object of her life to persuade people that it was the duty of the state governments to provide public asylums for the care of the insane. Interest sprang up in other neglected classes -first in the poor children, for whom the Sunday school had originally been founded. In 1807 some Williams College students became interested in the heathen of other lands, and stirred up the country to form mission societies. For that service each of the great denominations eventually created its own boards, and home missionary societies were formed for work on the frontier.

In the thirties and forties came also a new movement for

286. Edu cational reform

public education. Massachusetts, under the guidance of
Horace Mann, woke up in 1837 to the fact that she
had wretched schoolhouses, dull text-books, untrained
teachers, and ill-disciplined pupils. Public sentiment
was aroused in the state, the school system was improved,
the people began to tax themselves more freely, and a state
Board of Education was formed. The first normal school for
the training of teachers was established in 1839. These ideas
spread from state to state; and New York and Pennsylvania
for the first time established thoroughgoing systems of rural
schools.

The system of state universities was developed in 1825 by the founding of the University of Virginia (in which Jefferson was specially interested), the first American institution on the German model, offering a variety of elective studies. In the thirties Michigan established the so-called "Epistemiad," which developed into a state university. In 1837 there were over seventy-five endowed colleges in the country, besides twelve state universities and various kinds of special and technical schools. West Point Military Academy was founded in 1802, the Naval Academy in 1846, and law and medical schools by 1840 were numerous.

This was also a period of the foundation or enlargement of

libraries the Astor in New York, the Mercantile in Philadelphia, the Athenæum in Boston, and many others. Museums of art and science were opened in many cities, and the lyceum system of public lectures brought into towns and villages the most eminent men of the time.

Within the churches new duties were assumed, new societies were founded, and several denominations were divided 287. The From 1800 to about 1830 the Unitarian movement in churches New England separated the Congregational Church into and moral reform two ecclesiastical bodies. The Presbyterian Church, in 1837, split on doctrinal questions into "New School" and "Old School." The Methodist Church, in 1844, divided into a northern and a southern church, and the Baptist Church also showed a disposition to divide. The Catholic Church was much increased by steady immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany.

Up to about 1840 spirituous liquor was used freely by all classes: harvest hands received it; it was a part of the regular ration at sea; and it was freely served even at funerals. The Washingtonian societies, founded in 1840, agreed to use liquor in moderation, and from that it was a short step to total abstinence, and in 1846 to the "Maine Law," the first of the state prohibition laws.

A strong movement began about 1830 for "Woman's Rights," in which Frances Wright, and later Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and others were leaders. Their demand for good schools for girls was heard; girls were admitted to the public schools, then into high schools; academies were founded for them; and in 1833 Oberlin College was opened to women. The movement soon spread to a demand for woman suffrage, which, however, was nowhere granted till more than a generation later. "Not a leading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket," said Emerson. From 1820 to 1840 scores of societies undertook to end sin and poverty by some

new form of what was really monastic life. For instance, Robert Owen, an English enthusiast, came over and 288. Epoch founded "The New Harmony Community of Equality" of comin Indiana (1824), in which the men and women wore a uniform, and the community undertook to bring up the children. The older Shaker societies by 1826 numbered 5000 souls.

munities

SHAKER DANCE, ABOUT 1830. (From a contemporary print.)

The most remarkable communal society was the Mormon Church, founded by Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York, in 1829. In 1830 he published what he called the Book of Mormon, which he alleged to be a miraculously preserved account of the settlement of America by the lost tribes of Israel. He and his followers built a temple at Kirtland, Ohio; in 1837 moved to Missouri; and soon after to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built up a city of ten thousand adherents. The neighborhood disliked the Mormons, and Smith was killed by a mob in 1844. Two years later most of the Mormons moved to Utah.

A memorable example of the new community spirit was a little gathering of men and women at Brook Farm in Massachusetts, from 1841 to 1847. They agreed to perform the work

of the household and the farm, and to spend their leisure hours in the training of their minds. Among the members or visitors of this group were James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles A. Dana, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The community dissolved, for it could not support itself by such labor; but its intellectual stimulus was felt in the whole country.

289. American litera

ture

Until about 1830 most of the American essays, poems, novels, and criticisms were simply imitations of English writers. Even Washington Irving was intellectually an Englishman of the school of Addison and Goldsmith, but he found American subjects, and his Knickerbocker's History of New York (published 1809) is one of the most delightful of American satires. Of novelists the only widely known. American at that time was James Fenimore Cooper, who began in 1821 to publish his entrancing novels of Indian life and character. In 1833 Edgar Allan Poe began his wonderful tales. William Cullen Byrant in 1811, when seventeen years old, touched the height of his genius in his poem of Thanatopsis. Other great writers, such as Hawthorne and Lowell, though they began to

publish at this time, reached their zenith later. A school of American historians arose with the bold undertaking of George Bancroft to write the history of America from the beginnings, of which the first volumes came out in 1834; and a little later (1837) appeared William H. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella. Another important book was the first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. Educated Americans were great readers of the English quarterly reviews; and in 1815 was established the North

American Review, for many years an intellectual force. Newspapers began to improve, and between 1833 and 1841 were founded the New York Daily Sun, the first one-cent newspaper; the New York Herald, which set a standard of the search for news; and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, an example of breezy personal journalism. They were reënforced in 1849 by the Associated Press, which furnished information to a great number of papers.

The era of social reform extended very slowly to the South, which was not willing to harbor new ideas that might upset its rigid class system. The 3,700,000 whites of 290. Souththe South in 1830 were divided into three social strata. ern society (1) At the summit stood from 25,000 to 30,000 members of the families of large slaveholders; in a few cases one master owned as many as a thousand slaves. These people were the social and political aristocracy; they furnished the governors, the judges, the representatives in Congress, and the senators. (2) About 630,000 people belonged to families each holding from one to four slaves: together with perhaps 500,000 prosperous nonslaveholding white farmers, they made up the ordinary community. (3) The poor whites, numbering about 2,500,000, had neither slaves nor property, except rough land and miserable buildings, and except in some mountain communities never dreamed of using their votes against the slaveholding aristocracy.

291. Slave

Below all the whites were 180,000 free negroes, a despised and unhappy class, without political rights, held responsible for most of the petty crimes, and not allowed to move about freely. At the bottom of society were 2,000,000 African slaves, the people from whose physical toil came most of the wealth and consequence of their masters.

On the conditions of slave life there is an immense mass of conflicting testimony. Fanny Kemble, English wife of a Georgia planter, complained of sick slave women in hospital

life