I read a few of these books, and I came away persuaded that something else was going on with them. So I looked a little way into the matter and I found that William McGuffey was associated with a radical group in Cincinnati, and that the excerpts he collected and published for the most part anonymously are the work of writers he knew through this circle of radical reformers, or of writers sympathetic to them. According to Commager, “McGuffey, and his collaborators and successors, lived in the midst of the greatest reform era in our history … But the Readers show no awareness of this ferment of ideas, confess no temptation to challenge existing institutions, and reveal no inclination to enlarge the concept of social or political responsibility.” But consider the following partial list of contributors to various editions of the fourth reader and the causes with which they were associated. If the reforms that engaged them do not seem radical now, it is because they succeeded. The high percentage of women among the writers McGuffey excerpted — it is significantly higher than in other readers of the period — is characteristic of the prominence of women in reform circles.
Dr. Daniel Drake, McGuffey’s father-in-law, was an early public health and medical educator who supported universal compulsory education. Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish writer who championed education of women. Ann Taylor was a British writer who supported the Sunday school movement, an early major advance in popular education. Jacob Abbott was the founder of the Mount Vernon School, a girls’ school which offered as rigorous education as any available to boys, and which was entirely governed by its students. James Thomas Fields was an abolitionist publisher and editor in Boston. Elihu Burritt was an American abolitionist and pacifist who founded the internationalist League of Human Brotherhood, based in London. Thomas Grimké, brother of the famous early antislavery writers and lecturers Sarah and Angelina Grimké, was founder of the American Peace Society, which advocated total nonresistance to violence. Rev. Lyman Beecher, father of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was an early and crucial antislavery activist. Rev. Samuel Lewis worked with McGuffey for the creation of common schools in Ohio and founded with him the Western College for Teachers, a professional organization meant to support teaching standards. He was also the Anti-Slavery Party candidate for state senate, for congress, and for governor. Sarah Josepha Hale founded the first women’s magazine and was an early women’s rights activist. Rev. William Ellery Channing wrote a public letter of sympathy in 1836 to James G. Birney, an abolitionist printer in Cincinnati whose press was destroyed by a mob despite the efforts of Henry Ward Beecher to protect it. In 1837, Channing joined a public meeting in Boston to mark the killing in Alton, Illinois, of the abolitionist printer Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, whom Rev. Edward Beecher had attempted to protect. Channing became an active abolitionist, healing the breach between Unitarianism and theological traditionalists like Lyman Beecher, who had opposed it. John Greenleaf Whittier, a close associate of William Lloyd Garrison, was the secretary of the Abolition Society of Philadelphia. In 1839 the offices of his Pennsylvania Freeman were sacked and burned by a mob. From 1847 to 1859 he was an editor of the National Era, the antislavery periodical that first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Caroline Norton was an English writer on the status of women. James Russell Lowell was associated with the Anti-Slavery Standard, edited by the great early abolitionist writer, Lydia Maria Child. Horace Greeley was an abolitionist, labor-reform advocate, and socialist. Harriet Martineau was a British writer on slavery and social reform, author of a little book titled The Martyr Age in the United States (1839), which celebrates by name and in detail the abolitionist community then centered in Cincinnati. Her title reflects the fact that the reforms they espoused — abolition first of all — were not popular. It should be noted that the writers associated with antislavery were involved from an early period, like Channing, or from the beginning of their careers, like Lowell, or both, like Whittier. Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America includes Southern writers in sufficient numbers to make their absence from the McGuffeys worthy of note. It is surely worthy of note, also, that when literary writers are included, they have activist credentials.
Abolitionism seems still to be somewhat tarnished by criticisms of it made 150 years ago. It was said then to be an enthusiasm of New Englanders who had no direct experience of slavery and who were not economically dependent on it. Abolitionists were said to exaggerate the horrors of the institution and to simplify the problems and consequences of putting an end to it. There is a tendency to exaggerate regional differences — New York freed the last of its slaves in 1827. It is true that New England outlawed slavery early, though perhaps this fact does not imply a lack of understanding of its nature. It is true that the North flourished without slavery, but there was much evidence from an early period that slavery in fact depressed the development of the South. That is to say, however entangled in slavery, the South was not, strictly speaking, dependent on it either. In any case, such criticisms overlook the degree to which abolitionism foresaw a reform of the whole of society, not simply the suppression of slavery in the states of the South. The impact of the movement is underestimated for this reason. It must be said also that the erosion of rights of black and white Northerners entailed in measures to protect slavery in the South, most notably in the Fugitive Slave Law, made many in the North intensely aware of the consequences of allowing slavery to continue. Yet it is true at the same time that the virulence of public reaction to antislavery activity in the East appears to have been a reason for the deployment of abolitionist resources and energies into the Middle West.
The salient of abolitionism I touch on here was largely the work of people from New England and New York who were Puritans by culture and descent and who saw their movement into the Middle West from the 1830s onward as a reenactment and in effect a vindication of the Puritan settlement in America in the seventeenth century. Notable among them were the numerous family of Rev. Lyman Beecher. They included also Rev. Josiah Grinnell and John Brown. One consequence of their mission was a revival of New England Congregationalism, centered in Iowa. Another consequence was the creation of schools and colleges throughout the Middle West which have greatly affected the cultural development of the region. A third, somewhat indirect, consequence was the publication of the McGuffey readers, the project of W. B. Smith, a publisher who came to Cincinnati from New Haven and who was a member of the congregation of Lyman Beecher.
The cultural colonization of the Middle West by abolitionists was a straightforward consequence of the Second Great Awakening. In 1821, in upstate New York, a Presbyterian minister named George Washington Gale converted (in the phrase of the period) and educated for the ministry a young lawyer named Charles Grandison Finney. Finney’s gifts as a revivalist set off an outpouring of religious fervor throughout the Northeast, and gathered to him a band of converts of exceptional gifts and dedication, many of whom became passionate abolitionists. Among his converts was Arthur Tappan, a New York textile merchant and philanthropist who sheltered and guided the development of the antislavery movement through its long early years by dint of sheer openhandedness. The son of a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, Tappan made a fortune importing British textiles, primarily silks, which were a product of the same industrial system that received the products of American slave labor. He poured this wealth into antislavery causes with a liberality that bankrupted him once and that led Southerners to put bounties on him. He was called “the most mobbed man in America.”