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The Strangeness of the American Education Society: Indigent Students and the New Charity, 1815–1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David F. Allmendinger Jr.
David F. Allmendinger Jr.*
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Extract

Charity students at New England colleges before 1800 always had depended on individual patrons and small institutions to provide the kind of financial assistance which more fortunate students received from their families. Every year a few orphans and impoverished young men who had distinguished themselves as village scholars were sent to college as wards of prominent townspeople or as beneficiaries of their church charity funds. Since most patrons and churches could support only one or two students at irregular intervals, the scale of patronage in the eighteenth century had made it possible to think of student aid in familial terms: patrons, churches, local charitable societies, and even college officials—who rarely had funds to offer—all assumed an intimate, paternal watchfulness over these adopted sons. The rise of the American Education Society after 1815 altered these old assumptions. No longer did indigent students depend solely upon small sources of charity in their own communities, or experience the kind of paternal watchfulness that had always accompanied the charity they received, for they could turn instead to an institution too large to function like a family. As the number of A.E.S. beneficiaries climbed toward 1,000, totally new arrangements for student aid appeared, transforming the situation of indigent students in the nineteenth century, creating an organization of unprecedented size and influence over the American student population.

Type
Making it in Nineteenth-Century America
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 1971 , pp. 3 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 History of Education Quarterly 

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References

Notes

1. Congregational Library, Boston, American Education Society Archives, Cash book, October 26, 1815-April 1826. The Society was incorporated as the American Society for Educating Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry, but changed its official name in 1819.Google Scholar

2. Fiftieth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Boston, 1866), p. 11. In 1833 the A.E.S. estimated the total number of undergraduates in American colleges at 5,335, including four undergraduate classes and the graduating class for the previous academic year. See “View of the American Colleges, 1833,” American Quarterly Register, V (May 1833), 332–33.Google Scholar

3. Fourth Report of the Directors of the American Society for Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry (Andover, 1819), p. 17; Ninth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Boston, 1824), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

4. American Quarterly Register, VII (May 1835), 371–76.Google Scholar

5. Twelfth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Andover, 1828), p. 4; Edwards A. Park (ed.), Writings of Professor B. B. Edwards, 2 vols. (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), I, 71–72.Google Scholar

6. Yale University Library, Park Family Papers, Box 6, Minutes of examination of applicants for July 9, 1816; July 9, 1817; October 8, 1817. For letters from agents stressing the importance of revivals between 1830 and 1836, see American Quarterly Register, Vols. III-IX, passim. Google Scholar

7. Congregational Library, A.E.S. Archives, Beneficiary Letters, fol. 10/8, Letter, David Cushman to William Cogswell, September 15, 1831; Seventeenth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Boston, 1833), p. 77. For evidence on the decline of scholarships, see David F. Allmendinger, Jr., “Indigent Students and Their Institutions, 1800–1860” (Madison, Wis.: Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968), pp. 73–102. See also Beverly McAnear, “College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745–1775,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLII (June 1955), 24–44.Google Scholar

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10. Seventh Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Andover, 1822), p. 4; Tenth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Andover, 1826), p. 7.Google Scholar

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12. See the rules printed in the annual reports of the Society.Google Scholar

13. Yale University Library, Park Family Papers, Box 6, Memo of business, etc., of Directors of American Society for Educating etc., meeting of July 10, 1816.Google Scholar

14. Seventh Report of the A.E.S., pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

15. Eleventh Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Andover, 1827), p. 23; Twelfth Report of the A.E.S., p. 11; Seventeenth Report of the A.E.S., p. 40; Park (ed.), Writings of Edwards, I, 70; Nineteenth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Boston, 1835), pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

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17. Seventh Report of the A.E.S., p. 23.Google Scholar

18. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Directors of the American Education Society (Boston, 1831), p. 21; Congregational Library, A.E.S. Archives, Letterbook II, Letter, William Cogswell to Ansel Clark, February 16, 1835.Google Scholar

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20. Congregational Library, Archives, A.E.S., Constitution and Subscribers' names, August 29,. 1815; Eleventh Report of the A.E.S., p. 24; Fifteenth Report of the A.E.S., pp. 16–17; Seventeenth Report of the A.E.S., pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

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23. Another study has seen American benevolent societies as applying to their own structures the models of English societies and pursuing consciously repressive aims. See Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). Griffin, Clifford S. also stresses their repressive nature in Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960). Both of these studies differ from the interpretation in this essay, and from that in Mathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly, XXI (Spring 1969), 23–43.Google Scholar

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29. Ibid., pp. 565–76.Google Scholar

30. Eleventh Report of the A.E.S., pp. 20–21; Sixteenth Report of the A.E.S., p. 19.Google Scholar

31. [Carnahan, James], “Remarks of the Editors,” pp. 602–3, 616, 620, 623.Google Scholar

32. [Carnahan, James], “Board of Education,” pp. 363–64.Google Scholar

33. Congregational Library, A.E.S. Archives, Letterbook III, Letter, Samuel, H. Riddel to Samuel, T. Armstrong, September 24, 1841; “Statement Submitted to the American Education Society,” American Quarterly Register, XV (November 1842), 210–11, 218.Google Scholar

34. Fiftieth Report of the A.E.S., pp. 11–12.Google Scholar