Backcountry Learning Ways: North British Rituals of Schooling

Throughout the southern highlands, average levels of formal schooling were very low—in fact, the lowest in British America. When enrollment data first became available in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the proportion of white children enrolled at school in one county of North Carolina amounted to less than 10 percent of the school-age-population. This dismal statistic meant that children in this culture went to school only about 1.5 years on the average. Given the annual length of school sessions in the backcountry, they received only a few weeks of formal education during their entire lives. Other evidence suggests that the pattern in North Carolina was not very different from upcountry South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia.¹

Education increased with length of settlement, but low rates of school enrollment remained a regional tradition throughout the southern highlands for many generations. Levels of schooling were lower here than in any other part of the United States from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth.²

This pattern cannot be explained merely as the reflex of poverty alone, for poor communities in other regions gave strong support to schools. It was not primarily the product of frontier conditions, for other frontiers behaved very differently. It was not caused by that diabolus ex machina of southern historiography—the ethos of race slavery—for rates of school enrollment were lowest in those parts of the southern highlands where slavery did not exist. A more satisfactory explanation might combine these three factors with a fourth: the weight of cultural tradition that was carried from the borders of North Britain.

In northern Ireland, the north of England, and parts of rural Scotland which were largely untouched by the educational reforms of the Scottish Reformation and the Edinburgh Enlightenment, formal education was very limited. There were many some exceptions in Scotland, which had founded a system of parish schools supported by taxes on landowners and centrally controlled by the Presbyterian church. These Scottish schools have been much celebrated—by Scottish scholars. But they were not strong in areas of the southwest which contributed much to the American migration. In Ayrshire, whence many backsettlers came, half the parishes had no schools at all at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Further, where parish schools existed, their primary purpose was to seek out exceptionally gifted boys and send them on to higher places, rather than to provide mass education. For children of modest means, levels of schooling were very low on both side of the border. This was especially the case for females.³

These border patterns were transplanted to the American backcountry, where there were no institutions comparable to New England’s town schools, or even to Virginia’s system of parish education. Charles Woodmason wrote, “ … through the non-establishment of public schools, a great multitude of children are now grown up, in the greatest ignorance of ev’ry thing save vice—in which they are adepts.”⁴ This judgment was repeated in less pejorative terms by others who lived in the colonies. Governor Bull of South Carolina wrote in 1770, “Literature is but in its infancy here. We have not one good grammar school, tho’ foundations for several [exist] in our neighbouring parishes. All our gentlemen, who have anything of a learned education, have acquired it in England.”⁵

Backcountry education occurred mostly in small “neighborhood schools” maintained by private subscription and taught by itinerant masters for a few weeks each year. These humble institutions were similar to schools in the British borderlands where masters were hired ad hoc by local gentry.⁶ Individual parents in the backcountry and the borderlands sometimes made heroic efforts to obtain a little schooling for their children. Wills often expressed deep concern about the education of the young, and set aside large sums for that purpose. But the cultural circumstances which created thse anxieties also conspired to defeat them.⁷

To this general rule of educational poverty in the back settlements, there was an important exception in the growth of Presbyterian academies. These institutions were modeled on dissenting academies in Ireland and North Britain during the seventeenth century. Their primary purpose was to prepare candidates for the ministry. The American prototype of these academies was founded in 1727/28 by Presbyterian minister William Tennent at Little Neshaminy Creek, in Pennsylvania. Tennent was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. His object was to create what he called a “converted ministry” in America. George Whitefield visited Tennent’s school in 1739 and wrote, “The place wherein the young men study now is in contempt called the College. It is a log-house, about twenty feet long and near as many broad, and to me it seemed to resemble the schools of the old Prophets.”⁸

At least twelve of these Presbyterian academies were founded in the backcountry by the year 1750. More than thirty-three had opened their doors by 1770. Some were flourishing institutions. David Caldwell’s academy in Guilford County, North Carolina, survived from 1767 to 1820, and was faithfully attended by fifty or sixty students a year. But most were small and struggling institutions which collapsed after few years. Still, they helped to supply the need of the back settlements for an educated ministry and a literate elite.⁹

We tend to think of formal education as the enemy of folkways. But most societies have a folklore of learning which might be called their school ways. The backcountry was a case in point. It adopted educational folk customs which had long existed in North Britain. One example was the curious custom called “barring out.” This was a ritual of rebellion which occurred regularly before Christmas and sometimes at other seasons of the year. The larger students would forcibly bar the master from the schoolroom, until he granted them a long vacation. When he did so, the master commonly received small presents in return.¹⁰

In England this custom had many names—barring out, shutting out, penning out, or merely “the exclusion.” Its origins were described as “ancient” as early as the year 1558. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, barring out was a regional custom in the northernmost counties of England, and in the lowlands of Scotland and northern Ireland. It was most common in the English border counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Northumberland and Yorkshire.¹¹

This curious custom was transplanted to America, where it also became a backcountry folkway. Barring out was not unknown in other colonies, but it happened very rarely in New England, and was uncommon in the coastal south.¹² Mainly it occurred in the backcountry, where it spread from Pennsylvania into the southern highlands, and west to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It was specially common among American descendants of the British borderers in the back settlements.¹³

Sometimes barring out ceased to be merely a ritual, and developed into a pitched battle between older scholars and the teacher’s friends:

At our first common school we had a contest, which I mention here, because it shows the habits of the times. The schoolboys determined to turn out William P. Culbertson, the schoolmaster, for a day’s holiday. They assembled early in the morning, and barred the entry into the school-house by filling the door with benches and other heavy things. The school-master was then boarding with Abram’s father. He and all his brothers took part with him against the boys. They got to the school-house before Culbertson, and commenced threatening the boys inside with the master’s hickory. They dared any boy inside to come out. Those inside shoved me through the opening cut in a log for lighting the writing bench, to accept Abram’s banter. At it we went. I made a missing blow, slipped, or somehow else got down on the ground, and Abram on me. His brothers surrounded us, urging Abram to give it to me well. This was too much for the boys inside to bear. They tore away the fastenings from the door, and rescued me from my perilous position, put me upon my feet, and secured a fair fight.¹⁴

The custom of barring out was consistent with many aspects of border and backcountry culture. In this warrior society, even the most able scholar was literally compelled to fight for the esteem of the community. Even where barring out became merely a ritual, it preserved the old spirit of violence in a vestigial form.

The ritual of barring out was also an expression of restlessness under institutional restraint—an act which was sometimes violent in its form and always libertarian in its spirit. In one early instance of barring out (1587), Scottish schoolboys taunted their teacher:

Liberty, liberty under a pin

Six weeks holiday or never come in!¹⁵

This was, as we shall see, a very special conception of liberty, far removed from the ordered liberty of the Puritans, the reciprocal liberty of the Quakers and the hierarchical liberty of the cavaliers. It was an act deeply rooted in backcountry culture.

Barring out was merely one of many educational folkways in the backcountry. Another was what might be called educational magic. When Appalachian children went to school they adopted

(and continuously reinvented) a system of scholastic superstition which developed from the culture of their ancestors. Folklorists recorded many of these beliefs in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas:

If you sleep with your books under your pillow, you will know your lesson the next day.

If you sleep with your book under your head the night before an examination, you will pass successfully.

Put a willow leaf in the book that you are to pass an examination on, and you will pass successfully.

If you drop a book, you will miss that lesson unless you kiss the pages at which it opened.

Never write on the first sheet of a pack of paper. If you do your work will be poor.

The first lizard that you see running in the spring is a sign that you’ll be smart.

Put a stick in your book and you can walk a footlog without becoming dizzy.¹⁶

Educational magic flourished in the backcountry, as part of an inherited pattern of school ways which were carried from North Britain to the New World.