Blog for Nov. 29: Concluding Thoughts

For this final blog I narrowed my focus the topics of education and abolition. These are areas that I will be working with in my dissertation research, so these three periodical pieces were especially relevant when compared to the others that I found this semester. Each piece presents an argument about American exceptionalism that also invites readers to action – another type of literature I am interested in.

The first piece, "On Female Education," comes from The Port-Folio (May 1809) and is published in Philadelphia. This article is a printing of a speech given by James Milnor, Esq., (a trustee) at the Philadelphia Academy for the Instruction of Young Ladies. What is unusual about this speech is that Milnor' claims American women are exceptional -- when compared to their contemporaries in Europe. He says, "the women, with few, very few exceptions, are modest, prudent, and well informed. [...] In our principal cities and great towns, the systems of education, judiciously adopted by wise and prudent teachers, are admirably calculated to form accomplished daughters, and good wives. The mode of instruction may be old-fashioned, may be rigid, may be even austere, but it is perfectly right, and the good fruits of such culture are every where visible" (382). The speaker further compares American women to the Ancient Greeks and Romans to show how the "polite and well-informed woman [of America] is the most welcome companion of the intelligent of our [male] sex" (382). The speaker then praises the scholars on their mastery of the topics he considers worthy for female education -- reading (but not of novels), writing, grammar, composition, geography, history, biography, arithmetic, and religion. Such a recipe today we would call a curriculum for Republican Motherhood, but in that time, it shows how exceptional these young ladies were and how important education was for the people in our nation's first capital.

The second piece that was the most meaningful to me was "Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet" printed in The Religious Intelligencer (Sept. 13, 1828) and published in New Haven, Connecticut. It is a reprint from the Cherokee Phoenix, the first periodical to be published by the Cherokee Nation. Written in the style of a letter to the editor, it is an article relating the facts of how George Guess (Sequoyah) created a written language for the Cherokee people in 1819. What is interesting about this piece is the praise it heaps on Guess, showing him to be exceptional since he was able to create a written language within about a year, even though he was not literate and had "no knowledge of any language but the Cherokee" (255). This language was so exceptional that "several persons" were able to learn it within only "a few days" (255). And within "a few month, without school, or expense of time or money, [the Cherokee nation was] able to read and write in their own language" (255). The author ends the article praising Guess, but the subtext is that the Cherokee people are just as intelligent as the whites and can learn and become civilized. This article, written in 1828, would have been published when the US government was trying to remove the Cherokee from their homelands in Georgia. Unfortunately, this sympathetic portrait of the Cherokee was fruitless. The Trail of Tears happened 10 years later.

The last piece I wish to discuss here was especially moving. It is a letter to the editor of The Religious Intelligencer by "Melissa" and accompanied by her poem "A Slave Mother's Address to Her Infant" (Apr. 15, 1826). The letter details the author's experience seeing a young enslaved woman sold away from her child in Washington City. The experience so moved "Melissa" that she wrote a poem about it, imbuing her motherly sympathies into the poem and inviting readers to feel a sympathetic connection with the subject of her poem. This poem is similar to others I had read before by Frances E. W. Harper and John Greenleaf Whittier. But, after reading this one, I began to wonder how many other people had written similar poems featuring a distraught mother to promote abolition? Well, my investigation is not complete, but the questions raised by this poem led me to do a lot of exploring and what I have found so far is that this image of the distraught mother appears over and over again in poems, in periodicals, gift books, and novels (most famously in Uncle Tom's Cabin). As a result, this very subject will be a major portion of my dissertation. Hopefully I will be able to come to some conclusions soon -- but this is where it all began, in Dr. Dan's class.

In conclusion, these three pieces have shown me that Americans are exceptional, as Starr claims, or perhaps I should say that American Periodicals often portrayed Americans in the Early National Period as exceptional. Either way, this has been a fun ride and I have learned and thought much from my investigations and hearing reports from my colleagues in our seminar. Cheers!