A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation by Beth Barton Schweiger (review)

Elegantly conceived and imaginatively researched, Beth Barton Schweiger’s A Literate South explores “reading before emancipation,” as the subtitle notes. Schweiger tells us that her volume originated with the discovery of a journal deposited in the collections at the Virginia Historical Society. Begun in 1842 by Amanda Jane Cooley, who made the initial entry at the age of twenty-two, the handmade journal ends with her death twelve years later. There is the quotidian that we would expect, the days filled with household labor on a farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. And there is the entry we would not anticipate—Cooley’s list of the family’s reading, which included newspapers, religious tracts, songsters, advice literature, biographies, and national magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book. Shortly after Schweiger discovered Amanda Cooley’s journal, she found a parallel account in Allen Speer’s recollections of his ancestors who lived about fifty miles southeast of the Cooleys in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge. Like Amanda Jane and her sister Betsy, Jennie and Ann Speer read newspapers, magazines, advice literature, novels, histories, and biographies. They took pleasure in songsters, broadsides, tracts, and almanacs. The Speer sisters also studied Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), a text taught at male colleges and female seminaries across the United States.

Schweiger’s argument is twofold. Print, she argues, became widely available in the rural South in the years leading up to the Civil War, a premise she documents throughout A Literate South. The forms of print included the songs, stories, and doctrines that Schweiger considers in separate chapters. The Cooleys and the Speers benefited from the dramatic shift from scarcity to abundance in the print available to readers. In 1750, eleven thousand titles appeared; a century later, when the two sets of sisters took to print, fifty thousand titles were published in the United States. Schweiger also argues that the evidence left by the Cooleys and the Speers challenges the idea that northerners constituted a modern literate society that stood in contrast to a broadly illiterate South. That these women embodied “a literate South” is thoroughly demonstrated. But to what degree can we consider these intensely engaged readers representative of print’s circulation and consumption in the region? To what degree can we presume that the rich and diverse forms of print in which the Cooleys and the Speers immersed themselves were being read in households throughout the rural South? Was their engagement common? Or were they exceptional? Amanda Jane and Betsy Cooley sought a world beyond the Blue Ridge, as did Jennie and Ann Speer. Jennie Speer acted on this aspiration. In between her years spent teaching at Greensboro Female College and Rockford Female Seminary, Jennie attended Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Schweiger might have speculated about the commitment of Jennie’s parents to their daughter’s schooling. What does their support tell us about their aspirations for her? What does it tell us about the family’s financial resources?

The two sets of sisters learned how to express themselves with the familiar succession of spellers, grammars, and rhetorics. In documenting the significance of the speller, Schweiger introduces Jincy, the Cooley’s household slave whose education began and ended with the speller. In its pages, she was told to “be good and learn one’s book” (50). All indications are that she followed the second injunction. Spellers taught children— black and white, enslaved and free—deference, obedience, and submission. Girls were expected to practice the deference they learned as children throughout their adulthood. Jincy may well have recited from one of Noah Webster’s spellers, which were sold throughout the South beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Between its initial publication in 1783 and the author’s death six decades later, an astonishing thirteen million of Webster’s spellers were printed. There is no better evidence of the citizenry’s commitment to literacy. Grammars...