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Path Dependence and the Emergence of Common Schools: Ohio to 1853

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2015

Johann N. Neem
Johann N. Neem*
Affiliation:
Western Washington University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 48 - 80
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

An early draft of this article was presented at the Columbia University Seminar in Early American History and Culture (2012), where comments from Zara Anishanslin, Richard John, Brian Murphy, and Leonard Sadosky were particularly valuable. I also appreciate the thoughtful criticism offered by Andrew Cayton, Kate Neem Destler, Gary Gerstle, Peter Onuf, Harry Scheiber, Tracy Steffes, and the journal’s readers.

References

NOTES

1. Katz, Michael, Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaestle, Carl, The Evolution of an Urban Public School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York, 1976);Google Scholar Vinovskis, Maris A., “Horace Mann on the Economic Productivity of Education,” New England Quarterly 43, no. 4 (December 1970): 550–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blumenfeld, Samuel L., Is Public Education Necessary? (Old Greenwich, Conn., 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaestle, Carl, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reese, William J., The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar; Philip, Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass., 2002)Google Scholar; Reese, William J., America’s Public Schools: From the Common Schools to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, 2005)Google Scholar; Spring, Joel H., The American School 1624–2004 (Boston, 2005)Google Scholar; Glenn, Charles L., Myth of the Common School (Amherst, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar. For Ohio, see David Brown, “The Political Culture of the Whig Party in Ohio” (Ph.D. diss: University of Toledo, 1995), 105–40, esp. 117–19 (market discipline); Cayton, Andrew R. L., Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus, 2002), 57–66 (diversity)Google Scholar; Aaron, Daniel, Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1938 (Columbus, 1992), 202–27 (diversity and market discipline)Google Scholar. This has become the common sense of the common schools movement. See Barbara Winslow, “Education Reform in Antebellum America,” History Now (2012), http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow/01_2012/historian2.php (accessed 21 May 2012).

2. Scheisl, Martin, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley, 1977)Google Scholar; Teaford, Jon C., The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825 (Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar; Alan, Marcus, Plague of Strangers: Social Groups and the Origins of City Services in Cincinnati, 1819–1870 (Columbus, 1991)Google Scholar.

3. Katz, Irony; Kaestle, Evolution; Kaestle, Pillars, chap. 3; David B. Tyack, One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

4. Here I build on Tyack, David and James, Thomas, “State Government and American Public Education: Exploring the ‘Primeval Forest,’” History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 39–69;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Steffes, Tracy, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. John, Richard R., “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11, no. 2 (1997): 347–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York, 1990), esp. chaps. 11–12Google Scholar.

7. Paul, Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, 2004), 21Google Scholar. See also Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, Search for American Political Development (New York, 2004), 96–108Google Scholar; Richardson, John G., “The American States and the Age of School Systems,” American Journal of Education 92, no. 4 (August 1984): 473–502, at 481–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Pierson, Politics in Time, 24–44; Arthur, W. Brian, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, 1994)Google Scholar. Other scholars have used the idea of path dependence to understand policy questions, including Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Mothers and Soldiers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar; Hattam, Victoria, “Institutions and Political Change: Working-Class Formation in England and the United States, 1820–1896,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Steimo, Sven, Thelen, Kathleen, and Frank, Longstreth (New York, 1992), chap. 6Google Scholar; Hacker, Jacob S., “The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian, and U.S. Medical Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (Spring 1998): 57–130Google Scholar; Starr, Paul, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Einhorn, Robin, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006)Google Scholar.

9. On partisan ideas about education, see Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (New York, 1962); Christopher Hans Anderson, “The Rhetoric of Republican Education and the Teaching of Politics in American Schools, 1776–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2002); Julia M. Walsh, The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Period: Creating a Conformed Citizenry (New York, 1998).

10. Sewell, William H., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 225–70,CrossRefGoogle Scholarat 227. See also Clemens, Elisabeth S. and Cook, James M., “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Tiffin and Meigs quoted in Taylor, James W., The Ohio School System and School Laws in Force (Cincinnati, 1857), 96, 106–7.Google Scholar

12. Cremin, Lawrence, The American Common School: An Historic Conception (New York, 1951), 83–128.Google Scholar

13. Ohio constitution (1802), Art. 8, sec. 25. See Taylor, Ohio, 88–89.

14. Taylor, Ohio, 81–88.

15. Edward Miller, History of Educational Legislation in Ohio from 1803 to 1850 (Chicago, 1920), chap. 3; Taylor, Ohio, chaps. 6–9.

16. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 112–13.

17. Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); Neem, Johann N., Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), chap. 1Google Scholar.

18. Worthington quoted in Taylor, Ohio, 120.

19. Taylor, Ohio, 121–22.

20. Kaestle, Pillars, 186; Cremin, Common School, 122–23; Miller, History, 7–9, 19; Marius Garofalo, “The Origin and Establishment of a State Board of Education in Ohio” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1958), 43–44. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 122–25. This may be an example of what Orren and Skowronek, Search, 108–18, call “intercurrence,” in which a new path is layered over but does not obliterate the older path. In this case, the tradition of local control was reoriented by the state in certain ways but without initially threatening either the idea or practice of local control.

21. Ratcliffe, Donald, Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio, 1818–1828 (Columbus, 2000), chaps. 1–2Google Scholar; Miller, History, 9–10.

22. Scheiber, Harry, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (Athens, Ohio, 1969), 7–35.Google Scholar

23. Roseboom, Eugene H. and Weisenburger, Francis P., A History of Ohio (Columbus, 1954), 85–87.Google Scholar For similar conflicts during the second party system, see Ratcliffe, Politics of Long Division, chap. 3. See also Terence Corps, “Republican Ideology in Jacksonian Ohio: The Rhetoric of Democratic Political Economy, 1825–1850” (M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1985), chap. 4.

24. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 27–28; Ratcliffe, Long Division, 64–69. Before 1828, Ratcliffe had found no clear relationship between support for internal improvements, taxation, and education and partisan identification.

25. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 26–30. See also John J. Wallis, Richard E. Sylla, and Arthur Grinath III, “Sovereign Debt and Repudiation: The Emerging-Market Debt Crisis in the U.S. States, 1839–1843,” NBER Working paper 10753 (September 20004), esp. 20–22.

26. Ohio Historical Society, The Governors of Ohio (Columbus, 1954), 24–26.Google Scholar

27. Taylor, Ohio, 131; Miller, History, 7–9.

28. Taylor, Ohio, 131–41; Miller, History, 67–71.

29. Cayton, Andrew R. L., Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio, 1986), 146.Google Scholar

30. Miller, History, 10–11, 19–20. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 141–46.

31. Ratcliffe, Politics of Long Division, 68, 113, 242–43.

32. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 146; Miller, History, 20–21. See also Kaestle, Pillars, 186; Cremin, Common School, 123–24.

33. In general, see Ratcliffe, Politics of Long Division, esp. the graphs on pp. 10–11 and the map on p. 315.

34. Cayton, Ohio, 57–58.

35. In general, see Kaestle, Pillars, chap. 1; Reese, Origins, chap. 1; Sun Go and Peter Lindert, “The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools,” NBER Working Paper 13335 (August 2007); Beadie, Nancy, “The Limits of Standardization and the Importance of Constituencies: Historical Tensions in the Relationship Between State Authority and Local Control,” in Balancing Local Control and State Responsibility for K-12 Education: 2000 Yearbook of the American Education Finance Association, ed. Theobald, N. and Malen, B. (Larchmont, N.Y., 2000), 47–91;Google Scholar Kett, Joseph, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to Present (New York, 1977), 18–21Google Scholar. See also Wayne Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago, 1982); Kaestle, “The Development of the Common School Systems in the States of the Old Northwest,” in “Schools and the Means of Education Shall Forever Be Encouraged”: A History of Education in the Old Northwest, ed. Paul H. Mattingly and Edward W. Stevens (Athens, Ohio, 1987), 31–43. For Ohio in particular, see E. E. White and T. W. Harvey, eds., A History of Education in the State of Ohio: A Centennial Volume (Columbus, 1876), chap. 2; Samuel Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874” (Ed.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1985), 30–47; Roseboom and Weisenburger, History of Ohio, 141–42; Weisenburger, The Passing of the Frontier, 1825–1850 (Columbus, 1968), 166–67; Shilling, D. C., “Pioneer Schools and School Masters,” in Education in the Ohio Valley Prior to 1840, ed. Bradford, J. E. (Columbus, 1916), 36–51.Google Scholar

36. Nancy Beadie and Kimberley Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York, 2002); Theodore R. Sizer, The Age of the Academies (New York, 1964). For Ohio, see White and Harvey, History of Education, chap. 4; Kenneth B. Henderson, “A History of the Academies of the Western Reserve, 1803–1890” (M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1936); W. W. Boyd, “Secondary Education in Ohio Previous to 1840,” in Education in the Ohio Valley, 118–34.

37. Beadie, “Limits of Standardization”; Kaestle, Pillars, chap. 1; Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (New York, 1980), chap. 1; Go and Lindert, “Curious Dawn.”

38. Kett, Rites of Passage; Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar.

39. Meyer, Heinz-Dieter “The Rise and Decline of the Common School, as an Institution: Taking ‘Myth and Ceremony’ Seriously,” in The New Institutionalism in Education, ed. Meyer and Brian Rowan (Albany, 2006), 51–66.Google Scholar The focus on norms is different than arguing, as do some scholars, that elites imposed common schools on an unwilling population. Instead, the argument here is that as more Americans experienced the common schools, they not only appreciated them, but came to see them as part of the fabric of American institutional life.

40. Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, 6, 33–40, conclude that the most important outcome of the common schools movement was not higher enrollment but an “intensification” in the time students spent receiving formal schooling.

41. White and Harvey, History of Education, 336.

42. Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar, argues that institutions are sustained in part through human norms—we re-create institutions because we need them to maintain a sense of order and thus we act in ways that reinforce existing institutions. In many ways, schools are ideal examples of Giddens’s case. We have come to expect schools to look and act in certain ways, and these assumptions are consistently re-created generation to generation in the minds of Americans.

43. Kaestle, Pillars, chaps. 4–5; Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York, 1980), parts 1 and 2; Cremin, Common School, 1–27, esp. 12–17, 73–76; Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, N.J., 1959).

44. For a recent discussion, see Charles L. Glenn, Contrasting Models of State and School: A Comparative Historical Study of Parental Choice and State Control (New York, 2011), xic–xxi.

45. Quoted in Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati, for the school year ending June 30, 1834 (Cincinnati: Daily Times Office, 1834), 5.

46. Stowe’s report reprinted in Knight, Edgar and Hall, Clifton, Readings in American Education History (New York, 1951), 248–316, quoted at 256–57, 307.Google Scholar

47. On the emergence of moral reform movements in the 1830s in Ohio, see Cayton, Ohio, chap. 2. More generally, see Young, Michael P., Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago, 2006)Google Scholar; Neem, Nation of Joiners, chap. 4.

48. Beecher, Lyman, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835)Google Scholar. For context, see Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of America, ed. S. Deborah Kang (New York, 2012), chap. 3.

49. Catharine Beecher, An Essay Concerning Slavery and Abolitionism, with reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia, 1837). See Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973).

50. Allen Oscar Hansen, Early Educational Leadership in the Ohio Valley (1932. Reprint: New York, 1969), 22.

51. Nathan Guilford, “Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools of Cincinnati, July 1st, 1852,” in Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools (Cincinnati, 1852), 18–59, at 19. For background on Guilford, see http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=149. For some context, see Aaron, Cincinnati, 163–69, 222–26.

52. Moe, Terry M., “The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure,” in Can the Government Govern?, ed. Chubb, John E. and Peterson, Paul E. (Washington, D.C., 1989), 267–329;Google Scholar Beadie, “Limits of Standardization.”

53. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 89–92.

54. Miller, History, 17–18; Taylor, History, 99–100.

55. Miller, History, 18.

56. Kaestle, Pillars, 186; Cremin, Common School, 122–24; Miller, History, 7–9, 19. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 122–25.

57. Miller, History, 33; Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 142–46.

58. Taylor, Ohio, 153.

59. Miller, History, 43.

60. Ibid., 11–13, 23–26.

61. Marcus, Plague of Strangers. See also Walter Glazer, Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community during the Pre–Civil War Period (Columbus, 1999); Aaron, Cincinnati, 163–69, 222–26; Nancy Jean Rosenbloom, “Cincinnati’s Common Schools: The Politics of Reform, 1829–1853” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1981), 74–118.

62. Weisenburger, Passing of the Frontier, 166,

63. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 37–51. Between 1840 and 1860, the board would increasingly be made up of professionals, including people with an expertise in education, while the city’s mercantile elite moved off the board and maintained oversight from their perches on the City Council. See Irwin F. Flack, “Who Governed Cincinnati? A Comparative Analysis of Government and Social Structure in a Nineteenth-Century River City, 1819–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1978), 261–62, 274–75.

64. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1844), 26–31.

65. Fourth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1833), 1–6.

66. Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1834), 10.

67. Sixteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1845), 7.

68. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 60–63.

69. Eleventh Annual Report of the Condition of the Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1840), 10. All dollar amounts rounded to nearest dollar.

70. Fourth Annual Report, 6.

71. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1846), 2. On annual reports, see Neem, Nation of Joiners, 86–90.

72. Fifth Annual Report, 3–4.

73. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1847), 4.

74. Twelfth Annual Report of the Condition of the Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1841), appendix C, 35.

75. Twenty-First Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1851), 3.

76. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 119–42.

77. For other urban districts, see the discussion of San Francisco and Chicago in Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York, 1985), chap. 2, and of New York in Kaestle, Evolution, and Diane Ravitch, Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (New York, 1974).

78. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1847), 12, 18.

79. Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools, to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1848), 8.

80. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 130–32.

81. Glazer, Cincinnati, 155.

82. Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools (Cincinnati, 1852), 113–14. See also Flack, “Who Governed Cincinnati?,” chap. 5.

83. Flack, “Who Governed Cincinnati?,” chap. 4, esp. 153–58 on education, makes the case that Cincinnati’s government was effective at providing social services to its citizens, and that education was by far the largest city service in terms of personnel, with 413 paid employees in 1860 (see tables in Flack, 139, 144). See Flack, 157, for the per-student cost.

84. Carpenter, Daniel, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001), 14–15.Google Scholar

85. Daily Cincinnati Commercial (13 January 1851), as quoted in Flack, “Who Governed Cincinnati?,” 182. For the City Council’s deference to the board, and the board’s growing influence, see Flack, 180–84, and chap. 5 more generally.

86. On rural America, see Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside (Lewiston, 1998), 47–54; Fuller, Old Country School, chap. 2; William A. Fischel, Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts (Chicago, 2009); Paul Theobald, Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918 (Carbondale, Ill., 1995); Tyack, David B., “The Tribe and the Common School: Community Control in Rural Education,” American Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1972): 3–19.Google ScholarFor local school committees in New York state, see Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (New York, 2010), 141–46.

87. Miller, History, 21.

88. White and Harvey, History of Education, 360–68; Hansen, Educational Leadership; Roman J. Schweikert, “The Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers: An Instrument in the Creation of a Profession” (Ed.D. diss., Teachers College, University of Cincinnati, 1971).

89. See Schweikert, “Western Literary Institute,” 61–83, quote at 67.

90. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 136–37; White and Harvey, History of Education, 368–91.

91. The phrase “imagined community” is drawn from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).

92. White and Harvey, History of Education, chap. 12; Sally Harris Wertheim, “Educational Periodicals: Propaganda Sheets for the Common Schools” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1970). For a discussion of how professional norms influence policy, see Glenn, Charles L., “Public Education Changes Partners,” Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (January 2001): 133–56.Google Scholar

93. Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All, 33; Welter, Popular Education.

94. Lindert, Peter, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2004), 1:105–7Google Scholar. See also Kaestle, Pillars, chap. 1; Sun Go, “The Rise and Centralization of American Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., U.C. Davis, 2009).

95. Schultz, Ronald, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York, 1993), 231–32Google Scholar; Welter, Popular Education, chaps. 3–4.

96. Miller, History, 11.

97. White and Harvey, History of Education, 445–49. The total school-aged population was listed as 468,812, suggesting that many children remained unserved or underserved.

98. Ratcliffe, “The Market Revolution and Party Alignments in Ohio, 1828–1840,” in Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1787–1861, ed. Jeffrey Brown and Cayton (Kent, Ohio, 1994), 99–116; Ratcliffe, Politics of Long Division; Stephen Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 1–24; Weisenburger, Passing of the Frontier, chaps. 8–10.

99. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era; Maizlish, Triumph, 1–24; Corps, “Republican Ideology,” chap. 4, 146–49; James R. Sharp, The Jacksonians versus the Banks: Politics in the States After the Panic of 1837 (New York, 1970), 123–89; William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit, 1972). For the general turn against government activism, see Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca, 2012), chap. 2.

100. Similar partisan debates over public canals took place around the nation. See John Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001).

101. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 166–67.

102. Ibid., 167–68.

103. Joel Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985).

104. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, chap. 11; Weisenburger, Passing of the Frontier, 110–18. The same early decisions set the state on a new path in the telegraph industry. See Starr, Creation of the Media; Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). See also Callen, Zachary, “Local Rail Innovations: Antebellum States and Policy Diffusion,” Studies in American Political Development 25, no. 2 (October 2011): 117–42.Google Scholar

105. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 297–98.

106. Ibid., 304–6; Cayton, Ohio, 54–56.

107. Constitution of 1851, articles 8 and 13. See Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 297–98.

108. John Joseph Wallis, “State Constitutional Reform and the Structure of Government Finance in the Nineteenth Century,” in Public Choice Interpretations of American Economic History, ed. Heckelman, Jac C. et al. (Boston, 2000), 33–52.Google Scholar

109. Constitution of 1851, article 6.

110. On the convention, see Taylor, Ohio, chap. 15; Welter, Popular Education, 115–16. For the majority and minority reports of the committee on education, see Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Ohio, 1850–51 (Columbus, 1851), 693–94, 720.

111. Lindert, Growing Public, 1:92. According to Cremin, Common School, 180, of the 502,826 white students enrolled in Ohio’s public schools in 1850, 484, 113 were in public facilities.

112. Miller, History, 32–33. Edgar Knight, Public Education in the South (Boston, 1922), 162, argued that “no feature of the public-school systems of the United States has rendered greater or more lasting service than permanent public-school endowments in destroying opposition to taxation for school purposes.”

113. Lucas quoted in Taylor, Ohio, 162–66.

114. Vance and Shannon quoted in Taylor, Ohio, 166–70.

115. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 66–67.

116. Taylor, Ohio, 191.

117. Kaestle, Pillars, 187; Miller, History, 11–13, 24–26. For a discussion of the 1838 laws and Lewis’s tenure, see White and Harvey, History of Education, chap. 8; Garofalo, “State Board,” 45–49.

118. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 168–69.

119. Neem, Nation of Joiners, 135–38.

120. Atwater, A History of the State of Ohio (1838), 285, as quoted in Garofalo, “State Board,” 50.

121. Taylor, Ohio, 182–84.

122. Neem, Nation of Joiners, chap. 6; Gerald Leonard, Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois (Chapel Hill, 2002).

123. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era, 169; On the 1838 and 1839 elections, see Holt, Michael F., Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 75, 100–101Google Scholar.

124. Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, has identified reputation as one factor that protects bureaucratic autonomy. Had Lewis remained in office longer, the state might have continued on the path toward state oversight. Instead, Lewis’s tenure was insufficient. In the face of an economic crisis and the Democrats’ broader goals, the cost of policy reversal, once Lewis had retired, was affordable.

125. Kaestle, Pillars, 154–55.

126. Ibid., 187; Miller, History, 26–27; Cayton, Ohio, 58–59; Taylor, Ohio, 280–87.

127. Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 176; Maizlish, Sectional, 124; Edgar Allan Holt, Party Politics in Ohio, 1840–1850 (Columbus, 1930), 293–386; Roseboom and Weisenburger, History of Ohio, 146. Cincinnati long resisted efforts to establish black schools. See Joe William Trotter Jr., River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington, Ky., 1998), 33, 47; Matthews, “Black Educational Experience,” 57–61; Maizlish, “Ohio and the Rise of Sectional Politics,” in Pursuit of Public Power, 117–43, at 132–35.

128. Miller, History, 27–28; Taylor, Ohio, 189–90; Roseboom, History of the State of Ohio: The Civil War Era, 1850–1871 (Columbus, 1944), 260–61.

129. Taylor, Ohio, 190–91.

130. White and Harvey, History of Education, 34–35; Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools (Columbus, 1854), 6.

131. Maizlish, Triumph, 182–216; William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York, 1988).

132. The 1853 law is reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 251–79. My discussion of the act draws on Taylor, Ohio, chap. 16; William Howard Ketcham, “H. H. Barney’s Administration of the Ohio Education Law of 1853” (M.A. thesis, The Ohio State University, 1937), 18–29; White and Harvey, History of Education, chap. 1.

133. Taylor, Ohio, 217–20.

134. In fact, the new constitution made the governor’s top secretaries elected, providing more popular, and partisan, control over state agencies. See 1851 constitution, Art 3, sec 1.

135. Daily Ohio Statesman, 17 September 1853, as quoted in Ketcham, “Barney’s Administration,” 38–39. On the election, see Rosenbloom, “Common Schools,” 137–40; Ketcham, “Barney’s Administration,” 33–41. For the broader political context, see Maizlish, Triumph, 170–86. In some ways, the effort to ensure political/partisan control over a bureaucracy that Democrats had previously abolished reflects what Moe calls “the politics of structural choice,” in which opponents of a particular kind of policy seek to ensure that bureaucratic agencies have limited autonomy and are accountable to politics. See Moe, “Politics of Bureaucratic Structure.”

136. Nelson, William E., Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar; Moe, “Politics of Bureaucratic Structure.”

137. Annual Report of the State Commissioner (1854), 7–8; Ketcham, “Barney’s Administration,” 18–20. On the grievances, see Taylor, Ohio, 220–21.

138. This created a system of divided authority, which led to tensions between local directors and the township board over the remainder of the nineteenth century. See Nelson L. Bossing, History of Educational Legislation in Ohio from 1851 to 1925 (Columbus, 1931), 30–36.

139. Law reprinted in Taylor, Ohio, 251–79.

140. “School Supervision,” Ohio Journal of Education 1 (1852): 29.

141. “The School System of Ohio,” Ohio Journal of Education 1 (1852): 79–84.

142. On the role of the Ohio State Teachers Association, see Ketcham, “Barney’s Administration, 9–11; Taylor, Ohio, 348.

143. Ibid., 244.

144. Weisenburger, Passing of the Frontier, 166.

145. Barney, H. H., Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools to the Governor of the State of Ohio. For the year 1854 (Columbus, 1855), 3–5Google Scholar.

146. Numbers from Cremin, National Experience, 182–85.

147. Taylor, Ohio, iv.

148. Tyack, One Best System; Thelen, Kathleen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.