Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War

Emma Willard’s “True Mnemonic of History”: America’s First Textbooks, Proto-Feminism, and the Memory of the Revolution

162 EmmaWillard’s“TrueMnemonicofhistory” America’s First Textbooks, Proto-Feminism, and the Memory of the Revolution = Keith Beutler On Thursday, May 1, 1828, in Troy, New York, schoolmistress Emma Willard, author of the soon-to-be best-selling History of the United States, dedicated the work in verse to her mother, Lydia Hinsdale Hart: Accept this offering of a daughter’s love . . . Mother, few are left, Like thee, who felt the fire of freedom’s holy time Pervade and purify the patriot breast. Thou wert within thy country’s shattered bark, When, trusting Heaven, she rode the raging seas, And braved with dauntless death-defying front The storm of war. With me retrace the scene, Then view her peace, her wealth, her liberty and fame.1 Willard thus reflected her generation’s fear that losing their parents, the last aged eyewitnesses of the Revolution, might complicate continued transmission of the memory of that epoch to future generations. Emma Willard believed that the nation’s natal memories would be effectively 163 Emma Willard’s “True Mnemonic of History” conveyed only in accord with what she labeled “the true mnemonic of history.”2 Willard, and many Americans of her era, advocated a memory strategy that did justice to an increasingly popular, self-consciously scientific understanding of the faculty of memory itself, one that privileged material supports of memory. Members of Willard’s mother’s generation had been, in their very persons, physical props of patriotic memory, embodied relics of the Revolutionary era. Going forward, America’s children would have mothers who, not having lived through the Revolution, would not themselves be material icons of the Revolutionary period. They would need to be taught the history of the Revolution before they could communicate its memory to their children. In 1819, consistent with that encroaching challenge, Emma Willard composed a petition to New York’s legislature, reasoning from the then fashionable materialist view of memory to a state responsibility to support liberal education for girls: today’s girls will be tomorrow’s mothers. As mothers they will be in physical proximity to their children, literally in the best position “to soften their minds and fit them to receive impressions.”3 Ergo, New York’s legislature ought to make girls’ education a policy priority . Situating Willard’s logic in the context of her and other contemporary pedagogues’ preoccupation with preserving and promoting remembrance of the Revolution, suggests a larger lesson to be drawn: to understand the memory of the American Revolution historically, we must historicize memory itself, considering how Americans’ changing beliefs about the faculty of “memory” may have shaped contemporaneous performances of patriotic memory and their reception.4 Willard’sPhysicalistviewofMemory In 1890 women in Troy, New York initiated a campaign to erect “a statue of [the late] Mrs. [Emma] Willard,” founding schoolmistress of a local women’s academy. Documenting a legacy that they believed justified a material, public depiction of her, the monument committee solicited testimonials , including one from the children of a certain Cornelia Keeler. The siblings remembered listening awestruck as their mother recited “verbatim paragraph after paragraph . . . which she had not seen since her school-days.” When they asked her “how it was possible to remember so perfectly,” she enthused, “I learned to study at Mrs. Willard’s.”5 Willard would have been pleased. She regarded monuments as 164 KEITH BEuTLER efficacious, tangible supports of memory. The founder and principal of Troy Female Seminary in New York and author of popular U.S. history textbooks in the 1820s and 1830s, Willard claimed to have independently— albeit contemporaneously with others—empirically inferred the “true mnemonic of history” education, an avowedly sensate assay of memory. With coauthor, William Channing Woodbridge, Willard published a geography text that prominently pictured a monument in Baltimore to George Washington, reflecting their contention that able teaching relies “upon the principle of making the eye the medium of instruction.” The book’s preface , written by Willard, explained that they would “admit little” pedagogically “which may not be traced to one of these two laws of intellect— first, that the objects of sight more readily become the subjects of conception and memory than those of the other senses; and secondly that the best of all methods to . . . enable the memory . . . is to class particulars under general heads.” Thus, Willard promoted a version of what contemporaries could recognize as the “local memory” tradition.6 Conveyed in the early republic’s...