So far, the movement and control had been local. Next the commonwealth stepped in to adopt these town schools and weld them into a state system. This step, too, was taken by the men of the first generation, - pioneers, still struggling for existence on the fringe of a strange and savage continent. In 1642, "in consideration of the neglect of many A PAGE FROM THE EARLIEST KNOWN EDITION OF THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER, the first New England textbook not made up wholly of extracts from the Bible. The first edition appeared about 1680, and the book held its place until long after the Revolution. parents to train up their children in learning and labor, which might be profitable to the Commonwealth,' the General Court passed a Compulsory Education Act of the most stringent character. This law even authorized town authorities to take children from their parents, if needful, to secure their schooling.1 This Act assumed that schools were accessible in each town. Five years later, the commonwealth required each village to maintain at least a primary school, and each town of a hundred houses to keep up a grammar school (Latin school). This great law of 1647 (written with solemn eloquence, as if, in some dim way, the pioneers felt the grandeur of their deed) remains one of the mighty factors that have influenced the destiny of the world. James Russell Lowell, after a delightful remi 1 The Puritan purpose was good citizenship, as well as religious training. The preamble of the similar Connecticut Act of 1644 runs: "For as much as the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any Commonwealth," etc. THE PURITAN SCHOOLS 155 niscence of the New England crossroads schoolhouse, continues : Nayed [OW I lay me down to Jeep, I pray the Lord my foul to keep. If I fhould die before I wake, Good children must Fear God all day, Love Chrift alway "Now this little building, and others like it, were an original kind of fortification invented by the founders of New England. These are the martello-towers that protect our coast. This was the great discovery of our Puritan forefathers. They were the first lawgivers who saw clearly, and enforced practically, the simple moral and political truth, that knowledge was not an alms, to be dependent on the chance charity of private men or the precarious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debt which the commonwealth owed to every one of its children. The opening of the first grammarschool was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in In doing good. Awake, arife, behold thou haft, A PAGE FROM THE PAISLEY EDITION OF THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER, 1781. This "evening prayer" appeared first in the second edition of the Primer, nearly a hundred years earlier. state and church; the first row of pot-hooks and trammels which the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted and blubbered across their copybooks was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.' The Puritan plan embraced a complete state system from primary school to "university." In 1636, a year after Boston established the first town school, Massachusetts The Puritan established her "state university" (as Harvard ideal truly was in the seventeenth century, though it was named for the good clergyman who afterward endowed it with his library). Then the law of 1647 joined primary school and university in one whole, providing that each village of a hundred householders must maintain a grammar-school, with a teacher able to instruct youth so as they may be fitted for the University." 66 True, this noble attempt was too ambitious. Grinding poverty made it impossible for frontier villages of four or five hundred people to maintain a Latin school; and, despite heavy fines upon the towns that failed to do so, such schools gradually gave way, except in one or two large places, to a few private academies, which came to represent the later New England idea in secondary education. Thus, the state system was broken at the middle, and both extremities suffered. The universities ceased finally to be state institutions; and the primary schools deteriorated sadly, especially in the period of Puritan decline about 1700, with meager courses, short terms, and low aims. But with all its temporary failure in its first home, the Puritan ideal of a state system of public instruction was never wholly lost sight of in America. in 1775 6. Population in 1775 numbered 2,500,000. One third had been born in Europe. The English nationality was Population dominant in every colony. In the Carolinas the Huguenots were numerous, and in South Carolina and Georgia there was a large German population. South Carolina, too, had many Highland Scots. These came to America after the defeat at Culloden and the breaking up of the clan system. Curiously enough, they were Tories in the Revolution. The same conservative and loyal temper which had made them cling to the exiled House of Stuart in England made them in America adherents of King George. The largest non-English elements were found in the Middle colonies Dutch and Germans in New York; Dutch and Swedes in Delaware; Germans, Welsh, and Celtic Irish in Pennsylvania. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the back counties were settled mainly by the Scotch-Irish. In 1619, while Virginia was still the only English colony on the continent, she received her first importation of Negro slaves, twenty in number. As late as 1648, there slavery were only 300 in her population of 15,000. By 1670 the number had risen to 2000 (out of a total of 40,000). A century later nearly half her population was Black, while in Negro South Carolina, more than half was Black. In Maryland the proportion was about a fourth, and in New York a seventh. Negroes made a fifth of the whole population, and half of that south of Mason and Dixon's line. That line divided the population of the country into two nearly equal halves; but two thirds of the Whites were found on the north side of it. sections 7. Labor was supplied, in the main, by free men in New England, by indentured White servants in the Middle colonies, and by Negro slaves in the South. The White Labor in bondservants were of several classes. The man the different who sold himself into service for four or seven years in return for passage money for himself or his family, was known as a "redemptioner," or "free-willer." The German immigrants of the eighteenth century, like many of the English settlers, came in this way. Many White convicts were transported from England and condemned to a term of service, seven or fourteen years. After 1717, this class increased rapidly in number, averaging 1000 a year for the fifty years preceding the Revolution. Classed with the convicts in law, but very different from them in character, were the political “convicts,” — prisoners sold into service by the victorious parties, each in turn, during the English civil wars of the seventeenth century. Often the convicts were not hardened criminals, but rather the victims of the atrocious laws in England at the time. Many were intelligent and capable. In Maryland in 1773 a majority of all tutors and teachers are said to have been convicts. Some of them (like a much larger part of the redemptioners), after their term of service, became prosperous and useful citizens. Even in aristocratic Virginia, a transported thief rose to become attorney-general. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, was a "redemptioner," as was also one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. So, too, was Zenger (page 143); and many members of colonial legislatures could be named who came to America as "bond servants." White 66 servants The condition of the White servants was often a deplorable servitude. The colonial press, up to the Revolution, teems with advertisements offering rewards for runaway servants. More than seventy such notices are contained in the "Newspaper Extracts" published in the New Jersey Archives for that little colony, for only the two years, 1771, 1772. This must have meant one runaway servant to each 1000 of the population; and probably not half the runaways are in those advertisements. One runaway is described as "born in the colony," about 50 years THIS Day run-away from his Mafter Abraham Anderson of New-Marblehead, a white Man Servant, about 16 Years of Age, with fhort brownish ftrait Hair, he is pretty clear fkin'd, fomething freckled, and I think, on his left Foot the top of one of his middle Toes is cut off: He carried off with him a striped Worsted and wool Jacket, two tow and linnen Shirts, one pair of tow and linnen Trowsers, and one pair of tow and linnen ftriped Breeches, two pair of lightish coloured blue Hote, and a new Caltor Hat: His Name is Florence Sylvefter alias Ned Carter : Whofoever shall apprehend and take up faid Fellow, and him deliver to his abovesaid Maller in New-Marblehead, in the Courty of York, or to Capt. Jofbua Bangs in Faimouth, fhall have FOUR POUNDS, lawful Money, as a Reward, and all necessary Charges paid. August 25. 1755 · Abraham Anderjon. ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE Boston Weekly News Letter, September 18, 1755. A photograph of the original, which is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. old, and as having “served in the last war [French War] and a carpenter by trade." There are still more significant and gruesome notices by jailers, proving that it was customary to arrest a vagrant working-man on suspicion of his being a runaway, and then, if no master appeared to claim him within a fixed time, to sell him into servitude for his jail fees! Some of these White "servants" are described as fitted with "iron collars." American law and custom permitted these barbarities upon the helpless poor in the days of Lexington and Bunker Hill. Negroes were not numerous enough in the North (except |