Education in the Age of Pamphlets

Writing to Henry Lee in 1825, Thomas Jefferson famously described the Declaration of Independence as having neither “originality of principle or sentiment” but as being “an expression of the American mind” (Jefferson). “All American whigs thought alike on these subjects,” he said—but why did they do so? What kind of education prevailed in the colonies in the years leading up to 1776 and how did that prepare the colonists to be the kind of people who could find the logic of the Declaration “the common sense of the subject”? What can we say about the educations men like Franklin, Adams, and Madison received that made them fit to be founders—the education “most” Americans were receiving in the period that made them fit to be self-governing?

The earliest lessons undoubtedly came from the Bible and its many expositors, for the ability to read the Scriptures was the primary motivation for literacy throughout the period. Many colonial governments mandated that both boys and girls receive basic instruction in reading (most frequently), writing, and numeracy skills. Small children (male and female) were generally educated at home until approximately the age of eight, and then either put into apprenticeships, supplied with a tutor or placed in the care of a local gentleman or gentlewoman who fulfilled the role of academician. Apprenticeship agreements for both boys and girls typically specified that the indentured receive further general education, in addition to their training as a tradesperson. Opportunities were obviously greater for the children of free white parents, but schools for free and enslaved blacks operated throughout the period and records suggest they were well attended. Franklin, who was largely self-taught, established a subscription library in Philadelphia to help others access books. It was a great success, he tells us: “Reading became fashionable, and our people, having no public Amusements to divert their Attention from study became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observed by Strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.” (Franklin, 78) Although such things are difficult to measure, as nearly as scholars can ascertain, Franklin’s observation held true throughout the colonies, establishing a public culture centered around reading and the discussion of ideas that encompassed all classes.

For young men with the means and inclination, opportunities for advanced formal education were available: some traveled back to England, but in the colonies, Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), King’s College (Columbia), the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), Rhode Island College (Brown), Queen’s College (Rutgers), and Dartmouth were all founded before 1776. Such formal study was unavailable to women, but it was not unheard of for a lady of means to host younger friends and relations in her household and to oversee their growth in literature and learning as well as in the skills of housewifery. Some young women took it upon themselves to further their studies under the tutelage of trusted male advisors, often engaging in spirited and lengthy correspondences with them over a course of readings. Benjamin Franklin, for example, served in such a capacity for his acquaintance Mary (Polly) Stevenson, and the two developed a warm and lasting friendship centered in no small measure around their discussion of books: “your Reading…may occasion either some Questions for further Information or some Observations …those will furnish Matter for your Letters to me, and, in consequence, of mine also to you” (Franklin to Stevenson).

America before the revolution had a wide-spread base of potential readers who could be expected to interact with texts not just as a work-a-day skill but as a means of engaging with the broader world and ideas of the day. Self-education through the reading and discussion of newspapers (which often included what we would classify as literary and not strictly news items), magazines, pamphlets, and books took place everywhere from private parlors to public houses. Circulating libraries in larger towns made it possible for those who could not afford to purchase printed materials to access them at a relatively low cost, and then as now, friends and family lent books to one another to broaden the circle of pleasure and knowledge.

Habits such as private reading, keeping commonplace books of quotations and observations, and discussion were not just a means of ongoing self-education, but also helped fill the hours after the day’s labors were over, providing access to an infinite variety of amusements in a time when few other alternatives existed. Writing to a college friend in 1772, Madison commended him on having taken up “History and the Science of Morals for your winter’s study” (Madison). The observation is made so casually, and other remarks of a similar nature occur with such frequency in the writings of the period that it is reasonable to assume that individuals of a certain class (or with aspirations to it) made a habit of pursuing such independent projects of self-improvement, with the goal, as Madison observed, of “settling the principles and refining the Judgment as well as in enlarging Knowledge & correcting the imagination.” (As an aside, it is worth noting that in the same letter, Madison informed his friend that much of his own time was taken up in “instruct[ing] my brothers and Sisters in some of the first rudiments of literature,” a reminder that although we speak most often of the founding fathers, these accomplishments were not entirely restricted by sex.)

For the remainder of this essay, I will focus chiefly on what we can glean from the educations of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison. Together, the three men fairly represent the entirety of the revolutionary generation. Franklin, born in 1706 to a relatively poor craftsman in Boston, was already an old man when the Stamp Act was passed in 1765. That same year, Adams, born in 1735 to a successful but not wealthy farming family, was just coming into his prime when he controversially defended the colonists’ claims against the crown in A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law. And Madison, born in 1751, was still several years away from enrolling at The College of New Jersey (Princeton). Yet despite the nearly fifty-year span between their young adulthoods, there are some key similarities in their educational experiences. All three were, broadly speaking, taught to read men and history: to steep their minds in the study of the leading characters of the past, their virtues and vices, and to consider how men might flourish or fail in the work of building communities great and small. Such inquiries might be undertaken in the company of others, or alone with one’s books.

In his Autobiography, Franklin recounts how his father regularly invited “some sensible friend or neighbor” to join the family around the dinner table, “and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life” (Franklin, Autobiography, 10). Likewise, Adams observed that “wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion” (Adams, 21). The central theme of Adams’s Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law is that free inquiry—the root of all genuine education—reinforces whatever latent goodness resided in the hearts of men and makes them better able to practice self-government.

Like the majority of their counterparts, Franklin, Adams, and Madison were raised in conventionally Christian households, and from a young age inculcated in the habits of regular Sunday service attendance and family worship. (Indeed, Adams and Madison both briefly considered ministerial careers, although in the end, neither was so inclined.) Their worldviews were, broadly speaking, shaped by the doctrines of Christian theology, particularly on the question of human nature. All three men evinced a deep respect for Christian ethics as a system for inculcating the virtues and habits necessary for self-government. Adams cited “all sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian” to have “declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue” (Adams, 287-288). Consequently, he and his contemporaries devoted a considerable portion of their reading to the study of virtue. Their educations were, in this sense, deeply practical, aimed at the cultivation of the conditions under which human freedom and dignity might flourish. The man thus educated would better understand his own tendency toward vice or virtue and, in pursuit of his own good, at governing himself apart from external coercion. (Consider Franklin’s well-known scheme for practicing the virtues as recounted in the Autobiography.) Such individuals would also develop a high view of the human person as a moral agent, greater empathy toward others, and a capacity for justice as well as civic friendship—attributes that made them capable first of self-governing and then of participating in the broader government of the community.

To accomplish this deeply philosophical education, eighteenth century Americans read widely, searching for insights to the nature of man both as an individual and as a social creature.

As a young man, Adams recorded reading Bunyan, Milton, Tully, Cicero, Ovid, Addison, Gordon and Trenchard, Tillot, Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, Hutchinson, and Shakespeare among other authors. When Madison studied with  Donald Robertson in Virginia,      he had access to volumes by a range of Greek and Roman authors (Plato, Herodotus, Caesar, Tacitus, Plutarch) as well as works by Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Locke. Jefferson mentions the widespread influence of “elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc.” Under Witherspoon at Princeton, Madison would have continued his reading in the classics and the moderns, heard lectures based on the works of the Scottish Enlightenment in natural and moral philosophy, as well as taken up courses in the sciences, rhetoric, logic, mathematics. And lest we think “oh, well, that was just the elites” consider that in his Autobiography, Franklin wrote “I considered my newspaper also as another means of communicating instruction, and in that view frequently reprinted in it extracts from the Spectator and other moral writers, and sometimes published little pieces of my own which had been first composed for Reading in our Junto.” (Franklin, 96-97). Franklin’s aims for public reading were lofty: His Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania ambitiously called for scholars to be taught “those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental”—a regretful concession to the inescapable fact that “art is long and their time is short.” (Franklin, Proposals) Given that, he said the bulk of the scholar’s time ought to be devoted above all to the study of history for “the natural tendency of reading good history…to fix in the minds of youth deep impressions of the beauty and usefulness of virtue of all kinds.” (Franklin, Proposals)

Perhaps most of all, what made this sort of education suitable for the leaders of a revolution was that it did, as it was meant to do, free their minds. Describing instruction at Princeton, Samuel Blair wrote: “IN the instruction of the youth, care is taken to cherish a spirit of liberty, and free enquiry; and not only to permit, but even encourage their right of private judgment.” (Blair, 28) Although the books and subjects studied were important (one cannot grow to maturity eating only pablum), neither can one be force-fed an athlete’s diet and expect to win the race. Exercise is essential,  and above all what enabled the founding generation to be revolutionary in their thinking and, eventually, in their actions was the mode of their education. The nourishment of the idea to the mind was achieved through an engaged reading of a text, and then it was digested—internalized, tested and related to other pieces of knowledge in one’s own mind. This process of digestion might happen in writing, in the course of a leisurely conversation with others, or in more formal discursive settings such as clubs. As they worked their way through texts alone, and in conversation, they created a community of letters that transcended socio-economic boundaries, forming social networks that would prove essential to the organized resistance to Crown policies in the lead up to the revolution. The discursive aspects of colonial learning meant that these young men learned to rely upon one another for support and encouragement, cultivated the rhetorical skills necessary to communicate and defend their opinions, and to challenge each other civilly in academic disputations—skills that contributed to their later success as civic leaders. Americans in the eighteenth century engaged with ideas in ways that accustomed them to the habits of independent reflection, analysis, and questioning necessary for self-government. The education that enabled our revolutionary leaders to succeed was not merely for utility and neither was it for ornament. It was for the nourishment and flourishing of the human soul in virtue and the promotion of the common good.