Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Elizabeth Peabody on the “Temperament of the Colored Classes”:African Americans, Progressive History, and Education in a Democratic System

The prevailing critical notion of Elizabeth Peabody is that of kindergarten crusader, eccentric, and peripheral Transcendentalist. However, her letters and essays disclose a great deal about nineteenth-century culture and reveal that Peabody’s educational philosophy is significant. Perhaps most interesting, Peabody’s educational work both anticipates and responds to shifts of ethnological theory, especially those theories that are historically based, while it also comments on her notions of race and education . Examining Elizabeth Peabody’s educational writings reveals that Peabody struggled to balance her belief in the ability of education to effect individual change with her belief in a more biologically influenced, progressive historical march to a Christian finale. Peabody’s pedagogical work occurred during one of the most tumultuous periods of educational development in U.S.history.At the start of the century,the public schools were a nascent movement that would by the end of the antebellum period develop rapidly into a large and formalized school system. In the early 1800s, educational theoreticians and school officials began to emphasize education as a means to form a citizen of the democratic system. Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy claimed that the city would “educate better men, happier citizens, more enlightened statesmen; . . . elevate a people, thoroughly instructed in their social rights, deeply imbued with a sense of their moral duties; mild, flexible to every breadth of legitimate authority; unyielding as fate to unconstitutional impositions” (qtd. in Schultz 44). While education was seen as potentially uplifting, “there was Elizabeth Peabody on the “Temperament of the Colored Classes” African Americans, Progressive History, and Education in a Democratic System amy earhart • 77 • 78 • politics on the home front also,” as Michel Foucault theorizes, “a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions,not to fundamental rights,but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility” (169). The hope for the elevated citizen became enmeshed with the desire for a less rebellious,less troublesome citizen: a cog in the machine of democracy. Like that of her contemporaries William Ellery Channing, Horace Mann, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody’s educational work reflected this early antebellum educational ideology. Peabody insists that “a true education will keep all the powers of man in harmony”and “prevent this prodigious force of blind will making disorder & originating evil”(Letters , 350, 361); education becomes for Peabody, as Bruce Ronda argues, “the great mediating activity of life, negotiating the competing claims of self and other” (Reformer, 8). The early antebellum view of an education of control and the deemphasis of individuality, adopted by Peabody, would remain under debate during the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the African American population. Early antebellum theories about education’s ability to affect African American children were primarily based upon concepts of race and environment . In Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787; enlarged ed. 1810), Samuel Stanhope Smith, a dominant figure in ethnological thinking, argues that all races “were members of the same species and had a common remote ancestry; differences in color,anatomy,intelligence,temperament,and morality could be attributed to differing physical and social environments, especially climate and the contrasting habits of life produced by ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’” (Fredrickson 72). Assuming a monogenetic origin which made whites the dominant race, he believed that blacks could leave their “negative traits” and color behind, through changes of environment (Fredrickson 72). And Smith was not the only theorist who claimed environmental changes could affect race.George Louis Leclerc Buffon,a leading authority on natural history from 1749–1804,argued essentially that environmental difference precluded people of color from becoming white. He believed that excessive heat, land altitude, the proximity to the ocean, diet, and social customs were some of the reasons that Africans were black.1 Race, writes Buffon, amy earhart • 79 “persists as long as the milieu remains and disappears when the milieu is changed” (qtd. in Gossett 36). An avid reader of European philosophers and ethnologists, Peabody was aware of such theories. Her mentor, William Ellery Channing, also accepted that environment could play a key factor in the education of African American children. Channing argued that African American “modes of life would vary if instruction is early...