1. Massachusetts Senate Document Number 26 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838), 1. Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 37–64Google Scholar. John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Jensen, Laura, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Massachusetts Board of Education, Fourth Annual Report (Boston, 1841), 28. “Central Board” quote, Massachusetts Senate Document 49 (1840), 2; while “sympathy over justice” was a concern of A Philadelphia School Director to Horace Mann, n.d. (1845), Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 8. James Hall, Jr., to Horace Mann, 25 Feb. 1844, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 7.

2. Important texts in the history of antebellum schooling include Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Kaestle, Carl, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google Scholar; Dexter, Edwin Grant, A History of Education in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1916), 103–23Google Scholar; Tyack, David B. and Hansot, Elisabeth, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of Urban American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. “Beneficent arms” is from Massachusetts Board of Education, Third Annual Report (Boston, 1840), 46. Though David B. Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot see little administrative development in this period (see Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership, 1820–1900 [New York: Basic Books, 1982], 27), others like Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis disagree (see Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980]). Massachusetts House Document 22: Reports on the Reduction of Salaries and the Abolishing of Commissions (Boston, 1840), 22. Concerning the use of the term “maternalist,” I hope not to confuse. After all, Theda Skocpol uses the same word to criticize a later generation of charity-relief reformers, often women, who looked to limit public relief to the (usually female) “deserving poor.” She names antebellum public education organizers as “paternalistic” since—and this is true—they were all men. See Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 30–38Google Scholar; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” in Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 271–72.Google Scholar

3. I do not mean to imply that scholars have not examined how cultural priorities shaped government policy objectives, as opposed to this essay's contention that they shaped the arrangement of administrative structures. One has only to look at nineteenth-century mental health reform movements to see how culture influenced the things that states did. For example, see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 1971)Google Scholar. And, of course, the idea that public schooling existed to culturally reshape youngsters into a docile and obedient capitalist labor force has been important in the historiography of public schooling. See, in this regard, Schultz, Stanley K., The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Morris, Robert Charles, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Also, Daniel Walker Howe does write that the ideas of “faculty psychology”—the notion that human psyches are built of several fundamental characteristics, most notably “passion,” “will,” and “conscience”—influenced the constitutional format of “legislature,” “executive,” and “judiciary.” This line of analysis, however, unfolds only in passing. See Howe, , Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, especially, in this context, 91–94. On culture and Politics see Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Carwardine, Richard J., Evangelical Protestants and Politics in Antebellum America, 1840–1861 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (March 1991): 1216–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zagarri, Rosemarie, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freeman, Joanne B., Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Neely, Mark E., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGerr, Michael, “Political Style and Women's Power, 1830–1930,” Journal of American History 77 (1990): 864–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isenberg, Nancy, “The ‘Little Emperor:’ Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Pasley, Jeffrey, Robertson, Andrew W., and Waldstreicher, David (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Altschuler, Glenn, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Handlin, Oscar and Handlin, Mary Flug, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, 17741861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969)Google Scholar can be seen, perhaps, as an important precursor to the idea of the “state of courts and parties,” while its highest development can be found in Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, on this point, Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Crucial texts in the reexamination of American political development include Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carpenter, Bureaucratic Autonomy; Jensen, Patriots, Settlers; John, Richard R., “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Richard R. John, Spreading the News.

4. The “nourishing mother” quote is from Barnas Sears, successor to Mann. Quoted in Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 43. Concerning courts and property rights that constituted “for at least 150 years the quintessential instance of individual rights” in American political life, see Nedelsky, Jennifer, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, quoted 89–90. On the close relationship between the partisan press and early party organization, see Pasley, Jeffrey, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001)Google Scholar; and Cornell, Saul, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar. On contracts and property rights in general, see Basch, Norma, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage-Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James Madison, “Property,” in National Gazette, 27 March 1792. Federal Farmer [possibly Melancton Smith], Observations Leading to a Fair Examination of the System of Government Proposed by the Late Convention (New York: 1788), letter IX.

5. On state government tax collection, see Handlin and Flug Handlin, Commonwealth; Fairlie, John Archibald, The Centralization of Administration in New York State (1898; reprint, New York: AMS, 1969), 148–84Google Scholar; Erdman, Charles Rosenbury, The New Jersey Constitution: A Barrier to Governmental Efficiency and Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1934)Google Scholar; and Einhorn, Robin L., American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Concerning “municipal law,” see William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769), book 1, 117Google Scholar. On localities and other corporations as administrative subordinates of constitutional governments, see Maier, Pauline, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 51–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salinger, Sharon V., Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Anderson, Margo J., The American Census: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Other expansive federal administrations, like the post office, operated primarily through the organization of semiautonomous subcontractors. See Richard R. John, Spreading the News, 90–103. The conflation of entire families within the existence of the father in the population census was more than an administrative procedure. It was a reflection of the Common Law principle of coverture, which served as the master format of social relations throughout much of the nineteenth century. William Blackstone on coverture: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is … incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband … and her condition during her marriage is called here coverture.” (Commentaries on the Law of England, Book 1, 15). See also Dolan, Francis E., “Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture,” Feminist Studies 29 (2003): 249–77Google Scholar. About the activism of state and federal governments, see Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larson, John Lauritz, Internal Improvements: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

6. Quote from Massachusetts Constitution of 1788. The Washington quote is from his famous farewell address, in, among other sources, Richardson, J.D., ed., Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol.1 (1907), 213Google Scholar; Schooling, to Jefferson, of course also served a social function: “to exercise with order and justice those he retains,” to “improve morality,” and a general respect for the “social relations under which he shall be placed.” Quoted in Peterson, Merrill D., The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 239Google Scholar. On primary schooling for girls in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Tyack, and Hansot, , Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russell Sage, 1992), 13–45Google Scholar; and Kelley, Mary, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Rush, Benjamin, Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic (Philadelphia, 1798)Google Scholar.

7. Massachusetts Board of Education, Fourth Annual Report (Boston, 1841) 28; Christian Register, 24 May 1832, 4; “Troubles of a School District,” Michigan Journal of Education (June 1838): 3. Some men of administrative ambition, like Henry Barnard of Connecticut, resisted the vocabularies of the motherly state; still, it may be just coincidence that Barnard's efforts to build state administration in Connecticut produced only failure. See, in general, Downs, Robert Bingham, Henry Barnard (Boston: Twayne, 1977)Google Scholar. Final quote from Mann, Horace, Lectures on Education (Boston: Lee and Sheppard, 1872), 333Google ScholarPubMed.

8. Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1763; reprint, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11Google Scholar. It would be wrong to say that no other groups outside of the Liberal Protestants saw sympathy as mutual or equal. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as David Hume saw sympathy in likeness (“resemblance and contiguity”), a perspective that resonated in Hamilton's “Federalist 13,” dealing partly with feelings of sectional sympathy. See Hume, David, Treatise on Human Nature (1740, reprint Oxford University Press, 2000), book II, part I, sec. XIGoogle Scholar. But, as other scholars have pointed out, it was the sympathy of pity that energized nineteenth-century political and reform movements. See, for example, Clark, Elisabeth B., “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak:’ Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in America,” Journal of American History 82 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Halttunen, Karen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: each shows the organizational uses of pity among “benevolent” types. Writing about the ‘conscience to be aroused’ is Child, Lydia Maria, Letters From New-York, Mills, Bruce, ed. (1843; reprint Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 143Google Scholar. For Channing quote, Channing, William Ellery, The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (New York: C.S. Francis, 1853), vol. 2, 9–10Google Scholar. I do not mean to suggest that these Unitarians were on the leading-edge of a general change in the political meanings of sympathy. Indeed, sympathy as pity still enjoys full currency. For example, Dauber, Michelle Landis, “The Sympathetic State,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 387–442CrossRefGoogle Scholar, equates disaster relief—called “sympathy” here—with pity for victims of natural disasters.

9. A Philadelphia School Director to Horace Mann, n.d. (1845), Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 8; Association of Masters of Boston Public Schools, Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann, Secretary of the Board of Education (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844), 114.

10. On the rural transformation, see Clark, Christopher, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21–117Google Scholar. Samuel Gridley Howe would become particularly well known in these circles for his highly publicized work with the deaf-mute Laura Bridgeman. See Gitter, Elisabeth, The Imprisoned Quest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgeman, The Original Deaf-Blind Girl (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001)Google Scholar. Jonathan Messerli, Mann's most important biographer, focuses on reformers' benevolent impulses as the main theme of this story of state formation. Messerli, Jonathan, “Localism and State Control in Horace Mann's Reform of the Common Schools,” American Quarterly 17 (1965): 104–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘State establishment’ quote is from Barnard, Henry, Report of the Condition and Improvement of the Public Schools of Rhode Island (Providence, RI: B. Cranston, 1846), 46, 161–62Google Scholar. Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, 209–32 presents a legislative history of the bill creating the Board of Education. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The General Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Relating to the Public Schools (Boston: State Printers, 1868), 4–9, 30–33.

11. Massachusetts Board, Fourth Report, 19; Smith, Matthew Hale, A Reply to the Sequel on Hon. Horace Mann (Boston: Whitmore, 1847), 24Google Scholar.

12. On the formation of “population” as a category of administrative rule, see Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: With Two Lectures by and an Interview With Michel Foucault, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Cohen, Patricia Cline, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York and London: Routlage, 1999), especially 150–204Google Scholar; Cole, Joshua, The Power of Large Numbers Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Messerli, Jonathan, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 342Google Scholar.

13. Massachusetts Board of Education, Fifth Annual Report (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1841), 57; Martin, George H., The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York: D. Appleton, 1894) 149–51Google Scholar; First Report, (Boston: Dutton, 1837) 25–27.

14. Abbott to Mann, 25 June 1847, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; ‘quiet and sympathetic’ is from Theodore Parker, The School and the Schoolmaster, vol. 2, 279; ‘remaking the selves of others’ is from Howe, Making the American Self, 157–88.

15. Gustavus Gilbert to Mann, 19 Aug. 1841, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 6. The General Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Relating to the Public Schools (Boston: State Printers, 1868), 4–9, 30–33; on reform and party politics in Massachusetts, see: Kaestle and Vinovskis, Education and Social Change, 213–20; Earle, Jonathan H., Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Earle, Jonathan H., “Marcus Morton and the Dilemma of Jacksonian Antislavery,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 61–88Google Scholar; Letter from Barnas Sears to unknown, 22 January 1849, Massachusetts State Archive, Board of Education Papers, box 1507X.

16. Common School Journal, 1 February 1839; Hogan, “Affective Individualism,” 42; “Letter from P,” Common School Journal, 2 Sept. 1844, 321; Hogan, “Affective Individualism;” Taylor, J. Orville, The District School (New York: Harper, 1834), 95Google Scholar.

17. Greven, Philip J., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar writes about the culture of the rod as an instrument of family discipline. Smith, Matthew Hale, The Bible, the Rod, and Religion, in Common Schools (Boston: Redding & Co, 1847), 42Google Scholar; Proverbs 22:15, King James Version; Travis, William, “Children Must Have Masters,” [Michigan] Journal of Education 6 (April 1859): 133Google Scholar.

18. “Confessions of a Schoolmaster,” Ohio Common School Advocate, March 1838, 96; To the committee appointed to collect statistics in regard to the amelioration of the criminal code of Massachusetts, 28 Jan. 1843, William B. Fowle Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

19. Association of Masters of Boston Public Schools, Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann, Secretary of the Board of Education (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844), 114; Boston School Committee, Report on Corporal Punishment in the Public Schools of the City of Boston (Boston: A. Mudge, 1867) 16.

20. Norfolk Association of Teachers to Horace Mann, February 1832, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 3; Anonymous, A Plea in Favor of Maintaining Flogging in the Navy (Washington(?), n.d.).

21. On women teachers in Massachusetts, in general, see: Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 124–25; Massachusetts Board of Education, Abstracts of Massachusetts School Returns (Boston, 1837), 301; Massachusetts Board of Education, Fifteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1852), xxxvi; Massachusetts Board of Education, Twenty-Third Annual Report (Boston, 1860), xl; ‘good order’ quote in: George Lemmon to Horace Mann, 10 Aug. 1841, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 6. Women, for example, constituted 18 percent of Tennessee teachers on the eve of the Civil War. See Tennessee Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report (Nashville: Tennessee Department of Public Instruction, 1865), 40.

22. See Perlmann, Joel and Margo, Robert A., Women's Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sugg, Redding, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978)Google Scholar; Melder, Keith, “Woman's High Calling: The Teaching Profession in America, 1830–1860,” American Studies 13 (1972)Google Scholar; Barnard, Richard and Vinovskis, Maris, “The Female School Teacher in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 10 (1977)Google Scholar.

23. Annual Report of the [Michigan] Superintendent of Public Instruction (Lansing, 1847), 47; Journal of Education (August 1); Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Eighteenth Annual Report (Madison: 1867), 13; Massachusetts Board of Education, Fourth Annual Report, 45; Massachusetts Board of Education, Second Annual Report (Boston, 1838), 12; Bushnell, Horace, Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York, 1869), 66Google Scholar.

24. [Michigan] Journal of Education (March 1838): 29; “Female Teachers,” Common School Journal (15 Feb. 1839).

25. Morris, Robert C., Readin', Writin', and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Jones, Jacquelyn, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 60Google Scholar; Dexter, Edwin Grant, A History of Education in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1916), 79–122Google Scholar; Orlando Brown to Ada W. Smith, 25 Jan. 1867, Records of the Superintendent for Education for the State of Virginia, reel 27; C.W. Buckley to Charles C. Arms, 20 Dec. 1866, Records of the Superintendent for Education for the State of Alabama, reel 21.

26. C. W. Buckley to Cravath, 15 Aug. 1867, Records of the Superintendent for Education for the State of Alabama, reel 21; Manley to Sowell, 2 May 1868, Records of the Superintendent for Education for the State of Virginia, reel 27.

27. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Education Department, First Annual Report of the Commissioner (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1865), 8. Giles Mead was the anxious educator. See Mead to Mary Mead, 2 Apr. 1872, Giles Mead Papers, Correspondence, Series 2, Library of Congress. Eaton, John Jr., An Address on Scholarly Workers: Their Spirit and Methods (Washington, DC: Judd & Detweiler, 1879), 6–7Google Scholar. Harris, William Torrey, The Psychologic Foundations of Education: An Attempt to Show the Genesis of the Higher Faculties of the Mind (New York, D. Appleton, 1908), 181Google Scholar.