Education, social capital and state formation in comparative historical perspective: preliminary investigations

Abstract

The relationship between education and state formation in the United States differed from that in other countries in ways that have yet to be adequately accounted for in comparative and theoretical literatures. Specifically, in the northern United States, very high levels of mass school attendance and funding were achieved prior to and outside state initiative. Although this distinctive history of educational development in the US has been noted by scholars, existing literatures still leave largely unresolved two salient questions following from this fact: (1) What factors facilitated the earlier and greater expansion of mass education in the northern US in the absence of direct state intervention? and (2) What was the significance of this early expansion for the process of state formation itself? This article addresses these questions by juxtaposing an intensive case study of the relationship between education and state formation in New York State in the early republican era, 1790–1840, against reigning comparative historical accounts of such relationships. In the process, two factors are identified that promoted education expansion in the northern US that so far have received little attention in the comparative literature: access to corporate legal power and the distribution of wealth. Finally, it is suggested that the substantial social, financial and political capital commanded by schools prior to state intervention had a significant impact on the process of state formation in the US.

Keywords:

• mass education
• state formation
• social capital
• comparative history
• northern United States
• nineteenth century
• market revolution
• economic development
• market‐based schools
• religious disestablishment
• voluntary organisation
• corporate legal power
• distribution of wealth

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented as part of a panel, “The Transnational Dissemination of Ideas in Early Nineteenth‐Century Education Reforms.” The author would like to thank fellow participants in that session for the stimulation of their work: Anthony DiMascio, Meri Clark, Ben Justice, and especially Kim Tolley, who organised the session, first introduced the author to Margaret Archer’s work (discussed at some length below), and always challenges her thinking.

Notes

¹A summary of this argument appears in Nancy Beadie, “Education and the Creation of Capital: or What I have Learned from Following the Money,” History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Feb.): 1–29. The larger study will appear as Nancy Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (NY: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

²Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), 181–87.

³Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal and David Strang, “Construction of the First Mass Education Systems in Nineteenth‐Century Europe,” Sociology of Education 62, no. 4 (October, 1989): 277–88. Soysal and Strang’s work is summarised in Pavla Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 185–86. It is Miller who coined the phrases “statist construction”, “societal construction” and “rhetorical construction” to describe their findings.

⁴Green, Education and State Formation, 308–09.

⁵Soysal and Strang, “Construction of the First Mass Education Systems.”

⁶Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 87–127.

⁷Vincent Carpentier, “Public Expenditures on Education and Economic Growth in the USA in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Comparative Perspective,” Paedagogica Historica 42, no. 6 (December 2006): 683–706.

⁸Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy, 187.

⁹Lindert, Growing Public, 121.

¹⁰Green, Education and State Formation, 308–9.

¹¹Lindert, Growing Public, 121.

¹²Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People: Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and Germany, 1750–1850 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985). See also Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History (Albany: State University of New York, 1985).

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴Although New York’s Common School Fund was established in 1805, the law directed that the first income on the fund be distributed in 1815. In the intervening years the legislature passed a series of laws specifying structures for distributing and administering those funds. “An Act for the establishment of Common Schools, Passed January 19, 1812,” Laws of New York, 35th Session, chap. 242 (Albany: State of New York, 1813), 258–66; also “An Act Supplementary to the act, entitled ‘An act for the establishment of Common Schools,’ Passed March 12, 1813,” Laws of New York, 36th Session, chap. 52 (Albany: State of New York, 1814), 266–68; “An Act for the better establishment of Common Schools, Passed April 15, 1814,” Laws of New York, 37th Session, chap. 192 (Albany: State of New York, 1815), 228–43; and “An Act to amend the act, entitled ‘An act for the better establishment of Common Schools,’ Passed April 15, 1815,” Laws of New York, 38th Session, chap. 252 (Albany: State of New York, 1816), 260–64.

¹⁵Nancy Beadie, “Tuition‐Funding for Common Schools: Education Markets and Market Regulation in Nineteenth‐Century New York, 1815–1850,” Social Science History 32, no. 1: 107–33.

¹⁶Nancy Beadie, “Education and the Creation of Capital.”

¹⁷Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems (London: Sage Publications, [1979] 1984). The 1984 edition of Archer’s book is an abridged version. For a more detailed account of the cases upon which her theories are based see the 1979 edition of the book by the same title and publisher. Also, see Michalina Vaughan and Margaret Scotford Archer, Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France, 1780–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). I am indebted to Kim Tolley for introducing me to Archer’s work. Tolley discusses that work in her essay, “Reflections on the Historicality of Education Systems,” in Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Kim Tolley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 251–66.

¹⁸Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, 1.

¹⁹Ibid., 47.

²⁰Ibid., 46.

²¹Ibid., 53–59.

²²Ibid.

²³The exceptions were the iconoclastic New England colony of Rhode Island, often credited with first institutionalising concept of religious liberty, and the heterogeneous mid‐Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

²⁴Connecticut ended tax aid for established churches in 1818. New Hampshire continued the practice, but allowed the possibility of exemption to any Christian in 1819. For a precise enumeration of various establishment and disestablishment provisions in each colony and state, see John K. Wilson, “Religion under the state constitutions, 1776–1800,” Journal of Church and State 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 753–64. For a deeper philosophical and historical discussion of the meaning of religious liberty and how it emerged in the colonial and US contexts, see Chris Benneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); also William Lee Miller, The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (New York: Knopf Press, 1985).

²⁵Wilson, “Religion under the State Constitutions,” 755, 757.

²⁶George Frederick Miller, The Academy System of the State of New York (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1922): 19–21.

²⁷Mary Ellen Gadski, The History of New Bern Academy (New Bern, NC: Tryon Palace Commission, 1986).

²⁸For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Nancy Beadie, “Toward a History of Education Markets in the United States: An Introduction,” Social Science History 32, no. 1: 47–73.

²⁹Jon Teaford, “The transformation of Massachusetts education, 1670–1780,” History of Education Quarterly 10 (1970): 301.

³⁰Carl F. Kaestle, “Common schools before the ‘common school revival’: New York Schooling in the 1790s,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (1972): 465–500.

³¹Kim Tolley, “A chartered school in a free market: The case of Raleigh Academy, 1801–1828,” Teachers College Record 107 (2005): 59–88; and Tolley, “Music Teachers in the North Carolina Education Market, 1800–1840: How Mrs. Sambourne Earned a Comfortable Living for Herself and Her Children” Social Science History 32, no. 1 (2008): 75–106.

³²See Tina Sheller, “The origins of public education in Baltimore, 1825–1829,” History of Education Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1982): 23–44; and Hilary Moss, “Opportunity and Opposition: The African American struggle for education in New Haven, Baltimore and Boston, 1825–1855 (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts)” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 2004).

³³Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

³⁴See Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser., 50, no. 1, Law and Society in Early America (1993): 51–84.

³⁵See for example James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780–1970 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1970) and George Herberton Evans, Jr, Business Incorporations in the United States, 1800–1943 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1948).

³⁶Maier, “Revolutionary Origins”. Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service during Industrialization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), passim.

³⁷Seavoy, Origins.

³⁸Ibid. “An Act to enable all the religious denominations in this State to appoint trustees who shall be a body corporate, for the purpose of taking care of the temporalities of their respective congregations, and for other purposes therein mentioned,” April 6, 1784, Laws of New York (Albany: State of New York) 8th Session, chap. 18. The legislators who drafted the law specifically conceived it in terms of religious liberty. As stated in the original 1784 legislation, the New York constitution had declared that the free exercise of religions “without discrimination or preference” should forever be allowed within the state.

³⁹The story of the “Brick School House” is reconstructed from the “Minutes of the Charleston Congregational Society,” 1801–1804, Lima Presbyterian Church, Lima, New York.

⁴⁰See note 14.

⁴¹Seavoy, Origins, 21–23 and Appendix 2, 283–85. The question of whether counties had corporate powers was a subject of considerable confusion and litigation until the courts settled it in 1826. Towns had some limited corporate powers that did not apparently extend to building construction and ownership until they were awarded full corporate status in the Revised Statutes of 1828. Villages acquired corporate status through a general incorporation law in 1847.

⁴²John G. Richardson, “Settlement Patterns and the Governing Structures of Nineteenth‐Century School Systems,” American Journal of Education 92, no. 2 (February, 1984): 178–206.

⁴³The literature on antebellum US economic history is vast, and full of contested claims. A full survey of that literature is well beyond the scope of this paper. Some leading titles are cited in the notes below. For a general introduction to the economic issues of the period, a good place to start is the literature on the “market revolution”: Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds, The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789–1860 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁴⁴Vast scholarly literatures lie behind this brief description of early republican and antebellum economic change. For the brief summary provided here I rely primarily on Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Alan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); and Howard Bodenhorn, A History of Banking in Antebellum American: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation‐Building (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

⁴⁵This debate is generally represented by the work of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, on one side, and that of Gavin Wright on the other. See Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “Explaining the relative efficiency of slave agriculture in the antebellum South,” American Economic Review (June 1977): 275–96, reprinted in Historical Perspectives on the American Economy: Selected Readings, ed. Robert Whaples and Diane C. Betts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 226–59; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978); idem, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); also, David F. Weiman, “Farmers and the Market in Antebellum America: A View from the Georgia Upcountry,” Journal of Economic History 47: no. 3 (1987): 627–47; Kerry A. Odell and David F. Weiman, “Metropolitan Development, Regional Financial Centers, and the Founding of the Fed in the Lower South,” Journal of Economic History 58, No. 1 (March, 1998): 103–24; and Thomas Weiss, “Economic Growth Before 1860: Revised Conjectures,” in American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Weiss and Donald Schaefer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 11–27.

⁴⁶See the data and discussion in chapter 2 of Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 24–37.

⁴⁷See, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1993): 511–42; also Beadie, “Tuition‐Funding.”

⁴⁸John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

⁴⁹Green, Education and State Formation, 186.

⁵⁰Carpentier, “Public Expenditure,” 695.

⁵¹Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli, “The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutionalization,” Sociology of Education 60, no. 1 (1987): 2–17. I would also like to acknowledge John E. Craig’s formidable review of the comparative literature, “The Expansion of Education,” Review of Research in Education 9 (1981): 151–213. Although the twentieth‐century emphasis and meta‐level analysis Craig provides there does not directly inform the ground‐level discussion of early nineteenth‐century developments presented here, it continues to offer important insights for future research. Thanks to Francisco Ramirez for pointing me to Craig’s essay.

⁵²In recent work, Lindert and his colleague Sun Go have focused on developing measures of decentralisation, autonomy and political voice to further test the relative significance of these factors, particularly in the northern and southern US. Sun Go and Peter H. Lindert, “The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools,” Working Paper 13335, National Bureau of Economic Research (http://www.nber.org/papers/w13335), 2007.

⁵³ “Corporation,” in Encyclopaedia Americana, III, ed. Francis Lieber (Philadelphia, 1830), 548, quoted in Maier, “Revolutionary Origins,” 82.

⁵⁴Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy, 192.

⁵⁵Ibid., 209. The military history Miller referred to is John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).