Massachusetts Learning Ways: The Puritan Ethic of Learning

More than most Christians, the founders of Massachusetts were people of the book. Their faith was founded entirely on the Bible. John Cotton wrote that the “scriptures of God do contain a short upoluposis, or platform, not only of theology, but also of other sacred sciences … ethics, economics, politics, church government, prophesy, academy.” In the language of a later age, the Puritans were biblical fundamentalists who believed that every authentic word of Scripture was literal truth, and every command was binding upon them. On even the most mundane social questions, they searched the Scriptures for guidance. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony the standard size of a barrel of beer was set according to a rule in the book of Deuteronomy.¹

This religious attitude was closely linked to a social fact of some importance. By the standards of the seventeenth century, a very large proportion of adults in the Bay Colony were able to read and write. In 1660, approximately two-thirds of New England men and more than one-third of women were able to sign their wills. By 1760, these rates of “signature-mark” literacy had risen above 84 percent for men and 50 percent for women.²

These estimates, it should be understood, refer not to literacy itself, but to the proportion of men and women who were able to sign their names. More people in the seventeenth century could read than write: as many as half of those who could not scrawl their own names may have been able to make out a few words.³ The signature-mark test was only a rough indicator of literacy. Even so, it shows beyond doubt that literacy was higher in New England than in any other part of British America.⁴

Here we find another similarity between Massachusetts and East Anglia, where rates of literacy were higher than any other part of rural England. This was particularly the case in the county of Suffolk, where during the period of the great migration most people were able to write their own names. Approximately 55 percent could sign their names in that county, compared with 30 percent in England as a whole. The rate of literacy in Suffolk was higher than any rural county in England for which comparable evidence survives (22 counties in all). The next highest literacy rate in rural England was in the neighboring county of Essex.⁵

Within East Anglia, rates of literacy were even higher among that part of the population which moved to Massachusetts. One study in the county of Essex estimated that as many as 85 percent of people with Puritan leanings could sign their names to documents.⁶In economic and social terms, the middling ranks of East

Anglian yeomen, tradesmen and skilled artisans who came to Massachusetts in large numbers were mostly able to write their names by 1640. So also were most men who lived in the commercial towns of East Anglia.⁷

The zeal for learning and literacy in New England was not invented in America. The proportion of men and women in the Bay Colony who could sign their own names was almost exactly the same as yeomen and their wives in eastern England. This pattern had existed among East Anglian Puritans of middling rank for at least half a century before the great migration.⁸

The culture of this English region encouraged literacy in many ways. Its towns, its commercial economy, its connections with the Netherlands, and especially its predilection for Puritanism, all created conditions more favorable to literacy than those in other parts of England.⁹

In New England, this special concern for literacy was expressed in a unique set of laws and institutions, within a few years of the great migration. As early as 1642, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required that all children should be trained to read by their parents or masters. This law was copied by all the Puritan colonies: Connecticut in 1650, New Haven in 1655 and Plymouth in 1671.¹⁰

In 1647, this first act was followed by another Massachusetts statute called the “Old Deluder Law” after its immortal preamble, which began:

It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures, as in former times keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these later times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the Original might be clouded with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting in our endeavors.¹¹

The Old Deluder Law compelled every town of fifty families to hire a schoolmaster, and every town of one hundred families to keep a grammar school which offered instruction in Latin and Greek, “the masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” This statute did not demand compulsory school attendance. But it did require compulsory maintenance of “public schools,” as the Puritans began to call them in the seventeenth century. These laws were enforced. A system of town-supported schools developed rapidly throughout Massachusetts. As a result, children in Massachusetts received more than twice as many years of schooling as did youngsters in Virginia.¹²

The Puritans also actively supported higher learning in New England. Before the War of American Independence they founded four colleges—nearly as many as all other mainland colonies combined. These institutions existed primarily to train ministers and magistrates, but they had a broad base of support. In Massachusetts, every family was asked to contribute a peck of grain each year to the college at Cambridge. A great many did so—twenty-five heads of households in the town of Wenham, twenty-three in Woburn, thirty-three in York, Maine, and forty-two in Concord. Some of these donors were themselves illiterate. Altogether, many hundreds of families throughout New England freely gave this gift of “College Corn,” and in the process formed a firm sense of kinship with the institution.¹³

Every cultural region of British America gave some encouragement to formal learning. But New England, as we shall see, was unique in its strong support for both common schools and higher learning. This concern was reinforced by the colonial mood. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the first to perceive that the Puritans lived in fear of losing their cultural heritage in the New World—a process which one of them called “Criolian degeneracy.” In part because of this fear, levels of schooling and school support were consistently higher in New England than in the mother country.¹⁴

One consequence of New England’s support of learning was an exceptionally high level of intellectual achievement in this region: by far the highest in British America. During the late nineteenth century, Henry Cabot Lodge did a study of intellectual distinction by region in the United States. Lodge, of course, had an ethnic axe to grind, but the quantitative result of his inquiries had a truth value independent of the motives that inspired them. He found that by most empirical tests of intellectual eminence, New England led all other parts of British America from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.¹⁵

At about the same time that Lodge did this research, the English scholar Havelock Ellis made a study of intellectual achievement in his own country, and also found strong differences between regions. The eastern counties of England and East Anglia most of all accounted for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific and intellectual achievement than any other part of England. Here was yet another striking parallel between the two kindred cultures of East Anglia and New England through many generations.¹⁶