Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [300]
Against this background, well-to-do New York families began to place a higher priority on the education of young women. How, it was asked, could respectable wives and mothers contend with their new social and managerial responsibilities without some degree of formal schooling? How could they inculcate republican virtue in their children without some knowledge of history, natural science, and philosophy? Aaron Burr, who had pronounced Wollstonecraft’s Vindication “a work of genius” and vowed to read it aloud to his wife, had their daughter, Theodosia, tutored in Latin and Greek; at the age of nine she was reading two hundred lines of Homer and half a dozen pages of Lucian every day. The Jays, Kents, Duanes, and other prominent families shipped their daughters off to one or another of the many new female boarding schools that had sprung up around the country since independence (the three most favored by New Yorkers being the Moravian Young Ladies Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Young Ladies Academy, and Miss Pierce’s School in Litchfield, Connecticut). Still other well-to-do New York families came to depend upon the academy for women founded in 1789 by Mrs. Isabella Graham, a widow recently arrived from Scotland. The earliest institution of its kind in the city’s history, “Grandmother” Graham’s school was quartered in an old Georgian mansion on lower Broadway, a reputable address for what was still considered daring work.
CULTIVATING CITIZENS
“The history of the City of New York,” Elihu Hubbard Smith once wrote with some asperity, “is the history of the eager cultivation & rapid increase of the arts of gain”; its residents think of nothing but “Commerce, News, & Pleasure.” From the outset, accordingly, he and other members of the Friendly Club made a special point of disseminating a wide range of literary and scientific “information” to the reading public. By 1793 or 1794 they were providing all the original articles for the New York Magazine, a publication launched in 1790 by Thomas and James Swords and edited initially by Noah Webster. The journal featured a melange of materials ranging from sentimental romances to essays on the rights of man and woman by Godwin and Wollstonecraft. It wound down in 1797, about the time that the members of the Friendly Club disbanded. A number of former members founded the Monthly Magazine and American Review in 1799, the editorial philosophy of which closely followed that of the New York Magazine; it too sputtered out within a year. In 1801 Hocquet Caritat, the emigre proprietor of the most influential bookstore in town, established a “Literary Assembly” in a reading room of the old city hall. Caritat hoped it would become a place where writers, lawyers, scientists, doctors, and clergymen would come to discuss books and ideas, but like the efforts of the Friendly Club, it made little headway against the city’s preoccupation with money making—even after Caritat took the radical step in 1803 of inviting women to attend.
The struggle against municipal materialism finally began to bear fruit when it engaged the formidable energies of city inspector John Pintard. For years, inspired by the example of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791), Pintard had advocated the creation of a similar institution in New York to improve its intellectual and cultural tone. In 1804 he assembled a group of Friendly Club alumni, merchants, attorneys, and clergymen to found the New-York Historical Society. Its mission was “to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular.”
Historical preservation—especially of relics and records—held special meaning for men who had seen the city’s only two substantial libraries destroyed during the Revolution—that of Columbia College, and the New York Society Library, of which Pintard had been a trustee.