Certainly McGuffey’s most remarkable achievement was to have put together texts that were enormously popular in both the Middle West and the South before, during, and after the Civil War. When supplies of the books were cut off by the war, bootleg editions were printed in the South. There was little in the way of cultural consensus in this period. It was by no means clear in the early 1830s, when the McGuffeys first appeared, what kind of economy would develop in the Middle West. Forms of slavery were legal in Illinois. And of course the struggle for Kansas and the lower Middle West was precisely a struggle about which economic system would prevail there. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that “Cincinnati was herself to a large extent a slaveholding city. Her property was in slaveholding states. Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at the time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoining slave states.” The rhetorical battles that preceded the Civil War were waged in the language of Scripture, splitting the churches, so even those bonds between interests and loyalties and regions were strained or severed. In the circumstances, the McGuffey readers must be considered a work of considerable tact.
Yet they can be interpreted in the polemical terms of the period. To the extent that it is fair to say McGuffey’s texts establish modest well-being as a norm of life, they are positioning themselves on the side of the controversy also associated with the spread of literacy and the establishing of schools. To the extent that these texts portray wealth and standing as the reward of individual effort and character, they are promoting values that are the clear antithesis of the values invoked to justify slavery, whose apologists found norms in what are called aristocratic cultures and precedents in feudalism. Americans are terribly imprecise in their use of economic terms, perhaps because fragments of old polemic have outlived their occasion. So they see McGuffey’s smallholder republic as early capitalism, and the colonial economy of the South — a spectacular instance of the expropriation of the worker which existed to supply raw materials for the British and American industrial systems — as something else, something a little more poetical. McGuffey’s readers are assumed to be the sweetest statement of mean and minor aspirations, and no one reflects on them further.
In any case, it is easy to overstate the degree to which the books emphasize thrift and industry and so on. To the extent that they do, a context for these virtues is created by more numerous lessons urging kindness and generosity. In a story titled “Emulation” (Fourth Reader, 1866) a rich boy and a poor boy compete for first place in their school. When the poor boy cannot pay for his books, the rich boy buys them for him, then loses the competition. The story has no other moral than that generosity is to be admired. Far from proposing an ethical regime of minor worldly virtue, of self-interest enlightened by piety or benevolence or at least contained by limited aspiration, the lessons are rather ethereal. Their insistence on generosity and kindness is in turn given context by frequent references to death, and to the Bible, which, in the words of one poem, “in teaching me the way to live / Teaches how to die.” In other words, the things of this world are very much overshadowed by ultimate things in McGuffey’s readers — not surprisingly, since the man was a minister active in a culture where piety and evangelization were so routinely associated with education. It is surprising over against the modern reputation of the readers, however.
The great issue of the status of African-Americans during and after slavery is never alluded to in the readers, nor for that matter are African-Americans, or slavery itself, except in an adulatory essay titled “The Character of Wilberforce,” which appeared in the 1837 edition and was removed in 1844. Wilberforce, the British emancipationist, was a hero of the antislavery movement in America. This is not a mere failure to notice the existence of non-Europeans. Indians are represented rather frequently and sympathetically, and their dispossession and destruction are lamented, though they were then ongoing. If the readers neither reflected nor formed public opinion as it is manifested in the history of the period, this only reinforces the argument that they were the product of a special view of society, comparatively candid, humane, moral, and critical.
McGuffey’s readers are consistently contemptuous of war, before and after the Civil War. What may look to us like an evasive and calculating handling of explosive issues may have seemed to McGuffey conciliatory, as well as expedient, and therefore consistent with a belief in nonviolence shared by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, and not inconsistent with abolitionism. After a payment by W. B. Smith of twenty-five dollars, when he agreed to assemble the readers, McGuffey never received another penny for them, though he supervised numerous revisions. So cynicism seems not to have been a factor in the silences that made the texts acceptable in the South, and for that matter in the Middle West.
I have noted before that the South did not respond to the prolonged abolitionist onslaught of publication, evangelization, and institution-building in the Middle West with similar efforts of its own. Oddly enough, in the circumstances, there was not even a publisher of schoolbooks in the South itself. People so education-minded as McGuffey and his circle in Cincinnati might very well consider how such a vacuum should be filled. For them, education was the method as well as the substance of reform, yet education in the Middle West, as well as in the South, would have to take account of intense hostility to the antislavery movement.
It is interesting to consider what else besides slavery is missing from McGuffey’s readers. Factories and cities come to mind, an interesting omission for a man living in the so-called London of the West, also known as Porkopolis. Foreign countries, especially Germany, are given respectful notice, but there seem to be no immigrants — and this despite the large and growing German presence in the Middle West. No one in the readers seems to be transient, though the books were distributed into an unsettled frontier. As Mrs. Stowe wrote, “The little western villages of those days had none of the attractions of New England rural life. They were more like the back suburbs of a great city, a street of houses without yards or gardens, run up for the most part in a cheap and flimsy manner, and the whole air of society marked with the impress of a population who have no local attachments, and are making a mere temporary sojourn for money-getting purposes.” In fact, the world of the readers suggests rural New England in its fondest memories of itself. This is a consequence of the fact that, under cover of his own westernness, perhaps, McGuffey was publishing New England writers for whom primitive New England served as a norm or an ideal.
Abolitionists set great store by the fact that slavery is not mentioned by name in any of the country’s founding documents. To them this meant that these documents anticipate the end of slavery and refuse it the implication of acceptability and permanence that would come with acknowledging it by name. The McGuffey readers acknowledge neither slavery nor the factory system outright, but they teach an ethic so consistently opposed to both of them that they are arguably the subject of the books, in the same way that life in nineteenth-century society is the subject of Walden, and the preoccupation of Brook Farm and of Oberlin College. Just as the intention of individual stories in these collections is exemplary, so the intention of the readers altogether is also exemplary.