USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The bi-centennial celebration of the settlement of Litchfield, Connecticut, August 1-4, 1920 > Part 7
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was one of the most beautiful days in the year and just before sunset. One of the first objects that struck my eyes was interesting and picturesque. This was a long procession of school girls coming down North Street walking under the lofty elms and moving to the music of a flute and flageolet. The girls were gaily dressed and evidently enjoyed their evening parade in this most balmy season of the year. It was the school of Miss Sally Pierce, one of the earliest and best of the pioneers in American female education. That scene has never faded from my memory".
The dull prospect of the law school must indeed have been lightened with a brighter tinge just then. He further writes: "One of my temptations to an afternoon walk was to meet the girls who like ourselves were often seen taking their daily walk. Among these were the Wolcotts, the Demings, the Tall- madges, the Landons and Miss Peck who afterwards became my wife".
There was a bowling alley west of Prospect Hill Road built by Mr. Lord for the students of both schools which was a popular resort for these young men and maidens. Prospect Hill was also a favorite walk with them as also with Miss Pierce herself, who was as much a lover of exercise and fresh air as any modern, even in the deep snows of winter and the winds of March.
There were sleighing parties and many balls, some given by the girls in the school room, some by the law students in Deacon Buel's ball room or in the large dancing hall on the top floor of the Tavern on the Green, now Phelps' Tavern. It is worthy of remembrance by moderns that a school rule reads as follows: "no young lady is allowed to attend any public ball or sleighing party till they are more than sixteen years old".
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It is interesting also to note this combination of deacons and ball rooms. This proves Litchfield to have been most liberally minded.
The law students quite frequently dropped into the school of a Friday afternoon to hear the credit marks of each young lady read off by Miss Pierce. We may believe that the girls took good care of those marks.
This frank and open freedom of intercourse between these young men and women may have its encouragements for those who mourn pessimistically over modern laxities of this kind, but it must be remembered that it was allowed under strict regulations that were respected and honored by both boys and girls. The freedom allowed under these conditions led to this result, that no finer men and women went forth into the world than from the Litchfield of that day.
It is the abuse of freedom by the modern boys and girls and allowed by the parents which gives good cause for serious apprehension and condemnation. The boys and girls of one hundred years ago obviously had no less fun than modern youth, even though under restriction. For this abuse of free- dom the modern parent, and their modern notions that the proprieties are inconsistent with the "good times" young people should have, are very seriously to blame. This free inter- course of one hundred years ago was "liberty under law" -- a particularly appropriate phrase under the circumstances. If we do not learn lessons from the best in the past of what good are bi-centennials or ter-centennials or any other glorifi- cations of past days? One Litchfield family where the girls boarded was said to be so strict that the law students called it "the convent".
Early hours had to be kept. One of the pupils once went to spend the evening at "Aunt Bull's" on Prospect Street. A law student of the party put back the hands of the clock so that when one of them took Margaret home to school it was quite shut up, and finally after many knocks Miss Pierce her- self came to the door in night-cap and gown candle in hand. If a student called more than three times on a girl, his inten- tions were apt to be asked by the watchful elders. Religion and well-bred conduct formed the chief subjects of the school rules which each girl was required to copy and learn. Private
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scripture reading and devotions, getting up early, taking exer- cise before breakfast and in the evening, observing the hours of family retiring, prayers and meals; a holy Sabbath keeping, useful and regular employment or rational amusement for every hour of the week, neatness of rooms and person, truth- telling and self-control, politeness and economy-all these were inculcated in these rules. They could be posted today to the great advantage of schools and families.
The pupils did much fine sewing and embroidery, made, washed and ironed their own clothes, knitted frequently dur- ing recitations and when read to by Miss Pierce, did much home reading of best books such as travels, letters, histories of church and state, "Moral Tales" (which by the way one girl commented on in her diary as being "rather immoral"), "Sir Charles Grandison", "Don Quixote", sermons and essays of every kind, and attended to many household duties in the various homes.
Julia Cowles of Farmington in the eleventh year of her age thus begins her diary in 1797:
"To thee I will relate the events of my youth. I will endeavor to excell in learning and correct my faults so that I may be enabled to look backward with pleasure and forward with hope".
Mary Peck, another pupil, kept a common-place book or album in which are autographs and quotations written in by the foremost men and women of the time.
It remains to speak of the claim of Mrs. Willard's Female Seminary of Troy, New York, to be the first of its kind in the country. It is a very general though erroncous belief that Emma Hart Willard's school was the pioneer. I can assure Litchfield the more forcibly perhaps by being an outsider, that this is a popular error. Emma Hart was only five years old when Miss Pierce started her school in 1792, and she did not start the Troy Seminary until well into the first quarter of the 19th century.
Mrs. Willard was herself one of the fine minded, advanced women of those days who drew her inspiration from Miss Pierce.
In or about 1814 she had succeeded Idea Strong, a pupil of Miss Pierce's, as the principal of a school in Middlebury, Vermont, which had been founded by Miss Strong under the
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direct presence and encouragement of Miss Pierce herself, who had gone with her to Vermont in February, 1800, to get it started. These two had accompanied Moses Seymour, Jr., as far as Middlebury (according to the testimony of his grand- son, Dr. Josiah G. Beckwith) when he drove to Vermont in the aforesaid February, 1800, with sleigh and horses to bring back to Litchfield another Miss Strong as his bride. The school then founded existeel for several years, but Miss Strong's health failed and she was succeeded by Emma Willard, who finally removed it to Troy.
Miss Pierce had of course returned with the Seymour wed- ding party, but the direct connection between her and Mrs. Willard through Idea Strong is obvious. It would not detract from Mrs. Willard's fame as an educator in the higher brauches for women if these facts were known more widely than they are.
The Troy Seminary, still in existence, links past with present and leads one's thoughts to present-day education. With all our great colleges and universities, our private schools and the public school system of which we are justly proud, there is something wrong. Why so much illiteracy-and not all of it foreign? Why the danger of collapse of our educational system through shortage of teachers which educators who know tell us we are facing? Why are teachers leaving the profession by the thousand because they cannot live in it? Why are pupils being turned out half educated with but little of the old time thoroughiness in fundamentals or of the mental discipline such as Miss Pierce said was so necessary for both girls and boys? To answer these questions is not my purpose today. I merely call attention to them as problems for which a quick remedy must be found. The machinery of everything has speeded up except the machinery of our schools. Our school machinery is out of gear with the rest. It must be speeded up to a higher level of efficiency if the future citizens and voters of the Republic are to have that average intelligence which alone can make democracy safe for ourselves and the world.
This is no longer a state or local problem, it is a national problem. It is as much a national problem as the care of our agricultural and mechanical interests. The nation sub- sidizes state colleges of agriculture and the mechanical arts. It does not assist state normal schools which train the teachers
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to whose care and training we commit our children, body and mind.
The normal school is the least attractive professional school that we have, when it ought to be the most so. Its standards are lower, its instruction cheaper, than they should be to attract the best to the profession of teaching.
During the past school year in Connecticut, only 74 per cent of the teachers were college or normal trained. The reason is that 107 towns were paying their teachers an average yearly salary of only $800 or less while only 41 were paying $1,000 or more. Thirty-five towns paid $600 or less and one town paid only $400. Such salaries do not admit of profes- sional training in preparation for teaching. In 1916 our Con- necticut normal schools had an enrollment of 900 but this year it sank back to 465. We face a shortage of from 400 to 600 teachers next fall.
As a nation we have lagged behind others in the prepara- tion of our teachers both men and women. We fail to give them a living salary; we fail to give that social recognition which such a profession has a right to expect. Is there any profession more lofty than that which moulds mind and soul and fits a child for life and citizenship? Yet for the teacher there is low salary, small social recognition, cheap preparation.
Agriculture, commerce, labor are represented by depart- ments in our Government with a seat in the Cabinet; not so the education of the nation's children. This also should have a department of its own with a cabinet officer at its head, instead of being as it is today, a mere bureau tucked under the Department of the Interior. Shall we not do as much for our children as for our fields, our cattle, our commerce and our laboring interests?
The percentage of native born illiteracy as revealed by the draft was startling. We expect it in the foreigner. We do not expect it in our own, yet it is there. Its eradication depends on the rural school, the village school, and yet these are the weakest link in our educational chain.
We are told that sixty per cent of the next generation of American citizens are enrolled in the rural school and that five out of six of native-born illiterates live in rural communi- ties. Yet the rural schools are in charge of the youngest, the
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least educated, the least competent and well-trained of our public school teachers.
One million rural children are being taught by teachers who have not themselves passed beyond the 7th and 8th grades of the elementary schools; at least five or six million are under teachers of less than twenty-one years of age. It is clear from these facts given us by those who know, that upon the rural schools lies a vast responsibility and to the rural schools must be given a vast amount of help.
This comes back upon the town and the tax-payer to remedy in large measure; but it also comes back upon the nation at large to treat the situation nationally. A national policy of education linked up with that of state and town iş the answer in brief to our educational problems. It must be a policy that shall raise the profession of public teaching to the position where it belongs-at the summit of all professions, commanding recognition and respect. It must be a policy that shall adequately train the boys and girls-the incipient voters of the future-to be intelligent as well as loyal Ameri- can citizens, to be good men and women, upright, truthful and fearing God, to be that which is highest of all, the fathers and mothers of God's children yet unborn.
These are thoughts that every American community should ponder in its heart of hearts-and translate into action. Only thus shall we preserve the ideas and principles upon which this nation is builded, and which are being attacked every day-yes, even in our very schools, by those who seek to destroy them. Only thus shall we perpetuate the free political insti- tutions and the earnest religious soul transplanted here by Pilgrim and Cavalier three hundred years ago and producing some of their fairest fruits in the Litchfield of Tapping Reeve and Sarah Pierce.
THE TOLERANT SPIRIT OF THE AMERICAN COLONISTS.
Address by The Rev. Howard Duffield, D. D. (Pastor Emeritus of the First Presbyterian Church, New York City.)
Congregational Church, August 1, 1920.
I count myself happy to be a visitor to this historic hill- town in this great hour of its wonderful life. With all my heart I congratulate you upon the memory of those priceless contributions with which Litchfield has enriched the life and thought of America and of the world-and earnestly do I pray that the story of the coming years may outshine even this radiant past.
The voices that are speaking to us out of the bygone years, and the circumstances of the moment unite in dictating one theme upon which I am privileged to address you. Just now our thought is especially focused upon the little company of brave, farseeing pioneer souls who led the world of their day, and blazed the path along which alone humanity can reach its highest goals. It shall be my welcome endeavor to rebut certain popular aspersions which are ignorantly cast upon them and to reveal the noble spirit which dwelt within them-and made them what they were, and makes us count it our highest pride to be called their children. I shall do what I can to emphasize "The Tolerant Spirit of the Ameri- can Colonists".
At first blush there does not seem to be any. Aldrich once wrote a story entitled "Marjory Daw". The heart of the reader is enchanted by the loveliness of the heroine, only to receive a rude shock as the romance ends with the unlooked for sentence "There is no Marjory Daw", and the fascinating charmer vanishes into thin air. It is an impression quite universal that the grace of tolerance in the Puritan Founders of America is just such an imaginary quality, as exotic to their nature as pineapples to Greenland. The almost unanimous
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opinion is that they were the rugged reflection of a harsh environment; that the granitic quality of the rocks upon which they dwelt, made them stony-hearted; that the wintry tempests and the chilling snows which they encountered, wrought bleak- ness into their blood; that the pestilence which haunted their early occupancy of the New World, disturbed their mental poise, so that they became warped, abnormal, one-sided and narrow-minded. Their heroic qualities, their exalted ideals, their martyr-like devotion to what they counted to be the truth, is freely admitted, but they loom up before popular conception in outlines of grim unreality, not wholly unlike that repellant caricature of them which a distinguished Eng. lish writer etched with a pen dipped in vitriol: "The savage brutality of the American Puritans, truthfully told, would afford one of the most significant and profitable lessons that history could teach. Champions of liberty, but merciless and unprincipled tyrants; fugitives from. persecution, but the most senseless and reckless of persecutors; claimants of an enlightened religion, but the last upholders of the cruel and ignorant creed of witch doctors; whining over the ferocity of the Indian, yet outdoing the ferocity a hundred-fold; com- plaining of his treachery, yet, as their descendants have been to this day, treacherous, with a deliberate indifference to plighted faith such as the Indians have seldom shown,-the ancestors of the heroes of the Revolutionary and of the Civil War might be held up as examples of the power of a Calvin- istic religion and a bigoted republicanism to demoralize fair average specimens of a race which under better influences, has shown itself the least cruel, least treacherous, least tyran- nical of the master races of the world".
The first fact which casts a doubt upon the correctness of this characterization and suggests the necessity of modify- ing its sweeping criticism, is the character of the men who founded the colonies.
The Atlantic seaboard was no Botany Bay, no dumping ground for the waste and refuse of European life. The early settlers were not a band of adventurers questing aimlessly about the world, nor a company of merchants led by the lure of gold. The Mayflower did not carry steerage. The men of the earliest emigration were picked souls. "God sifted a
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whole nation that He might send choice grain out into this wilderness". They were the selected character products of England's Golden Age.
There is a spell in England whose mystic power affects the most casual visitor to that favored land. Storied castles repeat in stately stone the chronicles of knightly prowess and chivalric achievement. Ivied universities are haunted with a cloud of the master spirits of the race, and their walls and towers echo the teachings of the princeliest minds in the realm of thought. Glorious cathedrals, "poems in stone", celebrate and perpetuate the noble genius of an age-long worship, and link the loftiest religious aspirations with the serenest forms of material beauty.
This æsthetic stimulus suffused and surcharged our ances- tral line. The atmosphere which enveloped them from the cradle-side was tinged with this tonic impulse. Inevitably, even if insensibly, it toned their life, and refined their fiber, and bred distinction in their manner of looking at existence. The Puritan poet whose crown is second only to that of Shakespeare, was not the only one of his circle who loved to brood on "dim religious light, and long drawn aisles and fret- ted vaults". The stern dictates of a high-strung nature might on occasion recoil from the forms in which these exalting forces were enshrined; but the eloquence of these voices of history and the magic influence of these forms of beauty wrought upon the spirits of those warriors, scholars and worshipers who planted the new world with its life force, and could not be eradicated. "That happy breed of men", says Lowell, "who both in Church and State led our first emi- gration, were children of the most splendid intellectual epoch that England has ever known. For learning, intelligence and general accomplishment they were far above the average of the country and the Church, from which their conscience had driven them out". The figure of the founder of the Colo- nies as revealed in the white light of history is quite other from that in which he appears to the popular fancy. An insatiable appetite for the truth possessed them. The parting words of their Pastor as they knelt together beside the sea, at the hour of embarkation for the New World, were ever ringing within their souls: "Remember", said the good John Robinson of Leyden, "always remember there is more
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light ahead than has ever yet shone upon the world". They never forgot. They pointed the prow of their ship toward uncrossed horizons. They lived with their faces toward the rising of the sun. They were watchers for the dawn. The life force of these men was not of a kind to crystallize into hardness, cruelty and fanaticism, by being distilled into a new world.
A second fact which gires pause to the familiar stric- tures upon the Puritan and suggests a revision of the popular conception of his character, is the outcome of the work which he began.
The handful of corn which he planted beside the sea has yielded a harvest that is enriching the world. The grain of mustard seed which he cast upon the rocks has rooted and risen, until its branches overshadow the whole earth. That tiny cluster of colonies which he called into being he impreg- nated with such singular vital energy that it has developed into a glorious nation of United States, the wealthiest, and perhaps the mightiest, and, without question, the freest of the people of the globe. Its ideal is "government of the peo- ple, by the people, for the people". Its Declaration of Inde- pendence opens with the proclamation, "all men are created free and equal". Its strong conscience has revolted against any infringement of popular rights, and vindicated the liberty of mankind at great cost of gold, of blood and tears. It is the guaranteed home of equal rights and universal liberty, civil and religious. Under its sky the children of all the nations
find shelter. Beneath its flag the highest and the humblest possess equal privilege. Such is the bequest of the American Colonists to the world, and by their fruits, not by their roots, shall ye know them. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, even in these modern times. Not even Burbank has discovered a wizardry of cross-fertilization whereby figs can be grown on thistles. "Every seed after its kind", is as true in this hour as in the long ago when the Master of life walked the meadow paths of Galilee, and read the laws of God that were written in the wayside flowers.
A further examination of Colonial conditions brings to light the fact that the instances which are supposed to give
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color to the idea that our fathers were intolerant bigots, are not the characteristic happenings of their life, but are occa- sional, unusual and infrequent.
The incidents which paint the Puritan so darkly, which robe him in gloom, and surcharge him with bitterness of soul, have been written into history somewhat after the fashion of that modern school of journalism which flares out in eye- dazzling capitals, selected morsels of crime and indecency, but prints all qualifying matter in type of microscopic dimensions. If one were to limit his knowledge of present day social condi- tions to the data furnished by these alleged purveyors of the daily doings of the world, he would be constrained to the conclusion that reason and intelligence, common sense and common decency had fled to "brutish beasts", and that our civilization was only and altogether abnormal, criminal, sot- tish, grotesque, salacious. Our forefathers made mistakes, of course. They were men, not seraphs. That they committed many an act which, viewed in the light of our day, and mea- sured by later ethical standards, appears repellant and forbid- ding, is to be admitted without the slightest question. But the performances of this class have been given undue emphasis, and exaggerated significance, while their achievements of an opposite character, phenomenal for their time, and inspira- tional for all time, have been relegated to an unmerited obscurity. Now and then, especially along the New England seaboard, while the new world was amaking and the forces that were to mould a continent and fashion the leader of the nations were being generated, there were aets for which no one can apologize. But their very harshness is projected against a background of high thought and noble endeavor. Virginia was the seat of the freest and most enlightened institutions. Maryland and Rhode Island were asylums, free as the sun- light, for those of all beliefs. Pennsylvania, said Voltaire, was the one spot in the known world where men could be religious and not tear each other to pieces. In New York, the first English Governor, Dongan, introduced a Charter of Liberties that would need no amendment today as a guarantee of largest civic freedom.
The Colony of Connecticut is one of the most classic instances of this inversion of historic emphasis. The very
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mention of the name suggests wooden nutmegs and the Blue Laws. It is not impossible to subvert the conviction that Yankee ingenuity manufactured nutmegs in carpenter shops, but it is one of the labors of Hercules to illumine the average understanding with the fact that there was in reality no more indigo in Connecticut laws than there was wood in her nut. megs. The famous Blue Laws, which have feathered so many of the envenomed arrows discharged at the unspeakable nar- rowness of the nation's founders, in reality never existed. They were cobwebs in the brain of a Tory renegade, the Rev. Samuel Peters, who, while the men of his colony were fighting the battles of their country, was sneaking around London and peddling for a mouthful of bread whatever stories would delight or horrify our British cousins concerning the patriots of the Revolution who were in arms against the throne. In point of strict veracity, John Fiske declares that Peters divides the palm with Baron Munchausen. At the present day he would be an ex-officio member of the Ananias Club. The river at Bellows Falls, he declares, flows so fast that it floats iron crow bars, and he gravely describes as among the household pets of America, animals that can only be classified under the genus Jabberwock. The most famous passage of his fictitious Blue Code is that which enacts "no woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath", but the illuminating context is seldom quoted and almost unknown. The entire sentence reads, "that no woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath", and that "no one shall play any instrument of music upon that day, except the drum, the trumpet or the jewsharp". But while the mockers at the imaginary Blue Laws of Connecticut are legion, the individuals are rare who know that to the Nutmeg State belongs the honor of having produced the first written Con- stitution in the New World, as a complete scheme of civic order, embodying all the essential features of the Republic as it exists today. "Nearly two centuries have elapsed", writes Bancroft, "the world has been made wiser by various experi- ences, political institutions have become the theme on which the most powerful and cultivated minds have been employed; dynasties of kings have been dethroned, recalled and dethroned again, and so many constitutions have been framed or reframed, stifled or subverted, that memory may despair of a complete catalogue, but the people of Connecticut have found no reason
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