Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
claimed thirty students; four years later, it claimed at least seventy. The Moravian female seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, tripled its enrollment between 1787 and 1790. One year after it opened its doors, the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia enrolled one hundred pupils. Susanna Rowson’s Boston school opened with five students in 1799; by the end of that year, it had more than a hundred.16
Analogous figures for male academies are both more elusive and less dramatic. The inaugural class of the Moravian Nazareth Hall in Pennsylvania, for example, included eleven students. Fifteen years later, in 1785, the school enrolled forty-five, and by its fiftieth reunion, the school boasted of educating more than eight hundred men and boys—an average of about sixteen new students per year. By 1803, Massachusetts’s preeminent Phillips Academy enrolled a mere fifty-seven students.17 These numbers, which pale next to those for female academies, probably testify more to supply than to demand. Young men could choose from a greater number of academies; in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, no one institution was likely to secure enormous enrollment increases. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these schools did broaden education’s reach by serving a population that extended well beyond the college-bound sons of the elite. For example, when Josiah Quincy, the product of a prominent New England family and the future president of Harvard University, entered Phillips Academy at the precocious age of six, he sat next to a thirty-six-year-old Revolutionary War veteran.18
Indeed, one of the most regular registers of academies’ popular appeal can be found in the chorus of complaints that they had become all too popular. As one critic explained in 1791, the “easiness of access, and the smallness of the expense,” tempted farmers and mechanics to imagine brilliant and altogether unrealistic futures for their sons.19 He need not have worried. Notwithstanding the striking increase in early national academy enrollments, only a minority of American women and men gained admission. Indeed, that minority may have been as small as 6 percent of the population. The cost of tuition and board, questions about the market value of an advanced education, and lingering suspicions that individual ambition owed less to virtue than to vice all ensured that the vast majority of Americans never pursued advanced education. And academies, for their part, were careful to pitch themselves to potential students who were, at the very least, “respectable”—a term that by definition excluded entire categories of people, most obviously African Americans and members of the laboring class.20
Although most Americans would never attend an academy, the public prints relentlessly cast those who did as exemplars of republican virtue, as citizens who served a unified public interest. Lofty claims about the value of education, delivered to students and then published for the benefit of the reading public, collapsed a very select group of women and men into a depiction of the nation as a whole. Female scholars, for example, may well have been drawn to academies by a love of learning or by the need to acquire practical, even marketable, skills. But they were celebrated for their salutary influence over the nation’s manners. As the Philadelphia merchant, politician, and man-of-letters John Swanwick explained to students at the Young Ladies’ Academy in 1787, “the luster of your examples, and the intelligence of your minds” would “dispose others to similar qualifications.” Addressing the senior class of the Philadelphia Academy, James Abercrombie assumed that the purpose of the young men’s education was the fulfillment of civic duty. Individual ambition played no part in Abercrombie’s depiction of the liberal education afforded by the academy. Instead, schooling taught these soon-to-be-citizens how a “strong and energetic Government” and “undefiled Religion” together produced “real liberty.” More than that, it taught them how “securely to curb the phrensy of faction, and effectually restrain the ‘madness of the people.’”21 By acquiring an academy education (at least as described in the prints), students pursued a distinctly republican, deeply politicized form of virtue—for themselves and for the nation.
This discourse was never the mechanical reflection of a social fact. It was also a charged fantasy of nation formation. Oafish farm boys with their comically bad Latin; evenhanded young men of affairs who could be trusted to rise above faction, pulling the rest of the electorate up with them; serene young ladies who elevated the nation’s conversation before marriage and reared its citizens afterward: These were stock characters in a national discourse that used the academy movement to articulate an idealized, albeit contested, picture of the republic. Representations of male students marked the conservative boundaries of acceptable political culture. They reduced the threat of “leveling” to a joke and encouraged readers’ faith in the handful of good men who could and would secure the republic and lead the nation to greatness.
Or consider the remarkably energetic discussion of women’s education and female intellect that filled up the pages of early national newspapers and magazines, to say nothing of the catalogs, prospectuses, exercises, and broadsides published by academies themselves. Unlike discussions about men’s educations, which danced around questions about class, discussions about women’s education generally focused on the role of female intellect in a republic. Here, the issue was not so much educating the wrong girl as giving the right girl the wrong training. Should she learn rhetoric or French? Read history or novels? Learn to dance or to paint?22 Certainly, the endless and endlessly repetitive discussions of the “fair sex” served as a response to the growing numbers of young women who attended academies and as a vehicle for debating women’s social and political roles. But those same discussions also used the expansion of women’s education to demonstrate the distinctive virtue of the American republic.
Commentators routinely appealed to philosophical and literary conventions that conflated women’s status and national character. They gestured toward a political theory that located republics, including the American one, as landmarks on the journey from barbarism to civilization. John P. Brace, Sarah Pierce’s nephew and right-hand man, regularly reminded Litchfield students that they had been spared the cruel indignities piled upon the women of Greenland, China, and Burma. They knew only second-hand what their “sex once suffered when the night of ignorance covered the world.” Like the tales of “Oriental” seraglios that proved so popular in the 1790s, texts that focused on women’s education implicitly and explicitly situated the United States on a spectrum of civilization bounded by heathen primitivism on one end and aristocratic decadence on the other. As Mary Magdalen M’Intosh put it in an 1825 commencement essay when comparing American and Turkish women, “They were educated as slaves; we as the legitimate heirs and children of Freedom.”23 Indeed, the remarkable prominence of educated women in early national discourse may have owed less to demographics of academy enrollments or even to battles over gender equality than to the powerful resonance of the appropriately educated woman as a symbol of American virtue.
The elements of a republican education were never imagined as a series of intellectual abstractions. When academies sought to turn students into the pillars of the republic, they prepared them to assume roles as spectators and players within a national spectacle. In effect, an academy education furnished young men and women with the skills to execute an infinite number of performances in the larger world. There, students would be judged not only on their ability to declaim in Latin and read a map, but also on whether they had internalized the moral example set by Cato and how well they knew the nation’s geography. There, students would become objects of emulation, standard-bearers whose virtues would be reproduced across space and over time. And there, students would use the heightened perception and keen discretion they had acquired at school to monitor the nation’s progress, keeping a sharp eye out for the rogues and coquettes, the factions and demagogues that threatened the republic. Like virtue itself, the subjectivities and social relations fostered by academies depended on the cultivation of sensibility and the exercise of taste. They were, in other words, aestheticized. For that reason, a concern with aesthetics—broadly defined and embedded in a rich visual culture—pervaded curricula at academies throughout the early national period.
Learning Taste
Taste was central to the rhetorical study that anchored the curricula of the overwhelming majority of early national academies. Classes in English language and literatures (variously called “composition,” “composition and rhetoric,” or “composition and criticism”) aimed to teach students more than the mechanics of grammar and the rudiments