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Chapter4 Exciting Emulation For several weeks in 1800, the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Burnside labored as a farm hand in Maine. Predictably, this work led nowhere. The labor he managed to wring from his frail body went to enhance other men's property, and once the seasons turned his value evaporated . So he made his way back to Upper Coos, New Hampshire, where at least people knew who he was. Once more, he tried to labor for his family members, but his poor health "would not allow me to procure a living in this honorable way." Feeble and useless as always, he gave up on the farm and "kept a petty school in my own native Town and District." Ofcourse, he had no qualifications for this teaching job. He had always been a "dull scholar," he tells us, and his education in Northumberland was "miserable indeed, only such as had been acquired at a few private schools:' In this context , "private" referred to a school held at a household, perhaps by a widow who earned a little extra firewood by occupying neighborhood youth during lulls in family labor.1 Among the remote farms of Upper Coos, Thomas had little chance to move past that paltry education and the small horizons it offered. He was effectively stuck in his "own native Town and District." But just a month after his return, Thomas watched as his younger cousin or brother, Samuel, left for a very different kind of school: Haverhill Academy, sixty miles to the south. Here was another chance to escape his grim past and bleak future. Ironically, Thomas's poor health might have worked in his favor at this point; the Burnsides would not object if he left town, because he was not much help anyway. In March 1801, then, he set out for Haverhill, walking half of the way in a secular pilgrimage that left his feet "monstrously blistered:' He recalls that he arrived in the village "among entire strangers"-perhaps Samuel, newly established at the school, tried to ignore his awkward relative. "This scene will ever appear fresh in my memory, 'till my dying day;' Thomas wrote of his first day at Haverhill. "Howsoever, I mustered up what little fortitude I had left, and the next day, being the last of March 1801 I entered my Exciting Emulation 97 name a student of the Academy." That was the day his life, as he preferred to remember it, began.2 Thomas Burnside had arrived at one of the several hundred privately funded institutions for higher learning that sprouted across the republic after the 1780s, the most important of which were called academies. These schools drew young people from households that were variously situated in the economies and landscapes around them, widening the social distance between village and countryside and spreading the liberal knowledge and refined manners that signified gentility. As important, they converted the new ideologies of emulation and ambition into everyday policies. In the hands of teachers and precepts who saw themselves as members of a nation or society first and a town or community second, school became a crucial vehicle of cultural and personal change, an institutional base for new ways of thinking and aspiring. In The Mother ofa Family, a play performed at one such school in 1799, a rustic character named Nelly remarked that "everybody is going to school" in "these times:' Beneath the sweeping generalization , Nelly touched on a vital truth: for the first time, many of her peers and neighbors had to depart from home, physically and cosmologically, in order to go to schooP Customs and Reforms Many post-Revolutionary leaders valued schools as pillars of republican society , and some tried to tie them into regional or national systems. At least in theory, they wanted every citizen to have a common educational experience and to learn "that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property ." They meant, more specifically, national property. To accomplish this, reformers like Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson called for three-tiered state systems, with free elementary schools at the base, regional academies for more advanced pupils in the middle, and, at the pinnacle, state colleges for the best and brightest. (Some luminaries also hoped for a "Federal University'' that would train students to "think and feel as genuine sons ofAmerica:' thus lifting them "Infinitely above the local prejudices of vulgar bosoms:') They also wanted change at the classroom and instructional level. Much like the...

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