We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835

9. White Teachers

117 9 . Y . White Teachers w hen Caroline Ball Laurens traveled to europe in the 1820s, she directed a letter to her sister that “contained directions respecting the manner in which she wished her children to be educated, should she die before her return to Charleston.”1 in case of her death, Caroline asked another female relative, rather than her husband, to carry on her educational program. while fathers provided financial support, and certainly opinions , mothers for the most part oversaw this aspect of childrearing. The face of the young Republic was molded by mothers who decided how boys and girls would be taught and thus what kinds of men and women they would be. education was vital to many white families in the South; for poorer children , it could be a means to a better future, and it stamped elite boys and girls with an unmistakable class status. The presence of slaves in the South added urgency to the project of class and racial distinction, and education was a primary way in which mothers could maintain the lines between their children and the children of africans and african americans. Resting largely in the hands of mothers, education was a powerful tool for shaping the next generation, and it also confirmed mothers’ sense of their own usefulness and worth. as infants became toddlers, and toddlers became young boys and girls, mothers developed a program of education that included practical skills, moral improvement, and gendered instruction in how to be a valuable member of local and regional communities . Most mothers in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South considered education to fall under their purview, and as a result, most children engaged in educational programs that had been devised and implemented by their mothers. To a large degree, mothers controlled what children were taught, where their lessons were held, who could instruct them, and who could be instructed . By overseeing so many elements of their children’s education, women 118 sowing good seeds constructed maternal roles that placed them at the center of debates about religion , gender, race, and class. These mothers claimed responsibility over the classroom and thus responsibility for the future of their families, communities, and nation. ƒ Z % The subjects mothers taught were varied, from grammar to housekeeping, and they depended both on networks of fellow mothers and on larger social trends to determine what material their children needed to know. one of the great intellectual and educational shifts in early america was the gradual overshadowing of religion by rationalism. By the mid-eighteenth century, a growing colonial population, a burgeoning economy, and a new emphasis on the inherent innocence of children significantly altered the practices of childrearing, as religious learning was subsumed under the larger project of secular education.2 Choosing how to interpret secular trends and translating new ideas into lessons for children, mothers were at the vanguard of determining how the enlightenment would affect the next generation of americans. as the eighteenth century progressed, most elite white mothers—many of whom retained their personal sense of faith—began to trust that the study of geometry, history, Latin, and dancing would ensure a place for their daughters and sons in the drawing rooms and academies of the young Republic. Reluctant to abandon entirely their religious instincts in the raising of their precious charges, southern mothers made the transition from religious to secular education by way of a heightened discourse of morality. This secularized emphasis on morality and virtue comforted mothers who feared for their children’s souls, but it also allowed children to thrive in a society where their scope of moral duty was widening to encompass both colony and country.3 Though mothers could, to a large extent, control how and to what degree enlightenment trends were introduced to their children, not all of them expressed perfect confidence in this responsibility. as a young mother in the 1740s and 1750s, eliza Lucas Pinckney was on the cusp of changing ideas about the role of religion in children’s education, and her letters to her children illustrate the tension between an increasingly secular culture and the conviction that God alone could save one’s children. Struggling against the “fashonable but shameful vice” among many american youths who joined in the “ridiculeing of re- 119 white teachers ligion,” eliza reminded her sons that she would disdain a “learned man with every accomplishment” in favor of a...