idea. Indeed, in some cities undergoing these dramatic socioeconomic changes, the proposal to introduce a system of uniform, publicly controlled and operated schools which would instruct children from all classes in the community was adopted with considerable public approval and a minimum of opposition. Stanley Schultz's study of Boston, for example, demonstrates that the 1818 proposal to institute a system of primary schools that would prepare all children in the city for entrance to its well-established public schools met resistance from only a few members of the town's elite, whose protests failed “because an aroused public demanded action.” Carl Kaestle's account of the New York City experience shows that the Free School Society also encountered little opposition, with the exception of its dispute with the Bethel Baptist Church, as it evolved into the Public School Society in 1825, assuming all of New York City's state funding for education and opening its schools to children of all classes in the city.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 23 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Katz, Michael B. “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,“ History of Education Quarterly 16 (Winter 1976: 391–93; Schultz, Stanley K. The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York, 1973), p. 41; Kaestle, Carl F. The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 85–88.Google Scholar

2. Troen, Selwyn The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System. 1838–1920 (Columbia, Missouri, 1975).Google Scholar

3. Katz, “The Origins of Public Education,“ 385.Google Scholar

4. Earle, Carville and Hoffman, Ronald, “Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth Century South,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 48–50; Browne, Gary Lawson Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1980), pp. 12, 95. An important component of this elite was a dynamic group of Scots-Irish merchants. See Votto, LeRoy J. “Social Dynamism in Boom-Town: The Scots-Irish in Baltimore, 1760–1790,” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1969).Google Scholar

5. Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, pp. 51–114; Dennis R. Clark, “Baltimore 1729–1829; The Genesis of a Community,” (Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1976), pp. 191–239.Google Scholar

6. For other reform efforts, see p. 21, below.Google Scholar

7. Clark, “Baltimore 1729–1829,“ pp. 243–53.Google Scholar

8. First and Second Annual Reports of the Board of Delegates from the Male Sunday School Societies of Baltimore (1820); “Report of a Meeting of the Union Board of Delegates,” Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 24 July 1821.Google Scholar

9. A report on the meeting was printed in the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, 11 January 1825.Google Scholar

10. “All” here would, of course, exclude free black children. Their status, really non-status, in the community was well understood by the citizenry. In all of the discussions surrounding the public schools which I found there is no mention of education for free black children. White girls were to be included in the system, but not beyond the grammar school level.Google Scholar

11. Printed in the Federal Gazette, 27 January 1825.Google Scholar

12. For the growing class polarization during the 1820s in Baltimore, see Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, pp. 96–98; Ridgway, Whitman H. Community Leadership in Maryland, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1979), pp. 89–95.Google Scholar

13. Federal Gazette, 13 January 1825.Google Scholar

14. The “Act” was printed in the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 7 February 1825. Two printed copies of the bill (one an amended version) can be found in the John Pendleton Kennedy Papers, Peabody Institute Library, Baltimore.Google Scholar

15. Federal Gazette, 16 February 1825.Google Scholar

16. Of 162 known school supporters, I derived the leadership of 36 men from those who served in at least one of the following capacities: officer or speaker at ward meetings; member or officer of the city-wide school convention; member of the committee which petitioned the City Council; member of the committee which petitioned the state legislature. Because of their influence in the community, newspaper editors favorable to public schooling were also included among the leadership. This information was gleaned from the daily press, especially the Federal Gazette and Baltimore American, between January and March 1825; also from the Journal of the First Branch of the City Council, 4 February 1825, Baltimore City Archives.Google Scholar

17. Baltimore American, 24 July 1821; Fischer, David Hackett The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in an Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965), pp. 82, 120–21, 368; “Recollections of the Life of Hugh Davey Evans,” Subject File, Maryland Diocesan Archives, Maryland Historical Society; “Correspondence from the Male Sunday School Societies to the Baltimore City Council,” 9 November 1821, Document #603, Baltimore City Archives.Google Scholar

18. Sparks, Jared “Appropriation of Public Lands for Schools,“ North American Review 33 (October 1821): 337. For the Unitarian commitment to promoting education, see Howe, Daniel Walker “At Morning Blest and Golden Browed; Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and Reformers, 1835–1865,” in Wright, Conrad ed., A Stream of Light: A Sesquicentennial History of American Unitarianism (Boston, 1975). “Among the secular activities reflecting Unitarian religious commitment were many relating to the promotion of literacy and learning…. the Unitarians of the middle third of the nineteenth century were remarkable even among Yankees for their devotion to education.” (p. 34) William Ellery Channing and Samuel May, two prominent Unitarian ministers, were active in the Boston public school reforms of 1818. Schultz, Stanley The Culture Factory, p. 39.Google Scholar

19. Dielman and Hayward File, Maryland Historical Society; Edward Hinkley to Jared Sparks, 19 April 1817, in Adams, Herbert B. ed., The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, vol. 1 (New York, 1893; reprint ed., Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 128.Google Scholar

20. Baltimore American, 11 August 1824. The Edward Otis Hinkley Papers. Maryland Historical Society, contain Hinkley's sons's autobiography, which notes that he attended Public School #1, his father “having been instrumental in establishing the system of public education….”Google Scholar

21. Renzulli, L. Marx Maryland: The Federalist Years (Rutherford, N.J., 1973), p. 62; Resolutions Held at a Meeting of the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery, February 1792 (Baltimore, 1792).Google Scholar

22. Graham, Leroy “Elisha Tyson, Baltimore, and the Negro,“ (M.A. thesis, Morgan State University, 1975), pp. 43, 84; W. G. D. Worthington Diary, 1825, Box 270, Joseph Toner Collection, Library of Congress; Isaac Fein, The Making of an American Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 32–36.Google Scholar

23. Baltimore Gazette and Evening Advertiser, 3 November 1825.Google Scholar

24. Significantly, the group included one of the state's leading spokesmen for the advancement of “useful knowledge,” John Stuart Skinner, editor of the American Farmer, and an outspoken advocate of scientific agriculture and animal husbandry.Google Scholar

25. Two of the several themes of the public debate surrounding the schools concerned the rising cost and unsatisfctory quality of education in Baltimore. One correspondent to the Baltimore American (7 February 1825) complained that “at the present enormous charges for education, there exists a virtual prohibition of learning to all but the children of the rich.” Another correspondent (15 February 1825) in a seeming reference to the New Englanders, reported that parents who investigated “the manner in which this concern [education] was managed by the town” found that notwithstanding the high cost of the schools, “the children were very badly educated and their parents sometimes egregiously imposed upon, that the teachers were not altogether so moral in their deportment or so well qualified in learning or so disinterested in their views as to be fit for the great duties they had undertaken.”Google Scholar

26. Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, pp. 103, 106; conversation with Gary L. Browne. Ridgeway, Community Leadership in Maryland, p. 81.Google Scholar

27. Federal Gazette, 12 February 1825.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., 21 February 1825; Baltimore Gazette and Evening Advertiser, 18 September 1825. For similar arguments, see also Baltimore American, 11 February 1825; and Federal Gazette, 18 February 1825.Google Scholar

29. Baltimore American, 9, 10, 12 February 1825.Google Scholar

30. Federal Gazette, 11, 17 February 1825.Google Scholar

31. Samuel Hoffman to Virgil Maxcy, 9 February 1825, “Correspondence,” Box 63, Virgil Maxcy Papers, Galloway-Maxcy-Markoe Papers, Library of Congress.Google Scholar

32. Baltimore American, 9, 14 February 1825.Google Scholar

33. For the published resolutions, see Federal Gazette, 16 February 1825. For the City Council report, see Baltimore American, 9 February 1825, and Federal Gazette, 15 February 1825.Google Scholar

34. While the opposition did not include any merchant-manufacturers, at least two opponents were active supporters of manufacturing interests. Opponents John McKim, Jr., and John Eager Howard were officers in the American Society for the Promotion of Domestic Manufacturers and National Industry, organized in 1817. Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County, (Philadelphia, 1881; reprinted Baltimore, 1971), p. 393.Google Scholar

35. For the House of Industry, see Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County, pp. 826–27; “Report of the Trustees of the House of Industry,” December 26, 1822, Documents 514, 515, Baltimore City Archives. For the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, see Coll, Blanche D. “The Baltimore Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1820–1822,“ American Historical Review, 61 (October 1955): 77–87. For the Maryland Colonization Society, see Fifth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color (Washington, D. C, 1822), p. 111. The fate of the House of Industry further points up the type of conflict surrounding the public schools. In December 1826, the trustees of the House of Industry suggested that the City Council sell the House of Industry property, donate the proceeds to the Almshouse, which accomplished what the H. of I. had originally intended to do, and then obtain “an efficient vagrant act, by which vagrants, the youthful portion of them at least, may be removed from our streets and placed under the care and control of the Trustees of the Almshouse.” The following month, a committee from the First Branch argued that since the City Council had recently been authorized to establish public schools, the proceeds ought to go to these schools, “the best corrective of pauperism. “The Second Branch defeated this proposal, favoring instead the suggestion of the H. of I. trustees. “Report of the Trustees of the House of Industry,” 28 December 1826, Document 1288; “Report of the Committee on the House of Industry.” 16 January 1827, Document 771; “Report of a Committee on the House of Industry, “29 January 1827, Document 772, Baltimore City Archives, Journal of the Second Branch of the City Council, 8 February, 30 January 1827, Baltimore City Archives.Google Scholar

36. In their views of education and social organization, traditional Baltimoreans were representative of the Southern mindset. See Taylor, William R. “Toward a Definition of Orthodoxy: The Patrician South and the Common School,“ Harvard Educational Review 36 (Fall 1966): 412–26. The views of public school proponents, on the other hand, resembled those William Cutler has described in his analysis of the trustees of the New York Public School Society: “Theirs was not a distaste for social mobility by anyone, regardless of his background. For years they helped to send a few of the Society's brightest graduates to Columbia College, the University of New York, and the Rutger's Female Institute. But the Trustees firmly believed that social mobility, as well as citizenship, had to entail habits of moral order including a respect for industry, authority, and self-discipline.” “Status, Values, and the Education of the Poor: The Trustees of the New York Public School Society, 1805–1853,” American Quarterly 24 (March 1972): 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Scharf, History of Baltimore City and County, pp. 317, 343.Google Scholar

38. School supporters shared opponents’ concerns over the city's economic growth. Henry Payson, Solomon Etting, Kennedy, John P. Skinner, John S. and Tyson, Isaac were very active in promoting internal improvements. The point here is that pressing commerical concerns, in conjunction with an eighteenth-century view of community, tended to further inhibit one's willingness to accept a new and costly scheme of education. Eventually the city did contribute heavily to the railroads. In 1831, it allocated $50,000 to the B & O, and $12,000 to the B & S. The allocation to the fledgling public schools in that year was $3,915. “Register's Summary,” January, 1831, in Ordinances of the Major and City Council of Baltimore, 1831. This school budget contrasts strikingly with that of Boston, which spent $76,154 in 1825 and $120,244 in 1835. Schultz, The Culture Factory, p. 80.Google Scholar

39. Baltimore American, 23 February 1825.Google Scholar

40. Gazette, Baltimore 9, 27 September 1825; Baltimore American, 28 September 1825; Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser, 30 September 1825. The citizens of the Twelfth Ward held a referendum on the school issue. The results were: 607 For—14 Against; Baltimore Gazette, 4 October 1825.Google Scholar

41. Traditionally, the Second Branch had been the upper house of the Council. Originally, its members were elected by the First Branch, although this changed in 1808 when popular elections were instituted. The property qualifications for the Second Branch ($500) were higher than those for the First Branch ($300). The Second Branch included only one representative per ward, while the First Branch included two per ward.Google Scholar

42. Baltimore American, 23 February 1825, 2 January 1826. For the opposition of the Second Branch, see “City Council Resolution,” 27 January 1826, Document 1031, Baltimore City Archives; Laws of Maryland, 1824–25, Chapter 130.Google Scholar

43. Baltimore Gazette, 31 August, 4, 23, 25 September 1826; Baltimore Patriot, 19, 23, 29 September 1826.Google Scholar

44. Ordinances of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, #3, 17 January 1827; #42,6 April 1829. For example of Second Branch opposition, see Journal of the First Branch, 26 January 1829, 27 March 1829.Google Scholar

45. For the struggles of the opening year, see First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Public Schools, December 1829.Google Scholar

46. Ordinances, #9, 25 February 1830.Google Scholar

47. See annual reports of the school commissioners, 1829–39.Google Scholar

48. Baltimore Gazette, 3 November 1825.Google Scholar