Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 178-185

By Rodney Hessinger

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work.

Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt.

Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812202243

Book preview

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn

Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850

Rodney Hessinger

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hessinger, Rodney.

Seduced, abandoned, and reborn : visions of youth in middle-class America, 1780–1850 / Rodney Hessinger.

p. cm. — (Early American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8122-3879-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Youth—United States—History—18th century. 2. Youth—United States—History—19th century. 3. Youth—Books and reading—United States—History. 4. Social control—United States—History. 5. Moral education—United States—History. 6. United States—Social conditions—18th century. 7. United States—Social conditions—19th century. 8. United States—Moral conditions. I. Title. II. Series

HQ796.H465 2005

305.235'086'220973—dc22

2005042228

In memory of Frank Hessinger, Jr.

Contents

Introduction

1     Victims at the Shrine of Libertinism:

Gender in the Seduction Tales of the Late Eighteenth Century

2     Victim of Seduction or Vicious Woman? Conceptions of the Prostitute at the Philadelphia Magdalen Society and Beyond

3     The Most Powerful Instrument of College Discipline: The University of Pennsylvania and the Advent of Meritocracy in the Early Republic

4     Harvesting Youth: The Competition for Souls in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia and Beyond

5     The Young Man’s Friend: Advice Manuals and the Dangerous Journey to Self-Made Manhood

6     Private Libertines: Emergent Strategies for the Control of Male Youth in Bourgeois America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Recording his famous impressions of America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed surprise at the pervasiveness of American democracy. Its spirit had reached far beyond the realm of politics, extending even into the traditional institution of the family. Commenting on the relations between parents and children, the French aristocrat and traveler observed that while vestiges of parental authority remained, they were exercised only during the first years of childhood. Adults rapidly released restraints on the young: As soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed, day by day. Youth were soon wholly independent: at the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path. In America, Tocqueville concluded, there was strictly speaking, no adolescence.¹ His words were both perceptive and prophetic. Youth did largely stand as adults in the early American republic. The modern notion of adolescence, conceived as a period of protected dependency following childhood, would not take shape until the end of the nineteenth century.²

How had this occurred? Patriarchal control over youth had eroded to an unprecedented extent in the early American republic. To be sure, adults have always had some trouble ruling the young. Colonial America was no exception. By the late seventeenth century, ministers in New England already felt their grasp slipping, finding themselves delivering sexually suggestive sermons just to capture the attention of youth.³ Yet powerful influences were at work to uphold patriarchy in the colonial era. In subsistence farm communities, parents relied heavily on the labor of their sons and daughters. For this reason, parents were slow to give their children the means to establish their own families. With a highly restricted land market and few opportunities for wages, children had no choice but to wait patiently for parents to bestow property on them before they could set up on their own. In addition, village churches and courts steered the courting behavior of young adults. Puritan elders whipped youth for fornication, while Quaker men and women investigated young couples through committees of their Monthly Meetings. Not all youth were subjected to such patriarchal conventions or community control. Those young adults who arrived on their own in the New World had to worry less about parental interference, though they usually did have to serve out an indenture or apprenticeship before they could strike out alone. In the plantation economies of the South, parents could be indulgent with youth, for children’s labor was dispensable when slaves were on hand. For the North, however, especially in stable communities beyond the seaboard, extended dependency was the common lot.⁴

A number of factors made the early republic a particularly challenging era for patriarchy. Accepting the lessons of the Revolution, most Americans in the late eighteenth century came to believe that stern patriarchal rule was inappropriate in a democracy. Self-determination over major life choices, like choosing a marriage partner, would belong to the young, not their parents. In the early nineteenth century, the power of elders was further undermined. In the urban Northeast, a cultural marketplace for the attention of youth emerged. The Market Revolution, the rapid expansion of capitalist enterprise and industry, was critical to opening choices for the young. They would be empowered consumers, as elders competed for influence. In the case of publishing, for example, writers began to produce a steady stream of books for young adults. The market for youth went beyond what was being hawked in the storefronts of burgeoning cities. In colleges and churches alike, adults scrambled to gain hold of youth. In the midst of this fight, conservative moralists had to compromise their messages, but they did win various struggles. In fact, their voices would shape generations to come. Bourgeois Americans, those aspiring people who sought to improve themselves and those around them, would simultaneously create and absorb their lessons.

If youth were to be largely independent in America, how could elders hope to guide their actions? This became a central dilemma in emerging bourgeois culture. Persuasion, rather than coercion, became the main means to direct youth. That is, guardians tried to entice youth to listen to them. The challenge was not easy because others were competing for influence. Peers and corrupt elders could lead youth astray, indulging dangerous impulses in the young. To better comprehend this difficulty, consider briefly the world through the eyes of Ashbel Green. A conservative theologian and educator, this Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (known today as Princeton) had seen his college wracked by riots and disorder in the early nineteenth century. He wished to reassert control over his institution. In a report to the board of trustees in 1816, Green observed how students could easily corrupt one another. The new comers, he warned, are not yet trained to the discipline of the house and are therefore fit materials to be seduced and converted into cat’s paws by devious older students.⁵ Presumably, entering students would want to earn the esteem of their peers and therefore were easily convinced to help carry out troublesome plots. Green’s fear that students might be seduced into wrongful behavior was a major refrain in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. How could Green earn the allegiance and obedience of incoming students? Ironically, Green too would have to enter the business of seduction.

Green’s tough rhetoric about the discipline of the house was misleading. It belied the weak position of professors at his school. On the occasion of Green’s inauguration, he had also blustered that he would not indulge youth: Now a coaxing system, is exactly the worst kind of a thing that can be called government. He insisted he would not bend: No in every deed—I shall coax no one—I shall thank no one for doing his duty—Why should I? And yet already one could see cracks in his front. He quickly admitted, every one who shall do well will be made happy, while every one who shall excel shall be honoured.⁶ Alluding to his willingness to grant awards to students, Green was already prepared to rule with the carrot, not just the stick. It was a difficult balancing act. At what point did one bend too far? Like corrupt peers, professors had to persuade, perhaps even seduce, youth into following them. The danger in this was that it forced instructors to pander to the young. Fearing this problem, Green instructed his faculty that an evil to be avoided was the undue desire of obtaining popularity among our pupils. Professors were failing to correct the young and instead were seeking to gain their esteem and applause. This, in his view, was a mistake. It was sure to cause the most lasting injury to the school. In fact, Green was certain that professors’ efforts to please students was among the most prolific causes of a recent rebellion suffered by the college. While winning the favor of the young might yield a professor temporary rewards, ultimately he would be degraded into contempt.⁷ Students would come to understand they held the reins.

This dilemma was not simply a problem in the somewhat rarefied world of the early nineteenth-century college. After Ashbel Green left the College of New Jersey, he would face similar developments in religion. In churches, as in schools, adults were pandering to the young. As editor of Philadelphia’s Old School Presbyterian journal, The Christian Advocate, Green would publish searing critiques of revivalists who were exciting and flattering youth. Green did not struggle alone. In fact, he was one among a large number of outspoken adults who tried to fight the shift in power to young adults. While young men, more than young women, would see their horizons expand in the early republic, both were granted a greater range of choices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a wide array of arenas, those who wished to guide youth had to compete with those who would seduce them. A surprisingly broad range of writers, people from disparate backgrounds and occupations, spoke in unison of the need to restrain, as well as guard, the young. Didactic novelists seeking to guide young women through courtship warned against the seductive ploys of male libertines. Writers on the dangers of masturbation battled the purveyors of pornography. Orthodox ministers struggled against the emotional appeals of evangelical firebrands. Ultimately, the voices of respectability were forced into the same pandering game. The line between guardian and seducer became blurred.

*   *   *

This book traces the story of Americans’ reaction to the freedoms granted youth in the early republic. It demonstrates how the perceived social disorder of young adults helped shape the identity of the emerging middle class, particularly in the central sites of bourgeois cultural production: cities, schools, and presses. Regionally, it will concentrate on the urban Northeast, particularly the city of Philadelphia. In these centers of bourgeois cultural formation, elders coming to terms with troublesome youth crafted new values that would come to infuse middle-class society. The moralists who performed this cultural work did not set out to craft new ideologies, much less a new set of social relations. The challenge they faced, and the response to it with which this text is ultimately concerned, was to guide the next generation into stable and respectable stations in their families and communities. Their concern was not to secure status for youth in a material sense, so much as to transmit values that would keep them in good stead in an ever-changing society. Guiding the young was a vexing task in an age in which patriarchy had declined and youth could choose freely from a wide array of cultural vendors. Many of the values that advisors tried to impart had deep roots in the past. Chastity, virtue, piety, respect for elders, and hard work had all been important to colonial elders. But in the past one could rely on the broad support of a wider community to enforce these principles. Now these values had to be more deeply etched within the self, particularly for those seeking middle-class respectability. Freed from patriarchal constraints, empowered youth provoked the formation of bourgeois identity.

The stakes were high in trying to guide the young. The fact that the American population was demographically skewed toward youth in these years made the challenge for elders all the greater. Early American society was less age-graded than our own, so fixing definitive ages for the category of youth is tricky. The term was an open one, often used interchangeably with the phrases young man or young woman. As a life stage, youth sat between childhood and adulthood. Rhetorically, it ended when one took on all the responsibilities of adulthood, such as a marriage and an occupation. As a loose guideline, however, we can see in the records of this era that early Americans generally considered the stage of youth as beginning in one’s teens and lasting well into one’s twenties. Given this, we can see that many Americans in this era fell into the category of youth. The historian Burton Bledstein has found that while the number of children under fifteen actually declined as the nineteenth century unfolded, the number of youth did not, with close to 30 percent of the population falling into the fifteen-to-twenty-nine age bracket.⁸

In a symbolic sense, the challenge was even bigger than these numbers suggest. If traditionally the life stage of youth ended when one was settled into a permanent station in life, in a bourgeois society, a world in which people are always striving to get ahead, most everyone could be said to be a youth.⁹ Middle-class Americans never settled in a station, jumping from job to job and town to town. Geographic and occupational mobility characterized the bourgeoisie, so it should not be surprising that the words penned for youth in this era would come to define their class.

The cultural relationship between elders and youth underwent important changes over the course of the early republic. The chronology of this journey can be graphed as two intimately entwined trajectories. One pattern is the series of challenges offered by youth. The other is a corresponding series of responses by reformers. Ultimately, it is the second model we will privilege as this study progresses, for the goal of this book is to illuminate reformers’ perceptions of, and reactions to, youth, more than it is to explore the lived social experiences of the young. Nonetheless, to illuminate the dynamic, to see how expanding freedoms for the young might have informed the cultural reactions of elders, it will be helpful for us to survey the changing lives of young adults in the early republic in some greater detail.

Youth seized a widening range of freedoms and choices in the early republic. If they did not often voice outright rebellion in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, their growing boldness nonetheless greatly worried elders.¹⁰ As noted, the revolutionary era witnessed expanding courtship choices for youth. The trend actually predates the late eighteenth century, for growing land scarcity in the long-settled regions of the Northeast had already weakened the leverage of parents over children as the century unfolded.¹¹ As the Revolution arrived, many Americans accepted growing freedom for youth vis-à-vis adults. Patriarchal authority exerted over youth, more so than that exercised over other dependents like slaves, was criticized as an unjust form of tyranny like that wielded by the British king over his subjects.¹² Shrinking parental control was tied to declining community influence. In the colonial past, tightly bound religious communities had regulated the courting and sex life of youth through churches, courts, and neighborhoods. Both verbal and physical chastisement had been used to prevent premarital sex and to pressure youth into marriage. As religious fervor waned and families sought privacy, however, the community decreasingly interfered in courtship and sexual life. By the end of the eighteenth century, both parents and community were less involved in the negotiation of marriage. At the same time, youth embraced more sexual freedom, especially having more sex out of wedlock, producing what one historian has called a sexual revolution in the young nation.¹³

Youth also took advantage of growing freedoms in colleges and churches. Both developments, most fully realized in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, like changes in courtship, can be linked to an extension of democratic ideals. Certain market conditions, however, made their expression more fully possible. Exciting new religious choices appeared for youth in urban America in the early nineteenth century.¹⁴ There was, to be sure, tremendous religious diversity in cities like Philadelphia before these years, but the resurgence of evangelical forces at this time drew more distinct lines both between and within churches, lines that de-marked real differences in attitudes toward youth. Some preachers openly courted the young, encouraging them to break from the churches of fellow pastors.¹⁵ Similarly, colleges faced new market pressures in these years. By the 1810s and ’20s colleges had proliferated tremendously, leaving youth with the preponderance of negotiating power in their struggles with educators. Youth found themselves increasingly cherished as consumers by schools that had to fight with one another for their very survival. In addition, colleges provided an environment where youth could band together in ways unimaginable elsewhere in American society. It is not surprising, therefore, that colleges would struggle with many student disturbances in these years.¹⁶

By the 1830s and ’40s unprecedented urban opportunities opened for the young. The Market Revolution cut many male youth loose from their families. As business and industry expanded, some apprentices faced declining prospects, slipping into the working class. Nonetheless, many other youth found economic opportunity as clerks and bookkeepers in the expanding storefronts and shops that lined city avenues. Young men also had growing options about how to spend their newly earned salaries and wages. Living in boardinghouses, away from parents and employers in anonymous cities, male youth were less accountable than ever. Many competing cultural vendors awaited the young as they entered the urban world. Gambling houses, taverns, brothels, and theaters opened their doors to youth.¹⁷ Booksellers also plied their wares. Fueled by important new technological advances in printing, the publishing industry boomed, offering a wide range of reading fare for the young. The most disturbing result of these changes was an increasingly visible youth culture that celebrated licentiousness.¹⁸ Young men who indulged in this so-called rake culture could procure pornography and revel in seduction as they read a seamy new brand of literature that guided them through the urban underworld.

These, then, were the changes that the self-anointed reformers of youth were battling in the early republic. But not all the problems imagined by the reformers were real. It is fully plausible that moralists may at times have conjured up more difficulties than existed. The saga of student disorder at the University of Pennsylvania, a story taken up in Chapter 3, provides an example. At Penn in the early nineteenth century, student disorder never seemed to reach greater heights than silly pranks and surliness toward professors. Yet the provost, Frederic Beasley, was so worried by the very real riots and disorders he saw plaguing other colleges that he perceived his school to be on the precipice of disaster. His perception, accurate or not, drove his actions. In cultural history it is a truism that perception is more important than reality. Still, in the case of youth in the early republic, the two often did correspond to one another. While some reformers did have overactive imaginations, at this point historians have assembled enough evidence, to which this study will contribute more, to establish that substantial new freedoms and opportunities were available and being seized by the young in the early republic.

So how did reformers respond? The path moralists forged in their effort to contain youth began with novels and periodical fiction. As the literary critic Cathy Davidson has discussed, the birth of the American republic was intimately bound up with the rise of the American novel.¹⁹ The novel seems a curious place from which to stage a reform campaign. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has famously argued that the very hallmark of the novel is its dialogism, its ability and tendency to voice competing perspectives from society. Different passages and sentiments, he insists, will resonate distinctly with each reader. Context, rather than text, determines meaning.²⁰ Writers in the early republic actually understood some of these difficulties with the novel. They nonetheless had high hopes for its potential for moral influence.

Because the novel mixed entertainment with instruction, it had the ability to lure readers who might ignore straight didacticism. American writers did their best to contain the mutable character of fiction. The narratives that late eighteenth-century Americans composed and imported had a distinctive reformist cast. Showing a decided preference for the didactic strains of the eighteenth-century British novelist Samuel Richardson over the worldly satire of fellow Briton Henry Fielding, Americans saw great promise in the novel as a tool of moral instruction.²¹ Seduction tales, narratives that warned young women to avoid the dangerous sexual ploys of men, proved most attractive of all. While certainly there was a lingering distrust of fiction, a range of writers saw novels as a persuasive means to discourage the young from illicit sex. American writers did their best to ensure that readers did not misconstrue their messages.

Convinced by and impressed with the moral lessons of seduction fiction, Philadelphia reformers in 1800 decided to carry their moral reform vision into brick and mortar. The Philadelphia Magdalen Society asylum, an institution meant to rescue young prostitutes from the consequences of male treachery, was a logical extension of seduction fiction. It was founded by paragons of the Philadelphia community, men such as Bishop William White, head of the Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania. The essential agreement of these reformers with Susanna Rowson, a novelist and playwright (occupations more suspect in this age), suggests a surprisingly broad consensus about the dangers facing youth at the turn of the century. And yet as the nineteenth century unfolded, the meaning of seduction fiction began to unravel. The operators of the Philadelphia Magdalen Society would witness this firsthand.

The novel proved untrustworthy as a vehicle for moral lessons. Encouraged by the managers of the Magdalen Society, Philadelphia prostitutes began to read their own past into seduction tales. The dialogue between their lurid pasts and the stock seduction narrative, which positioned women as pure victims, pulled at the seams of the narrative. Increasingly the seduction tale was stretched to cover and excuse behavior that was shocking to bourgeois moralists. In New York the notorious prostitute Helen Jewett draped her sexual improprieties in stories of violated innocence.²² Similarly, several famous early nineteenth-century courtroom trials concerning seduction inspired vigorous celebrations of homicide in print, justifying murder as a response to seduction.²³ In 1804 a Presbyterian minister, Samuel Miller, accused the novel of framing an apology for suicide, adultery, prostitution, and the indulgence of every propensity for which a corrupt heart can plead an inclination.²⁴ If his warnings seemed overzealous at the turn of the century, by midcentury many more would have found his sentiments persuasive.

As society tested and strained the meanings of moralistic seduction fiction, the ability of the novel to support reform collapsed. The didacticism of the late eighteenth-century novel gave way to two new novelistic forms, both ill-suited for advancing moral campaigns. Sensationalism and sentimentalism dominated the world of early nineteenth-century fiction. Both strains ostensibly pursued moral aims, but the performance was unconvincing. Writers of sensational fiction like George Lippard inveighed against seduction, but he simultaneously aroused sexual desire with erotically charged descriptions of female bodies and violence.²⁵ Sentimentalists seemed the more natural heirs of the didactic form. Promoting causes such as temperance and abolitionism, sentimentalist authors did not wholly abandon the world. Still, the fundamental impulse of sentimental fiction was inward toward the self, not outward toward society.²⁶ Sentimental scenes of suffering in novels were more apt to inspire delicious tears rather than principled institution building. Reformers did not give up on the power of the press, far from it—but as we will see, when they took up publishing again with renewed vigor in the 1830s and ’40s, they moved to surer footing. By this point, advice literature, a more pure form of didacticism, had replaced the novel as the major means for influencing youth in print.

In the intervening years, reformers had taken to building institutions, especially colleges and Sunday schools, to guide the young. Colleges were initially inspired by republican dreams. Educators probably did not believe that all youth would attend college, but they did hope that those who did could form a virtuous leadership that would guide the country into the future. Riots and disorders dashed such hopes. Students were more inclined to mock and challenge professors, showing little concern for educators’ goals. By the Jacksonian era, few could have hoped that struggling colleges would direct the country on a path of virtue. New reform strategies, however, were simultaneously being born in the fervor of evangelical revival.

The Second Great Awakening inspired the rapid founding of voluntary societies meant to save the souls of youth. Quickly, however, elders discovered the disruptive potential of evangelical religion. Fighting to save their own congregations, conservative Presbyterian ministers had to rebuff the inroads made by upstart groups like the Methodists. Matters became more alarming when evangelical flames began to engulf their own churches. In response, conservative churchmen created new institutions that absorbed some of the energy of the evangelical voluntary forms but preserved their own sense of hierarchy and order. The Sunday school embodied this compromise between old and new. Something else the Sunday school movement learned to harness was the power of new printing technologies. Reform writers would quickly apply this lesson in the Jacksonian era.

Reformers began to write two new major forms of advice literature in the 1830s and ’40s. One new genre was the advice book written for the young man launching his career in the city. Despite their ostensibly secular purpose, these texts carried an unmistakable evangelical tone. According to these books, dangerous temptations lurked around every corner, as various seducers tried to take advantage of young men. In light of such dangers, writers insisted that success was predicated more on character and conscience than on business acumen. In the anonymous world of the city, they insisted, morality had to be inculcated in the self. The second major form of advice literature was the anti-masturbation text. Also indebted to evangelicalism, writers of these books replaced the sentimental appeal of seduction fiction with heavy-handed warnings against dabbling in sin. These midcentury sex reformers used language and metaphors that paralleled the work of other evangelical reformers. Temperance writing was a clear inspiration. If one sip of alcohol could lead one on a rapid downward slide towards alcoholism and degeneracy, for sex reformers one touch led a young man to sexual addiction. While this literature had jettisoned the ambiguities of fiction, it quickly revealed scandalous potentialities of its own by scaring audiences with grisly descriptions of sexual disease. Ultimately, the writers of this literature would serve order by calling on doctors and guardians to watch over youth who were incapable of controlling themselves.

From a bird’s eye view we might see an evolving strategy of reform, one that starts with fiction, moves to institution building, and then finally revisits literature, but of a more pure didactic form. But such a summary would erroneously suggest a deliberate progression. The moralists who reacted to youth were a diverse group. They probably would not have recognized many of their compatriots as their own. In fact, they really should be seen as various discrete camps of reformers, only occasionally overlapping in thought and personnel. Didactic novelists, asylum directors, college educators, Sunday school proponents, advice writers, and sex-reform authors—all pursued their own unique visions. Princeton president Ashbel Green would probably have had little to do with novelist Susanna Rowson. But, there is real reason to examine them together. All agreed about the essential nature of the problem they faced. And all gradually worked toward fundamentally similar solutions to resolve them. To better understand the answers they devised we must place their work in some broader theoretical context.

*   *   *

To frame the problem faced by moralists slightly differently, to more fully comprehend the dialectic that developed between youth and elders, we might say that Americans in the early republic were forced to come to terms with the logic of John Locke’s pedagogy on an unprecedented scale. The English philosopher’s 1693 text, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, anticipated with remarkable clarity the dilemmas faced by the guardians of youth in the early American republic.²⁷ The overlap between Locke’s ideas and those of other thinkers such as the Scottish moral sense writers makes it nearly impossible to draw lines of influence, especially since moral philosophy was most often popularized in fiction, not in philosophical treatises. Ultimately this book will not demonstrate the direct impact of Locke, but rather the maturation of a Lockean paradigm; it will highlight the development of strategies for influencing youth who were granted a larger share of freedom in society. Locke explored closely the challenges of rearing children who desired and possessed freedom.²⁸ The solutions he proffered were echoed in the choices made by writers and guardians in the early republic. Whether groping to Lockean solutions on their own or finding inspiration in his writings, moralists in the early republic elaborated a range of Lockean strategies to shape the behavior of the young.

To understand the dynamics of the young republic, then, it should be instructive to briefly explore Locke’s pedagogical thought through a close reading of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In it one can see the interplay between the twin impulses to indulge, but simultaneously direct, the young. One important starting point for Locke’s child-rearing theory was the desire for liberty in the young, a craving he believed present in mere infants. We naturally, he insisted, even from our Cradles, love Liberty, and have therefore an Aversion to many things for no other Reason but because they are enjoin’d us.²⁹ While he did advocate extending freedoms to youth as they aged, his first goal was to teach parents how to govern. The one instance for which Locke reserved corporal punishment as a last Remedy was when children showed an "Obstinacy, or manifest Perverseness of the Will," that is, when they openly defied the authority of their parents.³⁰ While Locke believed that children should conform to the will of parents, he recommended a range of noncoercive strategies that would prevent any counterproductive clashing of wills. Rather than commanding children to do things as an act of obedience, Locke believed parents should persuade children to listen to them. At some level, then, Locke was already accommodating children’s desire for liberty.

Parents might be able to persuade by manipulating young children’s perceptions of the world. Learning to read, for example, instead of being presented as a duty, might be made a Play and Recreation. Parents could cultivate a desire to be taught if learning were proposed to them as a thing of Honour, Credit, Delight, and Recreation, or as a Reward for doing something else.³¹ As children aged, reason was increasingly to be used as a tool of persuasion. Once grown, he instructed, children would have to monitor their own behavior according to reason rather than desire.³² It therefore