Morality and Citizenship in the Early Republic

Ways of Wisdom: MoralEducation in the Early National Period, Including the Diary of Rachel Mordecai LazarusBy Jean E. Friedman, transcribed and edited with the assistance of Glenna Schroeder-Lein University of Georgia Press, 2001

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American CultureBy Gillian Brown Harvard University Press, 2001

The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter By Patricia Crain Stanford University Press, 2000

The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in EarlyAmericaBy Franklin E. Court Syracuse University Press, 2001

The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910By Caroline WintererJohns Hopkins University Press, 2002

In August 1819, 10-year-old Eliza Mordecai was reading her day's lesson aloud to her half sister and teacher Rachel Mordecai when they came to the maxim "Learn to contemn all praise betimes" (211). Rachel, who at 31 was already a seasoned teacher in the Mordecai family's Warrenton Female Academy in North Carolina, saw an opportunity to combine instruction in morality with a vocabulary lesson by explaining the meaning of "betimes" to Eliza. "I do not think Eliza that the author means, to contemn all praise—," she began (211). But Eliza, in a rush to continue with the passage, interrupted Rachel's explanation and insisted that "Betimes, means all times" (211). We can only speculate about the direction that Rachel might have taken in interpreting the moral message for Eliza—would she have stressed the importance of learning to be suspicious of praise early in life? or perhaps advocated an initial reluctance to accept praise until it proved just?—for at this point the lesson took a different turn. Sent to bring a dictionary, Eliza obeyed but with a "slow & heavy step," and Rachel demanded that she make the trip upstairs again "briskly & cheerfully" (211). When Eliza's face continued to register her resentment over the episode, Rachel insisted that the girl reveal her thoughts, for "it is necessary for me to know what passes in your mind, that I may be better able to advise and direct you" (211). "You are not afraid that I should whip, or shut you up in a closet," Rachel continued, urging Eliza to be forthright and bear her punishment courageously, "but you are afraid of my anger" (211). Eliza's resistance turned out to be over a matter of interpretive authority. Rachel had accused Eliza of "conceit" for interrupting her instructor, and Eliza, at first sotto voce and then openly once pressed, responded by throwing the charge back at Rachel. Rachel deflected Eliza's rebelliousness, responding with sorrow rather than anger. Eliza's punishment came that evening, when the sisters completed their daily account of the girl's learning and conduct. Rather than evaluate Eliza's behavior herself, as was her custom, Rachel insisted that Eliza fill in the record, at which "Eliza took the pen & wrote 'One great fault, otherwise a good girl'" (212).

This episode in a young girl's moral education, recorded at significant length in The Diary of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, illustrates a number of central preoccupations that dominated pedagogical theory in the early national period: the Lockean aversion to corporal punishment except in extreme cases; the equally Lockean preoccupation with the proper handling of rebellion against authority; the personalization of authority figures and the effort to train children to build their moral identities upon their feelings for their instructors, in what Richard Brodhead calls "a purposeful sentimentalization of the disciplinary relation" (19); and the centrality of texts and literacy in the educational process. The Diary is a remarkable document that offers rich insights into the concrete practices and day-to-day interactions by which one teacher sought to shape one child's identity.

Rachel's intermittent record of Eliza's intellectual, emotional, and moral development provides numerous accounts such as the one summarized above of episodes where...