Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [398]
Some merchants and entrepreneurs had begun to experiment with educational institutions targeted at specific elements of the laboring population. In 1820, for example, the Chamber of Commerce established the Mercantile Library Association to impart commercial skills and sober habits to the city’s growing number of clerks—too many of whom, surrounded by “excitements to pleasure,” had “become the votaries of vice and depravity.” The association’s hope was that its mammoth book collection (eventually comprising thirty-seven thousand volumes, second largest in town), supplemented with regular lectures by leading business, professional, and public men, would help the clerks resist “these moral foes.” That same year, prompted by John Pintard and the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen—dominated by wealthy former mechanics like bankers Jacob Lorillard and Stephen Allen—established an Apprentices Library, a lecture series, and a school for the sons of poorer or deceased members. Their goal too was to teach good habits and skills. In 1826 the General Society opened a school for girls as well.
For the vast majority of children, however, so-called charity schools remained the only chance for an education. By 1825 city churches sponsored fourteen such schools, with a combined enrollment of nearly thirty-four hundred pupils, virtually all from poor families. The African Free School, founded by the Manumission Society in 1786, drew nearly nine hundred pupils in 1823—more than half the African-American youths of school age in the city. Another eleven charity schools were operated by the nondenominational Free School Society (FSS), which Eddy, Clinton, and other gentlemen had founded back in 1805 to educate poor children “who do not belong to or are not provided for by any religious society.” After 1815, against the background of mounting concern over pauperism and lawlessness, the FSS strenuously promoted its Lancasterian approach to education—a combination of Bible study, rote memorization, and rigorous discipline—as “the main instrument by which extreme poverty & grovelling vice, & high-handed crime are to be banished from society.” In 1825 John Griscom boasted that over the years some twenty thousand children, “taken from the most indigent classes,” had passed through FSS schools.
First Infant School in Green Street New York, by Archibald Robertson, 0.1827. Located in the basement of the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Canal and Green streets, the school was run by the newly founded Infant School Society. Like many “charity schools,” it used the monitorial system devised by the English reformer Joseph Lancaster. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W.C. Arnold, 1964. The Edward W.C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and Pictures)
More successful still were the scores of Sunday schools that sprang up in the city during the twenties. The Sunday school movement, launched just after the turn of the century, really took off in 1816, when merchants Divie Bethune and Eleazer Lord founded the New York Sunday School Union. The purpose of Sunday schools, said the union, was “to arrest the progress of vice and to promote the moral and religious instruction of the depraved and uneducated part of the community.” Thousands of students were quickly recruited by handbills offering an “education free of expense” and promising that those who attended regularly, read their Bibles, and behaved well would be recommended for admission to an FSS school. The two hundred-odd volunteers who signed up as teachers (many, like Melissa Phelps, from genteel families) were pointedly charged to help their pupils become honest and useful citizens: “While