Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Crockett’s natural writing style is a far cry from the carefully placed regionalisms and occasional slight misspellings of his autobiography. Crockett’s audience was delighted with the book’s colorful frontier idiom, but they would not have wanted to read page after page of real spelling and grammar mistakes.

  Crockett was canny enough to realize this. The Narrative gives readers a taste of the Tennessee backwoods, but a smoother version than the raw natural product. The book’s language aims for a version of Crockett’s authentic speech that educated people would find acceptable. Even folk heroes had to meet certain linguistic standards—at least if they wanted to be taken seriously as writers and political figures.

  * * *

  One strand of American culture celebrated uniquely American dialects, but a more dominant strand embraced grammar standards as an important part of being educated and socially mobile. Andrew Jackson and David Crockett were popular figures. Nonetheless, Jackson’s linguistic weaknesses were subject to scathing criticism, and Crockett felt the need to tidy up his natural speech before publication. In spite of superficial appearances, early nineteenth-century Americans valued proper grammar.

  The significance of grammar training is also obvious from the fact that not everyone had equal access to it. Until the Revolution, females were one deprived group. During most of the eighteenth century, education for girls was spotty at best. They were not always allowed to attend school. When they did, they were taught separately from boys and limited to brief classes at the beginning or end of the day. Most girls, even those from the upper classes, learned only basic reading and writing.

  Outside the upper classes, a majority of women remained illiterate. Others learned to read, but not to write. Women didn’t need to write as much as men did—they didn’t write business letters or keep records. Reading was a more practical skill. It allowed women to read the Bible, or read aloud to their children. (Many lower-class men were also illiterate, but the numbers were not nearly as large as for women. Families of every class often included a literate husband and an illiterate, or a semi-literate, wife.)19

  Grammar studies were out of reach for all except those rare privileged girls who received a masculine private education. One such was Aaron Burr’s daughter, Theodosia. Burr’s commitment to equal education for girls meant that his daughter learned Latin and Greek, as well as English grammar and composition, at an early age, but his idea of what constituted a suitable female education was very much in the minority. While Burr was away from home in the 1790s as a senator from New York, he wrote almost daily letters to Theodosia. He advised her on what to study next and critiqued the spelling, grammar, and style of her letters to him. His letter of January 8, 1794, instructs his eleven-year-old daughter, “Learn the difference between then and than. You will soonest perceive it by translating them into Latin.”20

  By the turn of the nineteenth century, young women’s prospects for learning grammar had improved. Nearly two hundred female-only institutions sprang up between 1790 and 1830.21 These new schools usually offered a greater range of subjects than they would have earlier. Traditionally, daughters of the upper classes who attended private academies had been taught literacy and simple arithmetic, but spent much of their day learning genteel accomplishments such as music, dancing, drawing, and needlework. The new schools added more serious subjects, including classical and modern languages, rhetoric, and English grammar.

  The belief that girls should learn grammar was still a novelty in 1782, the year that Noah Webster started his school in Sharon, Connecticut. Webster mentioned the issue specifically in the newspaper advertisement announcing the school’s opening. The ad deplores “the little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females, even among people of rank and fortune,” and promises that Webster’s school will give full attention to the education of young ladies as well as gentlemen.22

  At around the same time as Webster was starting his school, Caleb Bingham, a teacher in a Boston girls’ school, brought out The Young Lady’s Accidence. (Accidence is a term for a beginning-level grammar book.) Bingham’s book was “designed principally for the use of young learners, more especially those of the fair sex, though proper for either.”23 The author was evidently thinking of his own pupils, but he must have recognized a growing niche market as well when he specified that his grammar book was mainly for girls.

  Bingham doesn’t say what makes the book particularly suitable for females. The content is virtually the same as that of any other late-eighteenth-century grammar book. It is unusually short at sixty pages and includes only a few footnotes, and Bingham may have assumed that these features would make it easier for “young learners, especially those of the fair sex” to grasp. In any case, the book met with the public’s approval. In the first few decades after its publication, Webster’s speller was the only language textbook that sold better.

  Increasing numbers of girls from the lower classes were also studying English grammar after 1800. The decades following the war saw a push for state-supported schooling for children of both sexes. The main purpose of common schools was to train boys and girls who couldn’t afford a private education to become useful citizens. Advanced subjects such as the natural sciences were seldom offered because they didn’t have a practical application. According to proponents of widespread general education, English grammar did. They believed that encouraging students to learn and use a uniform version of English helped turn them into patriotic citizens. The same democratic principles that called for basic education for girls also supported grammar study.

  Those in favor of female education frequently emphasized the point that well-educated girls made better Americans. Girls weren’t being offered improved educations for their own benefit, but to turn them into more rational companions and more qualified mothers. Revolutionary leader and influential physician Benjamin Rush was a prominent supporter of this notion. He spelled out the practical aspects of educating young women in his 1787 address to visitors at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia. His speech outlined the sort of education that he believed was most suitable for girls.

  Rush began by declaring that girls’ education should be tailored to the “situation, employments, and duties” that fell to most American women. Americans’ tendency to make early marriages shortened the time available for schooling, so Rush thought lessons should focus on the areas that provided obvious advantages. The duties of most wives would include acting as “stewards and guardians” of their husbands’ property; ensuring a good education for their children, even if they didn’t do all the teaching themselves; and most important of all, instructing their sons “in the principles of liberty and government.”24 Female education, Rush believed, should prepare young women for these tasks.

  Rush then outlined the subjects that he thought were most essential for girls. First on his list was English grammar. He explained, “She should not only read, but speak and spell [the English language] correctly. And, to enable her to do this, she should be taught the English grammar, and be frequently examined in applying its rules in common conversation.”25 Other areas of study that Rush suggested included penmanship, bookkeeping, vocal music, dancing, and the kind of general interest reading that would qualify a young woman to be “an agreeable companion for a sensible man.” Grammar study came first though. By teaching girls to comprehend good writing and to be articulate themselves, it underpinned most of the other subjects.

  While women’s chances to learn grammar improved greatly during the early nineteenth century, those for African Americans remained elusive. In the 1820s, around 233,000 free blacks lived in the United States, mostly in cities. Like whites, they had better educational opportunities after the Revolution. Charitable groups such as the Quakers operated a number of “African free schools,” meant to provide freed slaves with a basic education. African Americans also set up their own tuition-charging schools in cities like Boston and New York. They were normally excluded from public sch
ools, although in a few cities local school committees provided minimal funding for separate schools.26

  A basic education did not mean the same thing for black children as for white children. Specifically, it did not include grammar studies. As with other public schools, the main point of African free schools was to turn students into useful citizens. Those organizing the free schools argued that because most free blacks were restricted to menial employment—cleaning houses, waiting tables, polishing boots—higher subjects such as grammar and rhetoric were a waste of time. In many places the committees expressly forbade teachers to offer English grammar to African American students.

  One African American who clearly understood the power of grammar was David Walker. Best known for his rousing seventy-six-page antislavery pamphlet An Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World, Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1796. His mother was one of the few free black women living in Wilmington and his father was a slave. Little is known of his early life or education. Sometime between 1810 and 1820, Walker moved to Charleston, South Carolina. His commitment to abolition almost certainly started there, when he joined an African Methodist-Episcopal church whose members were active against slavery. By the early 1820s he embarked on travels that took him, in his words, “through a considerable portion of these United States.” He probably spent time in several southern states before settling in Boston in 1825. At some point along the way, he educated himself, a process that included memorizing Murray’s Grammar.

  Walker started a used clothing business in Boston and married a local woman. He immersed himself in the community. In a short time he had gained a name as an antislavery activist and a community leader. He joined Boston’s African Mason’s Lodge. He also became a member of the African Methodist-Episcopal church headed by the outspoken abolitionist Rev. Samuel Snowden. In 1829, at the age of thirty-three, he published his Appeal.

  Walker’s An Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World is both an outraged indictment of black oppression by whites and a call to fellow African Americans to fight for their rightful place as citizens. It lays out in fiercely eloquent language what Walker sees as the chief causes of black wretchedness. Among the more obvious evils stemming from slavery and the lack of civil rights, he names ignorance as a major source of misery. He exhorts his readers, “You have to prove to the Americans and the world that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented.… Remember to let the aim of your labours among your brethren … be the dissemination of education.”27

  To Walker, the most devastating evidence of ignorance is the lack of grammatical knowledge. “It is lamentable,” he writes, “that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket.” He cautions against imagining that being able to read or “to scribble tolerably well” is the same as being educated. He tells the story of an elderly man who boasts that his adult son has a good education, saying, “He can write as well as any white man.” Walker then questions him: “Did your son learn … the width and depth of English Grammar?” When the man replies in the negative, Walker tells him, “Your son … has hardly any learning at all.”28

  He ends his discussion of education by relating “the very heart-rending fact” that he has examined schoolboys and young men in various parts of the country “in the most simple parts of Murray’s English Grammar, and not more than one in thirty was able to give a correct answer.” He has found that barely five in one hundred are able to correct false grammar. Part of the problem is the difficulty of acquiring grammatical learning. A young man of Walker’s acquaintance who has been attending a Boston school under a white schoolmaster tells him, “My master would never allow me to study grammar.” The local school committee, says the young man, “would not allow any but the white children to study grammar.”29

  David Walker would certainly have rejected any suggestion that he should adopt a more natural speech style. He recognized that a command of standard grammar was a powerful social advantage. So did the white school committees that tried to restrict its teaching.

  African American leaders had particular cause to be concerned about education in the early nineteenth century. At that time, most whites who rejected slavery, or who believed that it would eventually end, also favored resettlement of free blacks outside the United States. A number of political leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson, supported colonization. In 1816 the American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded to further the cause. ACS members argued that freed slaves would lead happier lives in Africa because racism and their own limitations would keep them from fitting into American society. As evidence they pointed to African Americans’ supposed intellectual shortcomings and lack of education. Walker wrote his Appeal partly in response to these arguments.30

  Another response was the New York–based Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper. Freedom’s Journal began publication in 1827, two years before Walker wrote the Appeal, and he became the paper’s Boston agent. In the first issue, the editors explain why they intend to make education one of their main topics. Those hostile to the black community, they write, “enlarge upon the least trifle which tends to the discredit of any person of colour.” In the editors’ view, most of the negative behaviors that people attribute to African Americans stem from a lack of early education. Therefore, they assure readers, “Useful knowledge of every kind … shall find a ready admission into our columns.”31

  Articles on education feature frequently among the weekly paper’s four or six pages of domestic and foreign news, marriage announcements, poetry, meeting notices, and offers to buy used clothing. Besides discussions on education, nearly every issue carries at least one notice of a school about to open. The first several issues advertise that B. F. Hughes plans to open a school for children of both sexes in the basement of New York’s St. Philip’s church. Subjects offered will include reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and English grammar. The cost is $2 to $4 per quarter.

  Later issues carry ads for other schools. While some are for children, others are evening schools for adults. All mention English grammar as one subject on offer. One teacher, a Mr. Gold, offers nothing but grammar. His advertisement runs under the title “English Grammar” and promises to teach grammar “upon a new and improved plan by which a pupil of ordinary capacity may obtain a correct knowledge of the principles of the English language.”32 Grammar was central enough to education to call for a class of its own.

  After Freedom’s Journal stopped publication in 1829, one of its editors, Samuel Cornish, started The Rights of All. This paper, which lasted only one year, published Walker’s Appeal over several issues. Walker circulated his essay in other ways as well. Sailors, both black and white, brought stacks of copies to their ports of call all along the Atlantic Coast. There they handed the pamphlets to local ministers or circulated them among the free black and slave populations. Those who were literate read them aloud to crowds of people who were not.

  Three editions of the pamphlet came out within the year. Wherever it was distributed, this strongly worded call to action frightened slave owners and other whites, while blacks, in the words of one newspaper article, rejoiced in its principles “as if it were a star in the east, guiding them to freedom and emancipation.”33 Walker’s emphasis on the need for self-education must surely have been one of the items that frightened whites. Shortly after the pamphlet’s appearance, state governments took steps to make black educational opportunities even narrower. Formerly, slaves had sometimes been taught to read and write, but by the 1830s it was against the law to do so in the southern states. In the North, African Americans continued to be limited to separate, poorly funded public schools. Few of those schools taught higher subjects like rhetoric and grammar.

  David Walker did not live long enough to see the f
ull impact of his pamphlet. He died of tuberculosis in September 1830 during an epidemic that swept through Boston. His infant daughter had succumbed to the disease a week earlier. His son, Edward, was born after Walker died.

  Edward (also called Edwin) must have believed in the possibilities of self-education as strongly as his father did. He attended Boston public schools as a child and later became a successful leatherworker. Then he advanced further through his own reading. During his activities as an abolitionist in the 1850s, he acquired Sir William Blackstone’s classic legal treatise Commentaries on the Law of England. The book inspired him to study law. He passed the Massachusetts bar exam in 1861, becoming one of the first African Americans to be admitted to the bar in that state. In 1866 he became one of the first two African Americans elected to the Massachusetts legislature.

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  Thirty-two years after Andrew Jackson took office, another man from a humble background was elected president. Like Jackson, Abraham Lincoln grew up on the western frontier. Lincoln’s family, like Jackson’s, was poor and undistinguished. Lincoln’s school days were even briefer than Jackson’s, amounting by his own estimate to less than a year. Like Old Hickory, Honest Abe projected a rustic image. This led his political enemies to smear him as an ignorant bumpkin who lacked grammar skills. In fact, Abraham Lincoln is the prime example of an American who rose from modest beginnings to the highest rung of the social ladder with the help of grammar books.

  Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, on a small farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. The area was sparsely settled and living conditions were harsh. Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was a carpenter and farmer who gradually acquired substantial land, but later lost it through disputed land titles. Thomas Lincoln was apparently literate, but not educated. Neighbors remembered him as a steady, dependable man, but unlettered, and Lincoln once commented that his father “suffered greatly for want of an education.” His mother, the former Nancy Hanks, was “passionately fond of reading” and taught her son to read the Bible. Like so many women of the time, however, she could not write.34