The Tensions between Continuity and Change: Early Prescriptive Literature in Ohio and the Western Reserve

All forms of literature, from scholarly essays to graphic novels, are subject to the tempos and occurrences of their creators' times. They embody the events and concerns that surround their authors, and they represent the spirit and essence of the authors' experiences as well as their aspirations. Literature is more than the sum of its words on paper. Any examination of such works involves more than a simple analysis of the words and the syntax employed. Considering the motivations of the authors and their audiences reveals a much fuller context within which the works were created. All forms of literature readily demonstrate significant shifts in the intellectual and cultural attitudes of the times in which they are produced. This is particularly true of prescriptive and instructional works¹ meant primarily for children.

In some ways, children's prescriptive and instructional literature is better able to tell us about their creators than contemporary adult writings. As such, the children's works produced and used in the Old Northwest were stripped-down versions of contemporary adult knowledge, and they provide scholars with a more concise vision of what their authors—usually parents, ministers, and teachers—believed their offspring needed to know in order to prepare themselves for the future. They are, in a sense, a distillation of what adults found most necessary to their children's educations. For example, such texts clearly illustrate the changing beliefs and needs of those who found themselves moving from the safe, "civilized," and relatively homogenous communities of New England and the Mid-Atlantic to the wilds of the Ohio Territory at the opening of the nineteenth century. In the Old Northwest, these pioneers faced primitive conditions, dealt with limited lines of communication back East, and encountered an increasingly diverse population. The children's prescriptive and instructional literature used and produced by adults in Ohio clearly demonstrates how they sought to preserve their past and find ways to reshape their wilderness into something more civilized and familiar.² Using the Western Reserve³ as a case study most clearly illustrates this phenomenon. It was one of the few places in the Ohio territory where the plan for public schools actually had some success, where planners in the East attempted to maintain religious conformity through "missionary" work, and where slow but stable population growth reflected the demographic changes occurring throughout the state.⁴

Children, along with women, slaves, the working class, and members of a variety of ethnic groups, have been largely invisible or inarticulate in the historical record. They appear in the documents generally used by historians only when they have done something outside the norm—very good or, more often, very bad. When they do make an appearance it is frequently as the objects of the actions of others.⁵ Therefore, while their books rarely tell us much about real children, they do construct for us images of the ideal—the models of what adults believed children ought to or needed to be. These children's texts reveal aspects of the relationships between parents and other adults, and adults and their children. With a focus on their methods of communication, the books that adults provided for their children outlined their expectations of them. Although this dialogue is in general one-sided—top down from adults to children—it tells us what parents, teachers, and other adults perceived as acceptable and desirable conduct. By default, they also illustrate which of their children's behaviors did not meet adult expectations. It must be noted and understood, however, that children were counted as voiceless in our past.

The literature meant for children's instruction and available in the Western Reserve and Ohio at large, from the turn of the nineteenth century through the decade preceding the Civil War, clearly illustrates the residents' dichotomy between remembering their eastern heritage and adapting for their futures. Two collections—the Rosenbach Collection of Children's Literature and the Hiram College Archives—provided the majority of the original materials consulted in this work and represent a fairly complete survey...