to found religious socialistic bodies in the far west.1

Joseph Smith, of Vermont, in 1827, according to his account, began to receive "revelations," one of which directed him to certain golden plates which through two stones, the Urim and Thummim, he was able to read, and to translate into a book, published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. It was written in Biblical style, an interminable account of the lost tribes of Israel in North America, and included many prophecies apt for the times. First organized at Manchester, Vermont, in April, 1830, with six members, the Mormons moved in 1831 to Kirtland, Ohio, where they took the name of "Latter Day Saints." After attempting to settle in Missouri, Smith gathered in 1840, at Nauvoo, Illinois, a settlement of about fifteen thousand people. He aroused the hostility of the local authorities, and in 1844 was put in jail, and there killed by a mob. This obscure sect, founded on the materialistic basis that God is a material being, "having a body, parts and passions," supported by a system of tithes, and inspired by timely revelations, had a success and endurance which makes it stand out from all other socialistic communities of the time.

At the other pole of reform through social organi

1 McCarthy, Early Social and Religious Experiments in Iowa; Perkins and Wick, The Amana Society; Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., chap. xxi. Linn, Mormons, chap. xi.

'Lalor, Cyclopædia, II., 910.

zation was Brook Farm, which sprang out of an idealism traceable in the ruggedest Puritans of the New England colonies; the force reappeared in the "transcendental" movement, partly philosophical, partly religious, and partly social, headed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A band of enthusiastic men and women gathered in 1841 at Brook Farm, near Boston, among whom as residents or sympathetic visitors were Charles A. Dana, later editor of the New York Sun, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, G. W. Curtis, Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in his Blithedale Romance idealized this community. After six years' existence a fire quenched the spirits of the Brook-Farmers, who did not know how to farm, and the institution ceased to be; though the influence of those who experienced it has remained an intellectual and moral force in New England and throughout the country.'

1 Wendell, Literary History of America, 304–310.

To

CHAPTER II

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

(1830-1840)

describe in detail all the interesting forms of

American social life would be a long task; but the anti-slavery movement made such use of appeals to the understanding that some account of the intellectual conditions of the time is necessary. In 1830, though the Americans were still far from being a literary people, they were a reading people: the remotest communities studied and quoted that fountain of English, the King James version of the Scriptures; and in the larger places there was a book-reading public which, first of all, applied itself to the English classics, especially the eighteenthcentury poets and essayists. The English reviews were imported or reprinted and were widely circulated; and as the new school of English authors sprang up-Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay,/ and Tennyson-they found an eager public in the new world.

Outside of the towns there was in New England, and those parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and the west which were influenced by New England, an intelligent reading community of

farmers, whose daughters taught the district schools, or, going into the mills of the factory towns, founded little literary journals.1

These rural communities were much aided by schools and academies planted in their midst, though until near 1800 there was no public provision for teaching girls, and during the first third of the nineteenth century even the New England public schools, outside of a few towns, were miserably housed and poorly taught, while the rich states of New York and Pennsylvania founded no general system of free schools till 1812.

When, in 1837, Horace Mann was appointed at the head of what was virtually a Massachusetts department of education, he exhausted his vocabulary in describing the state public schools, which he said were in session a little more than four months on the average, costing the state less than three dollars annually for every child of school age, paying average wages to women teachers of less than twelve dollars a month, and educating not more than twothirds of the school-children. His services as secretary of the state board of education did much to remove this stigma and to place the Massachusetts schools in the van. A great step in educating the teacher and giving a professional standing was the

1 Lucy Larcom, New England Girlhood, 209-225; for education and literary life in general, see Hart, Contemporaries, III., 88151-157.

Horace Mann, Report, 1837 (in Works, II., 400, 414, 423).

founding of normal schools, soon established throughout the northern states.

Though popular education at public expense was already taken up in the west and made a principle in all the American commonwealths north of Mason and Dixon's line, on the frontier and in the south the conditions were much worse than in New England. Abraham Lincoln said that when he was a boy in Illinois a man who knew algebra was thought to be a wizard; and not a single southern state, previous to the Civil War, set up a general system of free public schools. Outside of the cities, which provided for themselves under state laws, the poor whites had little opportunity for education. In 1850, of 250,000 adult native whites in Massachusetts, only 1000 were illiterate; out of 500,000 in Virginia, 75,000 were illiterate, as were, of course, nine-tenths of the negroes.1

This backwardness was not for want of warning, but rather in defiance of the principles which Jefferson laid down. He desired that Virginia should establish free local schools everywhere, that the most promising pupils should be provided with high-school instruction, and the most successful pupils of the high schools with college training. Yet a northern public man with some experience in the south pooh

1 A. D. Mayo, Common Schools in the Southern States, in U. S. Bureau of Education, Reports, 1900-1901, pp. 357-401; S. B. Weeks, Beginning of the Common School System in the South, in ibid., 1896-1897, II., 1379-1474; Olmsted, Back Country, 330