322. Horace Mann on Religious Instruction in the Schools (Mann, Horace, Sequel to the so-called Correspondence between the Rev. M. H. Smith and Horace Mann. Boston, 1847)

In 1846 a Reverend Mr. Smith attacked the Massachusetts State Board of Education and its Secretary, Mr. Mann, in a sermon entitled "The Ark of God on a New Cart." In this sermon he claimed that the increase in crime and immorality was due to the "Godless schools," sponsored by Mr. Mann and the State Board. Mr. Mann and the Reverend Mr. Smith exchanged two letters each on the question, and then Smith published the sermon and the correspondence in a book entitled The Bible, the Rod, and Religion in Common Schools. To this Mann published a Sequel, etc., of fifty-six pages, in which he judiciously examined the question at issue. He said he stood firmly for the reading of the Bible in the schools, but without comment; examined the matter in its different aspects; and in the concluding portion of the pamphlet said:

It is easy to see that the experiment would not stop with having half a dozen conflicting creeds taught by authority of law in the different schools of the same town or vicinity. Majorities will change in the same place. One sect may have the ascendency to-day; another tomorrow. This year there will be three Persons in the Godhead; next year but one; and the third year the Trinity will be restored to hold its precarious sovereignty until it shall be again dethroned by the worms of the dust it has made. This year, the everlasting fires of hell will burn to terrify the impenitent; next year, and without any repentance, its eternal flames will be extinguished, to be rekindled forever, or to be quenched forever as it may be decided at annual town meetings. This year, under Congregational rule, the Rev. Mr. So and So and the Rev. Dr. So and So will be on the committee; but next year these reverends and reverend doctors will be plain misters, never having had apostolic consecration from the bishop. This year the ordinance of baptism is inefficacious without immersion; next year one drop of water will be as good as forty fathoms. Children attending the district school will be taught one way; going from the district school to the high school they will be taught another way. In controversies involving such momentous interests, the fiercest party spirit will rage, and all the contemplations of heaven be poisoned by the passions of earth. Will not town lines and school district lines be altered, to restore an unsuccessful or to defeat a successful party? Will not fiery zealots move from place to place, to turn the theological scale, as it is said is sometimes. now done to turn a political one? And will not the godless make a merchandise of religion by being bribed to do the same thing? Can

aught be conceived more deplorable, more fatal to the interests of the young than this? Such strifes and persecutions on the question of total depravity as to make all men depraved at any rate; and such contests about the nature and the number of persons in the Godhead in heaven, as to make little children atheists on earth.

If the question, "What theology shall be taught in school?" is to be decided by districts or towns, then all the prudential and the superintending school committees must be chosen with express reference to their faith; the creed of every candidate for teaching must be investigated; and when litigations arise and such a system will breed them in swarms an ecclesiastical tribunal, some star chamber, or high commission court must be created to decide them. If the governor is to have power to appoint the judges of this spiritual tribunal, he also must be chosen with reference to the appointments he will make, and so, too, must the legislators who are to define their power, and to give them the purse and sword of the State, to execute their authority. Call such officers by the name of judge and governor, or cardinal and pope, the thing will be the same. The establishment of the true faith will not stop with the schoolroom. Its grasping jurisdiction will extend over all schools, over all private faith and public worship, until at last, after all our centuries of struggle and of suffering, it will come back to the inquisition, the faggot, and the rack.

Let me ask here, too, where is the consistency of those who advocate the right of a town or a district to determine, by a majority, what theology shall be taught in the schools, but deny the same right to the State? Does not this inconsistency blaze out into the faces of such advocates so as to make them feel, if they are too blind to see? This would be true, even if the State had written out the theology it would enforce. But ours has not. It has only said that no one sect shall obtain any advantage over other sects by means of the school system, which, for purposes of self-preservation, it has established.

323. Petition for a Division of the School Funds

(Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Michigan, 1853, pp. 190-91)

The following petition to the Legislature of Michigan, in 1853, by the Catholics of Detroit, is typical of petitions of the time to Legislatures in other States. This petition contains an interesting sectarian definition of free schools and liberty in instruction. It was met with a counter-petition from the Protestant Episcopal Bishop for the Diocese of Michigan (R. 324), and the matter was threshed out before the Legislature. Committees of both the Senate and the House made reports opposing division, and the Legislature took no further action on the request.

Memorial to the Legislature relative to a division of the School Fund We, the undersigned, citizens of Michigan, respectfully represent to your Honorable Body, that we have labored, and are still laboring under grievances to which neither Justice nor Patriotism require longer submission on our part, without an effort for their removal.

We, your petitioners, wish to represent to your Honorable Body, that notwithstanding the Constitution guarantees liberty of conscience to every citizen of the State, yet our Public School laws compel us to violate our conscience, or deprive us unjustly of our share of the Public School Funds, and also impose on us taxes for the support of schools, which, as a matter of conscience, we cannot allow our children to attend.

To convince your Honorable Body of the magnitude of these grievances, we have but to refer you to the fact, that in the cities of Monroe and Detroit alone, there are educated at the expense of their parents, and charitable contributions, some 2500 of our children. Your petitioners might bear longer their present grievances, hoping that our fellow-citizens would soon discover the injustice done to us by the present School laws, and that the love of public justice for which they are distinguished, would prompt them to protest against laws which are self-evidently a violation of liberty of conscience, a liberty which is equally dear to every American citizen; but, as the new Constitution requires that free schools be established in every district of our State, and as the present Legislature will be called upon to act upon the subject, your petitioners consider that their duty to themselves, their duty to their children, and their duty to their country, the liberties of which they are morally and religiously bound to defend, as well as their duty to their God, require that they apprise your Honorable Body of the oppressive nature of our present School laws, the injustice of which is equalled only by the laws of England, which compel the people of all denominations to support a church, the doctrines of which they do not believe.

Your petitioners would not wish to be understood as being opposed to education; on the contrary they are prepared to bear every reasonable burden your Honorable Body are willing to impose on them, to promote the cause of education, providing that our schools be free indeed. But they do not consider schools free when the law imposes on parents the necessity of giving their children such an education as their conscience cannot approve of. But that your Honorable Body may not be ignorant of what they understand by free schools, your petitioners wish to say that in their opinions, schools can be free only, when the business of school teaching be placed on the same legal footing as the other learned professions, when all may teach who will, their success depending, as in other cases, on their fitness for their profession, and the satisfaction

that they may render to the public; that in all cases the parent be left free to choose the teacher to whom he will entrust the education of his child, as he is left to choose his physician, his lawyer, etc.; that each person teaching any public school in the State should be entitled to draw from the public school fund, such sums as the law might provide for every child so taught by the month, quarter, or otherwise, on producing such evidence as the law might require in such cases. Schools established on such principles are what your petitioners understand by free schools.

Your petitioners, therefore, respectfully urge that the public school system for our State, be based on these broad democratic principles of equal liberty to all, allowing freedom of conscience to the child, who also has a conscience, as well as to the instructor and parent. And your petitioners will ever pray.

324. Counter-Petition against Division

(Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Michigan, 1853, p. 205) To the preceding petition for a division of the school funds, Samuel A. McCoskry, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Michigan, entered the following counter-petition:

The undersigned is the Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Michigan: He has learned from the public newspapers, and from petitions about to be presented to your honorable bodies, that an application is to be made for a division of the school fund of this State, so that "in all cases the parent be left free to choose the teacher to whom he will entrust the education of his child." Such application (if granted) he considers as giving the right not only to parents, but to every religious body, to select teachers who will teach the peculiarities of the religious views of opinions they may hold. It will place the school fund of this State in the hands of religious bodies or sects, and entrust to them the education of the children of the State; for the right, if given to one, will be claimed by each and all. Whatever opinion the writer may entertain in reference to the system and effects of the common-school education, he begs leave to say, that he has no wish or desire to interfere with, or in any way alter, or abridge the system which has been the pride of the State, and which has furnished to so many thousands of her children the means of obtaining a high secular education; nor does he wish that the fund so generously granted to the people of the State, and so carefully guarded by her Legislature, and so highly prized by her citizens, should be used for the promotion of sectarian strife and bitterness.

It is one of the distinguishing features of our free institutions, and

which lies at the foundation of happiness and freedom of the people, that neither religious tests nor religious preferences form any part of our legislation. All religious bodies are placed on precisely the same footing, and whatever may be the exclusive claims of each and all, they can be settled only by an appeal to a higher and different authority than State legislatures. But if your honorable bodies see fit to overturn and destroy that system which has been heretofore so carefully guarded, and which has introduced into every occupation and profession, some of the most distinguished men of the State, and which has brought to the door of the poor man the means of educating his children; and if the Priests and Clergymen of every religious body are to take the place of the common-school teacher, and the State is to assume the duty, through them, of extending and building up religious differences, and of fomenting strife and contention, then, the undersigned (most reluctantly) would claim to have a share in this work. If then such a change is to be made in our common-school law, so as to allow parents to choose teachers for their children, the undersigned would respectfully ask for his proportion of the common-school fund, so that the people entrusted to his spiritual oversight may employ such teachers as will fully carry out their religious preferences. He would freely and frankly state to your honorable bodies that the amount thus granted, shall be carefully used in teaching the principles and doctrines of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and that the services of as many clergymen and laymen of the Church will be secured and used, so that no other principles and doctrines shall find any place in the different schools.

Detroit, January 19th, 1853.

325. Act of Incorporation of the Norwich Free Academy

(Laws of Connecticut, 1854)

The following is typical of many acts incorporating free academies in towns and cities. A body of citizens was constituted the "corporation," with power to establish and conduct the school. Some of these school corporations still exist, though most of them have been turned over to the towns or cities and merged with or become the public high schools.

Act of Incorporation

Upon the petition of Russell Hubbard and others of Norwich, county of New London, praying for an act of incorporation for a free Academy, in said town of Norwich, as per petition on file, dated May 5th, 1854:

Resolved by this Assembly, That Russell Hubbard, (35 others here