Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part X: Students of Prestige

Education, as it happened, was another of the social markers adopted by the American planter class as a means of setting themselves above their similarly wealthy but uncultured peers. Granted, it was not a privilege of which every member of this cohort took enthusiastic advantage. The likes of George Mason (1725-1792), for example – later famous for his scholarship and his erudition – brothers Francis Lightfoot Lee (1734-1797) and Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), and the aforementioned William Blount of North Carolina were all educated at home by a succession of tutors hired by their wealthy families. Under the circumstances, this was entirely reasonable given that the management of a plantation could best be learned by firsthand observation, and that even a career in the law – perhaps the most popular vocation among the southern gentry – could be had via apprenticeship. Pragmatism, of course, was not a trait for which the American planter class was particularly renowned. For that reason, many of the scions of the colonial South’s wealthiest families received prestigious educations on the classical model – far in excess of what their likely vocations would ever require – either in America, Britain, or Continental Europe. By and large, the greater the cost, the more prestigious the resulting accreditation, and the greater the social cache it conferred.

 

On the first order – being those whose families could afford to send them only to the better class of school within the confines of the southern colonies – there were men like Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Carter Braxton (1736-1797), John Blair Jr. (1732-1800), and Edmund Randolph (1753-1813), all of whom attended the College of William & Mary – founded in 1693 and named for the sponsoring monarchs William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1662-1694) – in Williamsburg, Virginia. Though, by the standards of the contemporary British Empire, William & Mary was a far cry from Oxford or Cambridge, it nevertheless managed to provide its students with a thoroughgoing education is such diverse and heady topics as mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy, as well as languages like French, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. While, in light of the kinds of careers which the aforementioned students pursued upon graduation – Jefferson apprenticed as a lawyer under George Wythe (1726-1806), Randolph did the same under his father John (1727-1784) and his uncle Peyton (1721-1775), and Braxton became a merchant and plantation owner – this would seem on the surface to be an excessively dense criteria, the intention behind it was as much a matter of style as it was substance. Regardless of what the students of the College of William & Mary ultimately did with their education, the mere fact of having been taught to read ancient languages, and to discuss politics and philosophy, and to exercise the rules of rhetoric in conversation conveyed upon them a quality of prestige with few material equivalents. Being a gentleman, after all, was about more than simply living like one. A gentleman, on the 18^th century Anglo-American model, had to be able to talk a certain way, and be erudite, and witty, and well-read, and worldly. William & Mary successfully instilled these qualities into its students despite its relative obscurity within the sphere of contemporary British instructional institutions, and for this reason it served a certain strata of the southern planter class for generations on end.

 

There was also, of course, an entire sub-class of the southern elite above those families who patronized the flagship college of the Province of Virginia for whom greater wealth and more prestigious connections provided access to some of the most esteemed institutions in the 18^th century world. Of this latter group, it must be said, religion also factored into the decision of where to send their heirs and scions. Cousins Daniel Carroll (1730-1796) and the aforementioned Charles Carroll of Carrollton, for example, were members of a prominent Catholic planter family from Maryland who would accordingly have been prohibited from attending any of the colleges that had been chartered in British America to serve the needs of its Protestant inhabitants. In consequence, after having attained a preliminary education mainly via private tutors, both men attended the College of St. Omer in Artois in the Kingdom of France. Founded as a school for lay English Catholics outside the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, St. Omer had served the needs of Britain’s Catholic gentry for over a hundred years by the middle of the 18^th century, during which time it began to perform the same function for similarly wealthy and restricted Catholics in British America. That the Carrolls consented to pay the extra costs that this arrangement entailed is quite telling. As mentioned previously, the careers which men like Daniel and Charles Carroll eventually took on almost certainly did not require them to attain an advanced education. Charles became a lawyer after an apprenticeship in London. Daniel inherited his family’s plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Both of them, as the experiences of certain of their contemporaries clearly shows, could have followed these same paths without ever having left America or attended more than the equivalent of a primary school. Their attendance at St. Omer accordingly must not have been a matter of practical necessity. Rather, as with a number of their Protestant contemporaries, it was a question of appearance. Not only was St. Omer the only means by which Catholic planters in America could maintain a parity of prestige with their Anglican counterparts, but it arguably possessed the added distinction of being the same school to which members of the British aristocracy – Catholic though they were – sent their children and heirs. By making their children the academic peers of these aristocratic scions, families like the Carrolls thus arguably elevated themselves to the same rank in the contemporary Anglo-American social structure.

Protestant planters possessed of similar resources to those of the Carrolls naturally had a much easier time attaining the same level of distinction within the realm of education. The aforementioned “ancient universities” of Cambridge and Oxford were notable favorites among those families who could afford them, with Virginia’s Thomas Nelson Jr. (1738-1789) and South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch Jr. (1749-1779) and Arthur Middleton (1742-1787) attending the former, while Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), also of South Carolina, matriculated at the latter. Both institutions were products of the Medieval Era – Oxford having been founded in 1096, Cambridge in 1209 – and by the 18^th century possessed unsurpassed reputations in such fields as mathematics, philosophy, and the classics. It accordingly followed – whether it was empirically true or not – that a contemporary graduate of either of the “Oxbridge” institutions could convincingly boast of possessing the best education that money could buy. Granting, once again, that such a claim was of questionable practical value within the economic sphere that the late 18^th century American planter class inhabited, those families who could afford it seemed not to doubt its less-than-tangible worth. Just so, while it was entirely possible – and perfectly acceptable – for the heir of a wealthy planter family to begin a career in the law by apprenticing with a local professional, the wealthiest among them nevertheless insisted on sending their children to Britain to receive the formal training traditionally required of the better class of English barrister.

The Inns of Court – a set of four institutions founded in the 14^th century just outside the contemporary City of London for the purpose of training and lodging professional barristers – were accordingly well-patronized by a certain subset of the American planter elite, with Middle Temple in particular – as opposed to Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, or Inner Temple – appearing to be the most common choice among American students. Of the examples named above, Pinkney, Lynch, and Middleton all became members of Middle Temple, along with fellow South Carolinian Thomas Heyward Jr. (1746-1809) and brothers John Rutledge (1739-1800) – who would go on to become the 2^nd Chief Justice of the United States – and Edward Rutledge (1749-1800). Training at the Inns was at that time a rather lengthy and unstructured affair, with students expected to take advantage of the on-site archives and libraries and their proximity to working barristers – who traditionally kept their chambers and dined there – as the principle means of cultivating a mastery of the law. While apprenticeships – as were common in America – functioned on essentially the same model, with lawyers-in-training splitting their time between reading tomes like Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1770) by Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) and observing court proceedings in the company of their master, they lacked some of the more social aspects of life and study at the Inns. Not only were the students of Middle Temple expected to develop a technical understanding of the intricacies of English Common Law, but it was taken for granted that they would also size the opportunity to forge connections with both their contemporaries and their superiors for the purpose of building a network upon which to fashion a professional career. The cache which attending the Inns at Court conveyed upon the relative handful of colonial Americans who were fortunate enough to do so accordingly had only so much to do with the knowledge acquired therein. After all, anyone could become a lawyer in contemporary British America by studying under another lawyer and gaining acceptance to the relevant colonial bar. But only at the likes of Middle Temple could a prospective barrister rub shoulders with – and potentially learn at the feet of – some of the most skilled, honored, and respected legal professionals in the whole of the British Empire.

Notwithstanding the comparative excess of resources which the members of the late 18^th century southern planter class appeared willing to lavish upon their children in the name of formal instruction, it bears noting that they were not the only community living in contemporary British America to attach such surpassing social importance to the prospect of education. In the colonies of the so-called “Middle Atlantic” – i.e. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware – wealthy merchant or land-owning families patronized institutions of higher learning for much the same reasons as their southern counterparts. John Jay (1745-1829), for instance, attended King’s College in Manhattan at the behest of the wealth his father and grandfather had acquired as highly successful merchants and traders, and doubtless for the purpose of reinforcing – or improving – the family’s reputation. Robert R. Livingston (1746-1813), likewise the heir of a very prestigious family, most assuredly attended the same institution for precisely the same reasons, as did fellow New Yorker Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816). Johnathan Dayton (1760-1824) matriculated at the College of New Jersey under very similar circumstances, and the wealthy, plantation-owning family of John Dickinson (1732-1808) went so far as to send him to be trained as a lawyer at the aforementioned Middle Temple. Notwithstanding their relative frequency, however, examples such as these don’t necessarily represent the norm for an entire social class in the same way that the patronage bestowed upon the like of William & Mary arguably does for the southern planters.

Not everyone who attended Mid-Atlantic institutions like King’s College, the College of New Jersey, or the College of Philadelphia did so as a function of the social expectations nurtured by their respective families. Aaron Burr (1756-1836), for instance, very likely became a student of the future Princeton University because his deceased father, Aaron Burr Sr. (1716-1757) had been its second president. For that reason, the younger Burr’s decision was probably as much personal as it was aspirational, owing to a sense of paternal legacy as much to the prospect of social advancement. Just so, Burr’s eventual victim, the orphaned, penniless Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), attended King’s College thanks to the charity of his neighbors in the Danish Indies settlement of Christiansted. Far from living up to the expectations of a wealthy family, Hamilton was instead arguably pursuing some means of re-establishing the sense of personal and economic stability that the earlier departure of his father and the death of his mother had served to systematically destroy over the course of the 1760s. While it would be difficult to deny that both Burr and Hamilton benefited socially and materially from their respective educational experiences, neither of them could accordingly be said to have pursued higher learning based on the same kinds of assumptions that motivated either their contemporaries in the Mid-Atlantic colonies or their counterparts among the southern planters. Rather than respond to the prevailing currents in the social strata to which they belonged, they were compelled by the events of their respective personal lives.

  

And then there was New England, wherein formal education was much more common in the late 18^th century and higher learning was regularly pursued without any expectation of a gain in social capital. Owing to the emphasis which the Calvinist founders of colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire placed on the principle of biblical literacy, compulsory education in fact became the norm across the region as early as the middle of the 17^th century. Most townships of a reasonable size thereafter came to possess at least a primary school, supported by a mix of taxes and tuition fees, with larger settlements going so far as to establish grammar schools for the instruction of adolescent students. Boston Latin School was among the most famous of the latter, having been established in its namesake city in 1635, while Connecticut’s Hopkins School – located in New Haven and named for the late Governor Edward Hopkins (1600-1657) was founded in 1660. High learning was in turn facilitated by the likes of Harvard College (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636), Yale College (New Haven, Connecticut, 1701), Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1769), and Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, 1764), the majority of which were established and endowed for the purpose of training young men to enter careers in the ministry. Granting that the proportion of students at the likes of Harvard or Yale who actually became ministers dropped off significantly over the course of the 18^th century – to the point that, by around 1760, they could no longer realistically claim to be divinity schools – the social context in which these institutions existed continued to be colored by a strong perceived link between education, piety, and moral character.

   

While the proliferation of educational institutions in New England, and the consequent availability of learning to a wider social spectrum than in the contemporary southern colonies, might at first blush be taken to imply that similar class distinctions or aspirations didn’t exist among the inhabitants of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Rhode Island, this was very much not the case. There were elites, middling sorts, and commoners in the northern colonies just as there were in the southern colonies, with all of the assumptions and implications that such stratification entails. The so-called “Boston Brahmin,” for example – so named by Cambridge native and Harvard graduate Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) to describe the class to which he belonged – may not have been as wealthy as their southern planter counterparts, but they endeavored to cultivate much the same air of gentility, urbanity, and refinement. That being said, education undeniably played a smaller part in defining these kinds of social distinctions in New England than it did in Virginia, the Carolinas, or Maryland. A yeoman farmer in 18^th century rural Massachusetts might not have dreamt of sending his eldest son to Harvard, or even have believed that it was necessary for the reputation of his family that he did so. But his male children would more likely than not have benefited from at least a primary school education, or else have acquired as much literacy and learning as the law and custom required. The reason for this was also largely social, but in a very different way to those which seemed to motivate the planter elite of the colonies to the south.

Consider, by way of a case in point, the family of 2^nd President John Adams. His father, John Adams Sr., could most definitely claim descent from an ancestor who took part in the first period of settlement to what was then the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in the early 1630s. While this doubtless conveyed upon him a quality of social capital that could not be matched by those of his neighbors who were the offspring of later waves of emigration, it hardly made him the material equal of a similarly descended southern planter. For all the pride he purportedly invested in his ancestry, and the lengths to which he went to uphold the values he believed this heritage stood for, John Adams Sr. was a man of relatively modest means. He was a prosperous yeoman farmer, to be sure, though not to the extent that he could forgo taking on extra work in the winter as a cobbler. He was also a deacon in his church, a lieutenant in the colonial militia, a tax collector, and a selectman for the Town of Braintree. And he was a graduate of Harvard, at which he insisted his son also enroll. All of these things doubtless contributed to a reputation for integrity, diligence, and piety; most definitely they did not aid in projecting an image of gentlemanly conduct befitting one who was born to lead. Indeed, if the younger John’s recollections of his father were in any way accurate, the elder John was motivated exclusively by considerations of substance rather than appearance. Far from believing that study at Harvard would serve to set him apart from those he considered to be his social inferiors – many of whom lived in identical material circumstances – Farmer John considered the education one received at such an institution to be a mark of good character and sound habits.

Most assuredly, it was this reason that the elder Adams sent his son to the same institution. Graduating from Harvard, after all, had done little to improve either the social or material conditions of his life, and it seems unlikely he believed the experience would better serve John Jr. Just so, the younger Adams was evidently adamant that his own son, John Quincy Adams, be schooled in Cambridge in turn despite that fact that, by the time of his admittance in 1785, the boy had already accompanied his father to Europe, attended several schools in cities across the continent, and served as personal secretary to American diplomat Francis Dana (1743-1811). Compared to having attended the court of Catherine the Great (1729-1796) in Saint Petersburg or studying at Leiden University in the Dutch Republic, one would be hard pressed to imagine that even the toniest of the Massachusetts elite would have maintained that a degree from Harvard was the most prestigious honor a man could seek. Nevertheless, it was to Harvard that John Quincy next applied himself, and it was from Harvard that he graduated in 1787 before proceeding upon a career as a lawyer and a diplomat. Distinction, clearly, was not what John Adams sought for his son, for it would have seemed obvious to any who cared to measure such things that the boy already possessed it in abundance. Rather, as his own father had arguably impressed upon him, it was a matter of discipline, self-improvement, and character. The common product of New England habits and New England values – among them such Puritan virtues as hard work, probity, and studiousness – John Adams Sr., John Adams, and John Quincy Adams each of them attended Harvard College, not for the boost which they believed it would provide to their respective reputations, or in answer to a social expectation of gentlemanly attainment, but because they had imbibed the value of education as a shaper of morals and a cultivator of habits.