¹ Livingston and Onondaga County woman's diary [diary of Clarissa Pengra], 1838–1842, November 2, 1840, Microfilm, Collection #6230, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch, Carl A. Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Holder of original material, Chris Densmore, University of Buffalo Archives. I have identified the woman as Clarissa Pengra.Google Scholar

² For discussions of the market realities of teachers’ lives in the early national and antebellum periods, including the informal career ladders that existed, see Tolley, Kim and Beadie, Nancy, “Socio-Economic Incentives to Teach in New York and North Carolina: Toward a More Complex Model of Teacher Labor Markets, 1800–1850.” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 36–72; Tolley, Kim, “How Mrs. Sambourne Earned a ‘Comfortable Living for Herself and Her Children’: Music Teachers in the North Carolina Education Market, 1800–1840.” Social Science History 32 no. 1 (April 2008), forthcoming; Tolley, Kim and Nash, Margaret, “Leaving Home to Teach: The Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–41,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, eds., Beadie, N. and Tolley, K., (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 161–185; and Castelow, Teri L., “‘Creating an Educational Interest’: Sophia Sawyer, Teacher of the Cherokee,” ibid., 186–210.Google Scholar

³ Vast scholarly literatures lie behind this brief description of antebellum economic change. These literatures are referenced further below. For the brief summary here I rely primarily on Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and Bodenhorn, Howard, A History of Banking in Antebellum American: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation-Building (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the concepts of “market revolution” and “transition to capitalism” see Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Kulikoff, Alan, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser 46 (1989): 120–144.Google Scholar

⁴ These stories are part of the larger manuscript, “Education and the Creation of Capital: The Place of Schooling in New York's Transforming Political Economy, 1790–1850.” currently under review.Google Scholar

⁵ Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection, Syracuse University Archives, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. In 1850 the Seminary spawned the organization of an affiliated college, Genesee College, and in 1871 the Central New York Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church moved the College (against the active protests of local residents) to Syracuse to become the nucleus of Syracuse University. The Methodists apparently took most of the Seminary's records as well as the College's with them. Thus the Seminary's records have become part of the Syracuse University archives. For an account of these events, see Beadie, Nancy, “From Academy to University in New York State: The Genesee Institutions and the Importance of Capital to the Success of an Idea, 1848–1871.” History of Higher Education Annual 14 (1994): 13–38.Google Scholar

⁶ This phrase is borrowed from the title of Christopher Clark's 1990 book: The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). The titles of other books belonging to the same body of literature convey a similar idea. For example, Hahn, Stephen and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) and Kulikoff, Alan, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992).Google Scholar

⁷ An excellent survey of the literature on antebellum economic development is provided in Bodenhorn, Howard, A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation-Building (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–27.Google Scholar

⁸ Katz, Michael B., The Irony of School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

⁹ Katz, Michael B. and Paul, H. Mattingly eds., Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario's Past (New York: New York University Press, 1975); Kaestle, Carl, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., Education and Social Change in Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Vinovskis, Maris A., The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985). The differences were substantial. In 1826, the lowest and highest enrollment rates differed by as much as 37 percentage points when all forms of schooling were considered (including venture schools and academies), and by as much as 55 percentage points when only town-supported common schools were considered. These findings gave substance and specificity to the substantially higher rural than urban attendance patterns that the economists Soltow, Lee and Stevens, Edward were finding in their systematic study of literacy and school attendance in national census data. Soltow, Lee and Stevens, Edward, “Economic Aspects of School Participation in Mid-Nineteenth Century United States.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (Autumn 1977): 221–243. The analysis was then incorporated into a larger work: idem, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University Of Chicago, 1981). The norm of higher attendance in small towns and rural areas than in cities of the North continued, by the way, well into the twentieth century. Economists Goldin, Claudia and Katz, Lawrence discovered similar rural/urban variations in high school attendance data through 1940. See Goldin, Claudia and Katz, Lawrence, “Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 683–723.Google Scholar

¹¹ Kaestle, and Vinvoskis, , Education and Social Change, 1980.Google Scholar

¹² For example see, Schultz, Theodore, “Capital Formation by Education.” Journal of Political Economy 68, no. 6 (Dec. 1960): 571–583; idem., “Investment in Human Capital.” The American Economic Review 51, no. 1 (1961): 1–17; Goldin, and Katz, , “Human Capital and Social Capital”; Claudia Goldin, “America's Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century.” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (June 1998): 345–374.Google Scholar

¹³ Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ This is the interpretation developed in Cott, Nancy F., Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) and in Barbara Solomon's survey of the history of women's education, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). More recently Jane Hunter developed this interpretation with reference to the development of urban high school culture among the set of fairly affluent women she studied in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University, 2002). For a recent essay review that distinguishes the interpretation presented in these works from those developed in some works discussed below, see Ogren, Christine A., “‘Precocious Knowledge of Everything’: New Interpretations of Women's Higher Schooling in the US in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 39, no. 4 (2007): 391–402.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Jensen, Joan, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820.” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 511–542; Kerns, Kathryn, “Ante-bellum Higher Education for Women in Western New York State” (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993); Malkmus, Doris Jeanne, “Capable Women and Refined Ladies: Two Visions of American Women's Higher Education, 1760–1861” (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2001). Malkmus explicitly distinguishes between a “gentile” tradition of women's education rooted in large towns and cities of the east coast in the early republican period, and a “productionist” tradition of evangelical co-education rooted in the countryside of the eastern interior and the mid-west in the antebellum period.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Nash, Margaret, Women's Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005); Kerns, “Ante-bellum Higher Education”; Malkmus, “Capable Women and Refined Ladies: Two Visions of American Women's Higher Education, 1760–1861” (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2001); Tolley, Kim, “How Mrs. Sambourne Earned a ‘Comfortable Living for Herself and Her Children’”; Tolley, and Beadie, , “Socio-Economic Incentives to Teach in New York and North Carolina”; Tolley, Kim, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge/Falmer Press, 2002); and Kaufman, Polly Welts, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Records of the First Congregational Society at Charleston (later Lima), Lima Presbyterian Church, Lima, New York.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This description of the practice and terms of subscription raising in the early nineteenth century is based on examination of many subscription documents belonging primarily to five archival collections: Livingston County Historian and Livingston Country Historical Society, Geneseo, New York; Lima Historical Society, Lima, New York; Study Center for Early Religious Life in Western New York, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Syracuse University Archives, Arents Research Library, Syracuse, New York; and Sheldon Library and Research Center, Sheldon Museum, Middlebury, Vermont.Google Scholar

¹⁹ This summary of the initial capitalization of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary is based on extensive analysis of the institution's financial and organizational records, including especially the Account Books #178, #56, #59, and #102, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection, Syracuse University Archives, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.Google Scholar

²⁰ Records of School District #4, 1814–55, Lima Historical Society, Tenny Burton Museum, Lima, New York.Google Scholar

²¹ For the concept of “social economy” invoked here see Schlotterbeck, John, “The ‘Social Economy’ of an Upper South Community: Orange and Greene Counties, Virginia, 1815–1860,” in Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies eds., Burton, Orville Vernon and McMath, Robert C., Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). The more common term in the literature is “moral economy,” but I prefer “social economy,” as implying no presumed judgment regarding the fairness and justice of the relationships. Exploitation occurred in local barter and trade as well as in market relations. The best analytical account of these practices and transactions is still Merrill, Michael, “Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States.” Radical History Review 3 (1977): 42–71; also see the chapter on “How to Read an Account Book” in Merrill, “The Political Economy of Agrarian America,” (Unpublished PhD. diss., Columbia University, 1985).Google Scholar

²² Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 167.Google Scholar

²³ Coleman, “James S., Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 307, as quoted in Putnam, Robert, Democracy at Work, 167.Google Scholar

²⁴ Hume, David (A Treatise of Human Nature, book 3, part 2, section 5, [1740]) as quoted by Putnam, Robert D. in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 134. Putnam in turn borrowed the citation from Sugden, Robert, The Economics of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare (Oxford: Basil and Blackwell, 1986), 106.Google Scholar

²⁵ Although banks became more numerous in the late 1810s and 20s, they still specialized in short-term loans for three to six months at a time. For longer-term loans, people depended on mortgages from states or individual financiers. On antebellum banking and lending practices see Bodenhorn, , A History of Banking; also Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Sharp, James Roger, The Jacksonians versus the Banks: Politics in the States after the Panic of 1837 (New York: Columbia, 1970); Haeger, John Denis, The Investment Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Economic Development of the Old Northwest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).Google Scholar

²⁶ I refer to the idea, expressed in its most radical form by French physiocrats, and in a more moderate form by Scottish enlightenment thinkers, including Hume, David and Smith, Adam, that agriculture was the source of all real increase in wealth. See McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), esp. chap. 1, 13–47; Merrill, “The Political Economy of Agrarian America,” chap. 5, esp. pp. 292–317; Hume, David, “On Commerce,” and “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Political Essays, ed., Haakonssen, Knud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 93–104; and 105–114; and Smith, Adam, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed., Cannan, Edwin (NY: Random House, 1994), 718–746.Google Scholar

²⁷ These proportions are calculated from the figures provided by the Lima School Commissioners’ Reports, as recorded in “Lima Town Book, 1797–1818”; “Lima Town Book, 1818–1840”; and “Lima Town Book, 1841–1861”; Lima Historical Society, Lima, New York. Unfortunately, the town books stopped including copies of the school commissioner reports after 1848. These data and their implications are fully presented and discussed in Beadie, Nancy, “Tuition-Funding for Common Schools: Education Markets and Market Regulation in Rural New York, 1815–1850.” Social Science History 32, no. 1 (Spring 2008), forthcoming.Google Scholar

²⁸ These figures are compiled from the financial records of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, particularly Account Books #102, #56, and #59, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection.Google Scholar

²⁹ For example, in Lima, a local woolen mill established in 1835–36 was capitalized for about $30,000. Apparently, this was 30–50% more than the average woolen manufacturer invested in operations in the antebellum period, which according to one study was between $15,000 and $20,000. Warner, Matthew Papers, Lima Historical Society, Museum, Tenny Burton, Lima, NY; Crockett, Norman L., The Woolen Industry of the Midwest (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 31.Google Scholar

³⁰ The classic account of this shift is Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 [1944]).Google Scholar

³¹ For an excellent but now somewhat dated review of this literature see Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” 120–44. For a more recent update of some of this literature see Lamoureux, Naomi, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast.” The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 437–461. Also for a set of diverse perspectives on the whole set of economic changes loosely referred to under the concept of “market revolution,” see Stokes, Melvyn and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996).Google Scholar

³² See, for example, Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992).Google Scholar

³³ Clark, Christopher, “The Consequences of the Market Revolution in the American North,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, eds., Stokes, Melvyn and Conway, Stephen (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 23–42.Google Scholar

³⁴ “An Act for the Support of Common Schools, Passed April 12, 1819,” Laws of New York, 42nd session, chap. 44 (Albany, NY: State of New York, 1819), 186–208.Google Scholar

³⁵ Records of School District #4, 1824.Google Scholar

³⁶ Account Books #102 and #56, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection.Google Scholar

³⁷ See, for example, the account of capital mobility in Bodenhorn, A History of Banking.Google Scholar

³⁸ Totals calculated from Account Book #102, “Subscriptions,” Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection.Google Scholar

³⁹ The terms of this stock arrangement were defined in “The Report of the Seminary Committee,” copied into Account Book #178, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection. Evidence of the buying and selling of such certificates lies in references to the practice in the Minutes of the Trustees, also in Account Book #178; and also in the endorsements that appear on the back of the few surviving certificates.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 16th edition (New York:chkmam Published by Daniel Hunt and Thomas Ware for the Methodist Connexsion in the United States, J.C. Totten, Printer, 1813); and The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 22nd edition, (New York: Bangs and Emory, 1824).Google Scholar

⁴¹ The term “incipient bureaucracy” as applied to education in the antebellum era comes from Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1975).Google Scholar

⁴² Bullock, Steven C., Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

⁴³ As of 1820, the official policy of the Methodist Episcopal Church was to promote establishment of a Methodist academy in every regional annual conference of the church. Sweet, William Warren, Methodism in American History (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1933), 211 and 214–15. The literature on norms, practices and significance of Methodism is vast. In addition to examining a large number and variety of Methodist records myself from every level of the organization, I have drawn upon the following: Wigger, John H., “Fighting Bees; Methodist Itinerants and the Dynamics of Methodist Growth, 1770–1820,” in Methodism in the Shaping of American Culture, eds., Hatch, Nathan O. and John Wigger (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 87–133; Andrews, Dee E., The Methodist and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000); Nickerson, Michael George, Sermons, Systems and Strategies: The Geographic Strategies of the Methodist Episcopal Church in its Expansion into New York State, 1788–1810 (PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1988); Cawardine, Richard, “Antinomians’ and ‘Arminians’: Methodists and the Market Revolution,” in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 282–310; and Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1977).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Mathews, Donald, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis.” American Quarterly 21 (1960): 23–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁵ Robert Putnam discusses the distinction between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital in Bowling Alone, 22–23. He attributes the coining of these terms to Gittell, Ross and Vidal, Avid, Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). The distinction between “embeddedness” and “autonomy” is described by Woolcock, Michael, “Social Capital and Economic Development: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis and Policy Framework.” Theory and Society 27, no. 2 (April, 1998): 151–208, esp. pp. 164–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Gamm, Gerald and Putnam, Robert D., “The Growth of Voluntary Association in America, 1840–1940.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 511–557; citation from p. 552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ Evidence of these various school-based political coalitions and conflicts lies in a large body of local church and school records for the town of Lima, in the trustee minutes and other account books for Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, and in state legislative records. These records include: “Records of the First Congregational Society at Charleston,” Lima Presbyterian Church; “Records of School District #4,” and “Lima School Commissioners’ Reports,” Lima Historical Society; Account Books #178 and #102, Genesee Wesleyan Seminary Collection; “Memorial from sundry inhabitants of Lima, in the county of Livingston, remonstrating against the further incorporation of the Genesee and Wesleyan seminary at Lima, dated January 7, 1834; recorded January 22, 1834, No. 51, Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York (Albany, NY: Croswell, E., printer to the state, 1834); and Journal of the Assembly, State of New York (Albany: State of New York, 1834), 39, 81, 87, 95, 101, 128, 183, 195, 238.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ This politicization process had a good deal to do with the rise of political antimasonry, a movement that had strong evangelical roots, at least in western New York. See Brackney, William Henry, “Religious Antimasonry: the Genesee of a Political Party,” (Philadelphia, PA: Unpublished PhD diss., Temple University, 1976); and Kutolowski, Kathleen Smith, “The Social Composition of Political Leadership: Genesee County, New York, 1821–1860,” (Rochester, NY: Unpublished PhD diss., 1973). In my larger work I establish the political connections between Methodist networks and emerging Whig constituencies by connecting evidence of anti-Masonic organization and Methodist activity at the local level in and around Lima with a number of other sources, including Methodist records of strong anti-Masonic lobbying from the locality within the larger Methodist organization, election results for anti-Masonic candidates representing the locality at the state level, the rise of Whig leadership at the state level, and specific legislative actions relevant to the Lima case. Beadie, “Education and the Creation of Capital.”Google Scholar

⁴⁹ New York established its common school fund in 1805 and its literature fund for support of academies and higher schooling in 1813, though in both cases it took several years for the funds to mature and begin yielding substantial income. By 1815, a total of seven states north and south had established such funds, including Delaware in 1796, Tennessee in 1806, Virginia in 1810, South Carolina in 1811, and Maryland in 1813. Thirteen additional states followed before 1830. That included original colonies like Georgia and New Jersey in 1817 and North Carolina in 1825. It also included new states like Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, and Kentucky and Mississippi in 1821. Swift, Fletcher Harper, A History of Public Permanent Common School Funds in the United States, 1795–1905 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ibid. In addition to appropriating proceeds from the sale of public lands, some states (Rhode Island, Delaware and Virginia) capitalized their school funds from sources such as license and excise fees, fines, forfeitures, lotteries and auctions.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Muscalus, John Anthony, The Use of Banking Enterprises in the Financing of Public Education, 1796–1866 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1945), 7.Google Scholar

⁵² The law directing distribution of the surplus passed Congress in June 1836. The distribution of funds to the states began in January 1837. The law directing allocation of funds within the state did not occur in New York until 1838. For an account of the events surrounding the return of surplus federal deposit funds to the states, see Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, esp. 453–57 and Bourne, Edward G., The History of the Surplus Revenue of 1837 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1885).Google Scholar

⁵³ The distribution of these funds in New York was directed by an 1838 law: “An Act to appropriate the income of the United States deposit fund to the purposes of the education and the diffusion of knowledge, Passed April 17, 1838” Laws of New York, 61st Session, Chap. 237 (Albany, NY: State of New York, 1839), 220–23. In some states, such as Massachusetts, the provision of federal deposit funds became the occasion for establishing new system of state funding for schools and academies that had theretofore operated entirely on local taxes and tuition or rate bills. In New York, by contrast, the law had the effect of strengthening existing systems of school funding. See Swift, Fletcher Harper, A History of Permanent Common School Funds in the United States, 1795–1905 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Swift, , A History of Permanent Common School Funds.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ In his oft-quoted “Memorial” to the Legislature of the State of New York promoting the Erie Canal Project, DeWitt Clinton talked about the importance of binding a country's inhabitants together in a “community of interests” and “reciprocation of benefits.” Though he was talking about “internal navigation” at the time, the logic of his argument applied to other internal improvement projects, including schooling. These phrases from Clinton's “Memorial” belong to the most widely cited passage of Clinton's writings which is reproduced, among other places, in Miller, Nathan, The Enterprise of a Free People: Aspects of Economic Development in New York State during the Canal Period, 1792–1838 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 42–43; and Cornog, Evan, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (New York: Oxford University, 1998), 115.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ In some ways this policy became more significant after the Civil War when federal power became a major factor in the economic development of the West. Examples include not only the Morrill Act, funded by the sale of federal lands that went to railroads, but huge grants of mineral rights in a state like Wyoming and of timber rights in states like Oregon and Washington. These rights were sold to private corporations with the justification that proceeds of the sale would fund education. On land grants see Ross, Earl D., Democracy's College: The Land Grant Movement in the Formative Stage (Ames, IA: The Iowa State College Press, 1942); Becker, Carl L., Cornell University: Founders and Founding (Ithaca, , NY: Cornell University Press, 1944); and Halliday, Samuel D., History of the Federal Land Grant of July 2, 1862 … as Relating to Cornell University (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Democrat Press, 1905). On mining and timber rights as sources of funding for schools, see Swift, A History of Permanent Schools Funds.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ The idea of education as a means of “human capital” formation is usually attributed to Theodore Schultz, “Capital Formation by Education”; and idem, “Investment in Human Capital.”Google Scholar

⁵⁸ For a comprehensive comparative historical analysis of education as an object of social spending see Lindert, Peter, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

⁵⁹ For a very helpful though now somewhat dated survey of this literature see Woolcock, Michael, “Social Capital and Economic Development: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis and Policy Framework.” Theory and Society 27, no. 2 (April 1998): 151–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁰ Goldin, and Katz, , “Human Capital and Social Capital”; Goldin, , “America's Graduation from High School”; Rury, John L., “Social Capital and Secondary Schooling: Interurban Differences in American Teenage Enrollment Rates in 1950.” American Journal of Education 110 (August 2004): 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶¹ Franklin, V. P. edited a special issue of The Journal of African American History on “Cultural Capital and African American Education,” in which the work referred to here appeared. See Franklin, , “Introduction”; Randolph, Adah Ward, “Building upon Cultural Capital: Ferguson, Thomas Jefferson and the Albany Enterprise Academy in Southeast Ohio, 1863–1886”; and Span, Christopher M., “I Must Learn Now or Not at All: Social and Cultural Capital in the Educational Initiatives of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Mississippi, 1862–1869.” The Journal of African American History 87, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 175–181; 182–195; and 196–205, respectively. In the same issue see also Savage, Carter Julian, “Cultural Capital and African American Agency: The Economic Struggle for Effective Education for African Americans in Franklin, Tennessee, 1890–1967”; Breaux, Richard M., “‘Maintaining a Home for Girls’: The Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919–1950”; Gill, Peggy B., “Community, Commitment, and African American Education: The Jackson School of Smith County, Texas, 1925–1954”; and White, Monica A., “Paradise Lost? Teachers’ Perspectives on the Use of Cultural Capital in the Segregated Schools of New Orleans, Louisiana”; ibid., 206–235, 236–255, 256–268, and 269–281.Google Scholar

⁶² Anderson, James D., Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). I am thinking in particular of the sections of Anderson's book where he describes the substantial funds raised by black communities for basic common schools above and beyond any support received either from public or philanthropic sources; as well as the financial and political capital mobilized from black communities for high schools and from black church denominations for colleges. Intensive study of particular aspects of the larger picture described by Anderson are provided by Williams, Heather Andrea, Self-Taught: African-American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005) and Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996).Google Scholar

⁶³ At a finer grain of detail Benjamin Burks documented the same pattern among both black and white normal school students in post-bellum Virginia. Benjamin Burks, “What was Normal about Virginia's State Normal Schools: A History of Virginia's State Normal Schools, 1882–1930,” (Unpublished PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2002).Google Scholar

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⁶⁸ Hero, Rodney, Racial Diversity and Social Capital: Equality and Community in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I am grateful to Joe Lott for directing me to this work.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁹ The town of Lima remained rural and primarily agricultural through 1860. According to the economic model developed by Pritchard in “Religious Change in a Developing Region,” the town of Lima in 1850 had achieved the population density and per capita land values characterized by a “mixed” economy did not approach those of an “industrial” or “industrial mixed” economy. The data sources and analysis behind this assessment is fully discussed in my larger work, Beadie, “Education and the Creation of Capital: The Place of Education in New York's Transforming Political Economy.”Google Scholar

⁷⁰ “Livingston and Onondaga County woman's diary,” passim.Google Scholar