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CHAPTER ONE

Learning Taste

“Saturday morning we defined the word Sensibility.” So wrote Caroline Chester in the copybook that she kept while attending Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy in 1816.¹ Chester was proud enough of her own definition to record it in her journal: “True sensibility is that acuteness of feeling which is natural to those persons who possess the finer perceptions of seeing, hearing and feeling. It may very easily be distinguished from the false as the former has the effect upon the heart while the latter affects only the nerves.” This sort of exercise was a typical part of an academy instructor’s repertoire: Students parsed words like “useful knowledge,” “discretion,” “taste,” and “sensibility” in order to nurture those qualities in themselves and reward them in others.

“Sensibility” was an obvious choice for the pantheon of virtues that Pierce aimed to inculcate in her students. In the narrowest terms, the word described an organic, physiological sensitivity—Chester’s “finer perceptions.” But for Pierce and her students, it meant much more than that. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, sensibility had been a catchphrase and a catchall. By the time that Caroline Chester put pen to paper, legions of philosophers, popularizers, ministers, and novelists had touted sensibility as the ideal marriage of reason and feeling. They had also enshrined it as both a prerequisite for and a crucial component of the development of taste, a quality that promised to reinforce moral as well as aesthetic judgments. In fact, “taste” and “sensibility” were so closely linked in everyday usage that one conjured to mind the other. Judgments afforded by taste were suffused with feelings that flowed from sensibility.²

If it is not surprising to find that sensibility was included among the key words of an early national academy student, neither is it surprising to learn that Chester associated it first with the “finer perceptions of seeing.”³ The same transatlantic discourse that defined and celebrated “sensibility” underlined the connections between physical perception, intellectual apprehension, and affective realization: Information about the world entered the individual through the eye, or the mind’s eye, causing a nervous reaction and igniting emotion. That emotion manifested itself first in the individual’s bodily appearance—in flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and pooling tears—and then in his or her behavior. One person’s capacity for sensibility was thus immediately visible to others who were similarly endowed. Comparable processes were at work in the exercise of taste. Although taste operated on all kinds of phenomena, ranging from landscapes to texts to music, it generally depended on visual perception. Taste shaped what people saw and how they chose to be seen. Just as the man of taste picked his discerning way through the world guided by his eyes, so, too, did he mark his identity in ways that would render him visible within the republic of taste. The logic of sensibility and taste locked men and women of feeling into a sensory feedback loop that was predicated upon and driven by assumptions about the significance of vision and visibility for subjectivity, taste, and cognition. To be sure, these closely linked constructs posited individual virtue in ways that aligned morality with class. Yet Pierce and her contemporaries recognized that these qualities could be maximized in almost everyone. Toward that end, early national academies placed considerable emphasis on the cultivation of sensibility and taste.

These preoccupations were invested with new political and social urgency in the years following the American Revolution. Educated and influential citizens insisted that sensibility and taste could contribute to the harmony of both domestic relations and civil society. Imagining that manners and affect, taste and feeling could bind an increasingly diverse, increasingly contentious society together, Americans likewise imagined a republic in which the putatively personal became explicitly political. At the same time, the values and practices associated with sensibility and taste reinforced Americans’ fundamentally contradictory ideas about status and opportunity. Based on capacities that could be cultivated if not precisely taught, sensibility and taste held out the promise of improvement to an infinite number of citizens. And to the extent that these qualities were, at root, predicated on one’s ability to distinguish between good, better, and best, they reinforced any number of social distinctions. Simultaneously elevating individual and society, sensibility and taste, linked selfcultivation to public service.

This broad consensus on the public importance of taste and sensibility accounted for their prominence among the characteristics that early national academies aimed to inculcate in youth. An equally broad consensus on how these qualities were constituted and how they operated led educators to situate visuality near the center of the academy experience. But academies were more than crucial sites for the enculturation of taste and sensibility in young women and men. They were also crucial sites for projecting the notion that taste and sensibility were central components of the republican project. The curricula and culture that defined these institutions, like the endless discussions of education that swirled in newspapers and magazines, served as a charged fantasy, an idealized picture of what the nation should look like. Grand pronouncements about education in general and academy education in particular allowed a very select group of young men and women to stand in for the nation as a whole. These discerning students, in turn, served a particular vision of the republic, one that was exclusive rather than inclusive, hierarchical rather than egalitarian.

The Academy in the Republic

The academic world that produced Caroline Chester’s copybook, with its studied definition of sensibility, was as much the product of an institutional matrix as an intellectual one. Colonial education had been a patchwork affair. Notwithstanding a handful of state-sponsored Latin grammar schools in New England, education was largely a private concern. Throughout the colonies, enterprising men and women opened up ad hoc venture schools, providing a paying clientele with training in any number of skills, practical and otherwise: Advertisements for various eighteenth-century venture schools enticed students with geography, French, fencing, drawing, and dancing along with reading, writing, and arithmetic.⁴

By the middle of the eighteenth century, academies of various sorts had begun to appear. Ranging widely in curricula, organization, constituency, and financial support, early Anglo-American academies defy the tidy categories that historians usually aim to impose: Any provisional definition collapses before the sheer variety of schools that were deemed academies by their contemporaries. Indeed, that very flexibility was central to their success. Depending upon circumstance and market, academies might offer the rudimentary English of a common school, the classical curriculum of a grammar school, the eclectic mix of a venture school, or the ambitious program of a college. Generally speaking, they were more catholic than grammar schools and more systematic and more permanent than venture schools.⁵

Predictably, access to any of these schools was mediated by the inequalities that structured Anglo-American society. The Virginia scion who devoted himself to the works of the Roman historian Sallust under the careful direction of a Princeton-trained tutor was far removed from the anonymous young men who labored at “Arithmetic and Book-keeping” at a Philadelphia night school. And women were, by definition, excluded from Latin grammar schools and colleges. Still, by the 1750s, children of the elite and the merely prosperous found it far easier to secure some form of advanced education than their parents would have. Although precise figures are elusive, the number of schools and students was increasing by the mid-eighteenth century. Why? A dynamic, complex economy rewarded men who possessed at least a modicum of learning. Protestant denominations, eager to secure their share of the faithful, looked to schools to inculcate piety. Political conflict, especially following the Stamp Act Crisis, increased interest in the public prints and sharpened colonists’ textual engagement with civic life. Finally, the pursuit of gentility encouraged some individuals to seek out more extensive schooling than the minimum demanded by market, church, or civil society.

If the war for American independence disrupted this energetic, diverse collection of institutions and strategies, the creation of the American republic famously reinvigorated it. The ideological commitment to a culture of learning, broadly defined, ran wide and deep. Benjamin Rush may have been remarkable in asserting that a national school system could “convert men into republican machines,” but he was downright pedestrian in believing that “the business of education has acquired a new complexion by the independence of our country.”⁶ Throughout the early national period, Americans manifested enormous faith in the capacity of learning to transform individuals and society. Countless essays, tracts, speeches, sermons, and letters affirmed that education, republican style, did more than create an informed citizenry. It also fostered a virtuous one. In Rush’s words, formal education could make a man “immutable in his character, inflexible in his honesty,” and prepare him to “feel the dignity of his nature and cheerfully obey the claims of duty.” Only education could free men and women from the shackles of self-interest, from the parochial and the particular.

The expansion of education in the decades following the Revolution took many forms, encompassing the creation of common schools and colleges, the organization of learned societies, and the proliferation of print culture. Yet no one form was as visible, either for contemporaries or subsequent scholars, as the academy. Numbers alone account for much of the academy’s prominence. By 1800, the United States boasted only twenty-five colleges, but it had launched literally hundreds of academies.⁷ Academies flourished because they were well suited to a nation that was simultaneously convinced of the urgent importance of schooling, uncertain about how to fund it, and divided over the extent to which it should create new opportunities or reinforce old hierarchies. Most depended on multiple revenue sources, confounding modern distinctions between private and public. Funding was secured through gifts, subscriptions, and, especially, tuition, which varied widely among schools. But many academies also looked to state legislatures for support, ranging from monies raised by the sale of confiscated and public lands to outright land grants to tax exemptions. Whatever form it took and however limited it might have been, state support forged powerful ideological connections between “public” and “education.”⁸

Conflicts over curricula, which quickly ballooned into ideologically charged debates over the kind of education most suited to a republic, also contributed to the notion that academies were central to the well-being of the republic as a whole. Consider the debate over classical languages. On one side were those who urged educators and students to eliminate or at least minimize the emphasis on Greek and Latin. As early as 1749, Benjamin Franklin had begun to champion a more utilitarian approach to education.⁹ Following the Revolution, other voices joined Franklin’s critique of the classics, inflecting it with the imperatives of postrevolutionary politics: Rush and Noah Webster, for example, advocated the careful study of English and condemned the classics as difficult, impractical, and altogether unsuited for a republic that demanded the diffusion of “universal knowledge.” And any number of wags published jokes about farm boys whose academy stints had bestowed a smattering of comically bad Latin while doing nothing to remove the rust from their English.¹⁰ On the other side of the debate, traditionalists like Joseph Dennie worried that, by “removing the foundations of intellect” from education, Americans were poised to “sacrifice intellect itself.” John Adams wrote that he “should as soon think of closing all my window shutters, to enable me to see,” as he would “banishing the Classicks, to improve Republican ideals.” Defenders of the classics insisted explicitly that ancient languages and texts were the building blocks of advanced education. Implicitly, they correlated learning with social class. All citizens may have needed an education, but they did not need the same education.¹¹

Neither side prevailed. The virtuous learning advanced by early national academies never fit into a single mold. Most men’s academies managed to incorporate classical languages into their curricula. The pedagogy remained stultifying, and few students ever actually used the languages outside the academy or college. Instead, the persistent appeal of Latin, especially, testified to the political resonance and cultural cachet of all things connected to the ancient republics.¹² But with the exception of a handful of schools like Phillips Academy (where well into the nineteenth century, students studied Latin, Latin, and more Latin), the ancient languages typically formed one optional component of a far more general curriculum. School catalogs and advertisements promised students a sort of intellectual smorgasbord: The classical program of study was balanced by an English one, which included instruction in reading, spelling, grammar, composition, and polite letters. Arithmetic, including the useful but tedious “rule of three,” was ubiquitous. History, which offered clues to the developmental trajectory of the American republic, and geography, which situated the nation in a global context while describing its vast and varied terrain, became common by the 1790s. By the turn of the nineteenth century, these standard offerings were often supplemented with modern languages; natural philosophy or natural history; music; a smattering of purely vocational skills including bookkeeping, surveying, and navigating; and an entire battery of “ornamentals.” Some schools required students to follow a set course of study. But far more offered them a series of choices: English or classical, with extras like French, geography, or music added on, usually for an additional fee.¹³ Withal, the precise course of study depended on both the competencies of available instructors and the expectations and desires of potential students. The options served up by early national academies derived less from a fervent commitment to the importance of, say, Latin, than to a complicated calculus of supply and demand.

If the much-ballyhooed debates over the classical curriculum in particular and truly republican cultures of learning in general did not determine what most academies actually offered, they did serve to amplify the political resonance of the curriculum as a whole. Academies could and did claim that their courses of study, regardless of their specific content, furthered the “diffusion of knowledge” and thus contributed to the “improvement of society.” Such claims were freighted with republican significance. As the Reverend Simeon Doggett intoned at the dedication of the Bristol Academy in Massachusetts, education did more than determine the shape of the state. It endowed citizens with a “knowledge of the rights of man, and the enjoyment of civil liberty.” Only education could forge a nation that was “happy at home and respectable abroad.”¹⁴ That said, institutions like the Bristol Academy granted students considerable latitude in deciding on the particular components of knowledge that were most desirable and, by extension, most republican.

This aura of civic importance extended from the curriculum to the students. It was not simply that an academy education could help initiate young men and women students into the ranks of a republican citizenry. Academies promised to extend that education—and all it represented—to an unprecedented number of students.¹⁵ White women were the most visible beneficiaries of the postrevolutionary expansion of higher education. Their access to education is evidenced through not only the founding of female and coeducational schools but also those schools’ rising enrollments. A few examples from especially well-documented schools can suffice: In 1798, Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield, Connecticut, academy claimed thirty students; four years later, it claimed at least seventy. The Moravian female seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, tripled its enrollment between 1787 and 1790. One year after it opened its doors, the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia enrolled one hundred pupils. Susanna Rowson’s Boston school opened with five students in 1799; by the end of that year, it had more than a hundred.¹⁶

Analogous figures for male academies are both more elusive and less dramatic. The inaugural class of the Moravian Nazareth Hall in Pennsylvania, for example, included eleven students. Fifteen years later, in 1785, the school enrolled forty-five, and by its fiftieth reunion, the school boasted of educating more than eight hundred men and boys—an average of about sixteen new students per year. By 1803, Massachusetts’s preeminent Phillips Academy enrolled a mere fifty-seven students.¹⁷ These numbers, which pale next to those for female academies, probably testify more to supply than to demand. Young men could choose from a greater number of academies; in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, no one institution was likely to secure enormous enrollment increases. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these schools did broaden education’s reach by serving a population that extended well beyond the college-bound sons of the elite. For example, when Josiah Quincy, the product of a prominent New England family and the future president of Harvard University, entered Phillips Academy at the precocious age of six, he sat next to a thirty-six-year-old Revolutionary War veteran.¹⁸

Indeed, one of the most regular registers of academies’ popular appeal can be found in the chorus of complaints that they had become all too popular. As one critic explained in 1791, the “easiness of access, and the smallness of the expense,” tempted farmers and mechanics to imagine brilliant and altogether unrealistic futures for their sons.¹⁹ He need not have worried. Notwithstanding the striking increase in early national academy enrollments, only a minority of American women and men gained admission. Indeed, that minority may have been as small as 6 percent of the population. The cost of tuition and board, questions about the market value of an advanced education, and lingering suspicions that individual ambition owed less to virtue than to vice all ensured that the vast majority of Americans never pursued advanced education. And academies, for their part, were careful to pitch themselves to potential students who were, at the very least, “respectable”—a term that by definition excluded entire categories of people, most obviously African Americans and members of the laboring class.²⁰

Although most Americans would never attend an academy, the public prints relentlessly cast those who did as exemplars of republican virtue, as citizens who served a unified public interest. Lofty claims about the value of education, delivered to students and then published for the benefit of the reading public, collapsed a very select group of women and men into a depiction of the nation as a whole. Female scholars, for example, may well have been drawn to academies by a love of learning or by the need to acquire practical, even marketable, skills. But they were celebrated for their salutary influence over the nation’s manners. As the Philadelphia merchant, politician, and man-of-letters John Swanwick explained to students at the Young Ladies’ Academy in 1787, “the luster of your examples, and the intelligence of your minds” would “dispose others to similar qualifications.” Addressing the senior class of the Philadelphia Academy, James Abercrombie assumed that the purpose of the young men’s education was the fulfillment of civic duty. Individual ambition played no part in Abercrombie’s depiction of the liberal education afforded by the academy. Instead, schooling taught these soon-to-be-citizens how a “strong and energetic Government” and “undefiled Religion” together produced “real liberty.” More than that, it taught them how “securely to curb the phrensy of faction, and effectually restrain the ‘madness of the people.’”²¹ By acquiring an academy education (at least as described in the prints), students pursued a distinctly republican, deeply politicized form of virtue—for themselves and for the nation.

This discourse was never the mechanical reflection of a social fact. It was also a charged fantasy of nation formation. Oafish farm boys with their comically bad Latin; evenhanded young men of affairs who could be trusted to rise above faction, pulling the rest of the electorate up with them; serene young ladies who elevated the nation’s conversation before marriage and reared its citizens afterward: These were stock characters in a national discourse that used the academy movement to articulate an idealized, albeit contested, picture of the republic. Representations of male students marked the conservative boundaries of acceptable political culture. They reduced the threat of “leveling” to a joke and encouraged readers’ faith in the handful of good men who could and would secure the republic and lead the nation to greatness.

Or consider the remarkably energetic discussion of women’s education and female intellect that filled up the pages of early national newspapers and magazines, to say nothing of the catalogs, prospectuses, exercises, and broadsides published by academies themselves. Unlike discussions about men’s educations, which danced around questions about class, discussions about women’s education generally focused on the role of female intellect in a republic. Here, the issue was not so much educating the wrong girl as giving the right girl the wrong training. Should she learn rhetoric or French? Read history or novels? Learn to dance or to paint?²² Certainly, the endless and endlessly repetitive discussions of the “fair sex” served as a response to the growing numbers of young women who attended academies and as a vehicle for debating women’s social and political roles. But those same discussions also used the expansion of women’s education to demonstrate the distinctive virtue of the American republic.

Commentators routinely appealed to philosophical and literary conventions that conflated women’s status and national character. They gestured toward a political theory that located republics, including the American one, as landmarks on the journey from barbarism to civilization. John P. Brace, Sarah Pierce’s nephew and right-hand man, regularly reminded Litchfield students that they had been spared the cruel indignities piled upon the women of Greenland, China, and Burma. They knew only second-hand what their “sex once suffered when the night of ignorance covered the world.” Like the tales of “Oriental” seraglios that proved so popular in the 1790s, texts that focused on women’s education implicitly and explicitly situated the United States on a spectrum of civilization bounded by heathen primitivism on one end and aristocratic decadence on the other. As Mary Magdalen M’Intosh put it in an 1825 commencement essay when comparing American and Turkish women, “They were educated as slaves; we as the legitimate heirs and children of Freedom.”²³ Indeed, the remarkable prominence of educated women in early national discourse may have owed less to demographics of academy enrollments or even to battles over gender equality than to the powerful resonance of the appropriately educated woman as a symbol of American virtue.

The elements of a republican education were never imagined as a series of intellectual abstractions. When academies sought to turn students into the pillars of the republic, they prepared them to assume roles as spectators and players within a national spectacle. In effect, an academy education furnished young men and women with the skills to execute an infinite number of performances in the larger world. There, students would be judged not only on their ability to declaim in Latin and read a map, but also on whether they had internalized the moral example set by Cato and how well they knew the nation’s geography. There, students would become objects of emulation, standard-bearers whose virtues would be reproduced across space and over time. And there, students would use the heightened perception and keen discretion they had acquired at school to monitor the nation’s progress, keeping a sharp eye out for the rogues and coquettes, the factions and demagogues that threatened the republic. Like virtue itself, the subjectivities and social relations fostered by academies depended on the cultivation of sensibility and the exercise of taste. They were, in other words, aestheticized. For that reason, a concern with aesthetics—broadly defined and embedded in a rich visual culture—pervaded curricula at academies throughout the early national period.

Learning Taste

Taste was central to the rhetorical study that anchored the curricula of the overwhelming majority of early national academies. Classes in English language and literatures (variously called “composition,” “composition and rhetoric,” or “composition and criticism”) aimed to teach students more than the mechanics of grammar and the rudiments of style. Instead, they were intended to immerse young men and women in an aesthetic world that encompassed criticism as well as composition. As Sarah Pierce put it at the close of one school term, the goal of studying rhetoric and composition had been “to create or direct taste.”²⁴ Toward that end, students at academies and seminaries throughout the country read in, if not all the way through, the eighteenth-century British aesthetic canon. This project was facilitated by an expansive print culture that made works by Joseph Addison; Edmund Burke; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Archibald Alison; and, most especially, Hugh Blair available in multiple forms that were more or less comprehensive and more or less costly. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Kames’s Elements of Criticism, for example, were available as full-length books, in either imported or domestic imprints; as abridged editions; or excerpted into volumes like the one compiled in 1784 by James Rivington, which included extracts from Blair, Sterne, “Kaimes,” Burke, Chesterfield, Addison, Steele, and the “Authors of the Connoisseur.”²⁵

This extensive, transatlantic discourse on taste, elaborated over the course of the long eighteenth century, was hardly monolithic. It encompassed significant disputes over whether the capacity for taste was the result of nature or nurture and generated arguments over whether there was a single standard of taste or many. But by and large, Americans were far less interested in the disagreements within this discourse than in its overriding consensus on the importance of taste as a measure of character and civilization. After all, as Blair observed in his enormously popular Lectures, educators “in every age” had been duty-bound to “tincture” youth “early with relish for the entertainments of Taste” because it was “more or less connected with every good and virtuous disposition.” Taste increased “sensibility to all the tender and humane passions” and diminished the “more violent and fierce emotions.” If these capacities made taste central to civilized society, they made it critical to a republican one.²⁶

Given the stakes, debating taste was less important than affirming it. One mode of affirmation was explicitly textual. To recognize the connections between beauty, sensibility, and taste or to understand the standards of taste that governed the production of polite letters and fine arts, scholars were directed year after year to works by Addison, Kames, Alison, or the ubiquitous Blair. From these longer texts, they excerpted key passages, which they then read silently and aloud, memorized, recited, and transcribed. When Caroline Chester spent an afternoon in 1815 writing that a good letter called for “ease and familiarity, simplicity, sprightliness and wit” and that poetry was the “language of passion, or of enlivened imagination, formed most commonly into regular numbers,” she demonstrated her knowledge of polite letters and her ability to reproduce their generic conventions in her own writing. But she also demonstrated that she had internalized the precepts from Blair’s lectures on “Epistolary” and “The Nature of Poetry.” More than fifteen years later, a Philadelphia student, Sara Gratz Moses, transcribed extracts from Addison, John Dryden, and William Cowper along with Blair’s assessment of their rhetorical strengths and weaknesses. Sandwiched between these critiques were her own attempts to craft prose that would meet the standards that had been set out by Blair more than fifty years previous.²⁷

Other modes of affirmation operated at the intersection of the textual and the visual, for one sign of a good stylist was the ability to communicate in tasteful words what the tasteful eye perceived. Indeed, according to Blair, the “high power” of prose and poetry obtained precisely in their capacity for “Imitation and Description,” which allowed a writer to “represent” an original “in colours very strong and lively.” Accordingly, student diaries, letters, and essays reveal a sustained and self-conscious attempt to train their eyes, articulate sensation, and thereby register taste. Henry Cheever, whose reading of John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Oliver Goldsmith inspired his description of a summer sunset, was hardly alone in using the books he read to help him recognize and describe the beauty of the natural world. While studying at Litchfield, Mary Ann Bacon regularly began her morning with a walk in the garden of the house where she boarded; after each walk, she recorded in her diary that she “went upstairs contemplating the beauties of nature.”²⁸

These habits of seeing and writing, conditioned by reading, stayed with young women and men outside the confines of school. Hetty Anne Barton, for one, took them with her on a family junket from Pennsylvania to Virginia in 1803. Standing on the banks of the Susquehanna River, she adopted the perspective of the picturesque tourist: “The scenery from the middle of the river is very beautiful, the eye can scarcely reach the misty distance, so extensive is the view while nearer objects seem more immediately to command attention. … The hills along the bank are richly fringed with woods,” while “those more distant, assum[ed] the different shades of blue and purple, the warm colouring of the setting sun.” The next morning, the shifting light of sunrise combined with the movement of the carriage to create a landscape that was “continually changing before us.” This play of light and motion, a by-product of travel, was itself worthy of comment: “Every moment … unfolded new beauties, each scene, varying in richness, and highly cultivated, formed a continual picture for the eye to rest on.” Barton parsed her field of vision according to the precepts laid out by eighteenth-century picturesque writers like Thomas Whately or William Gilpin; she described it in rhetoric informed by Blair.²⁹

It was no accident that Cheever, Bacon, Barton, and countless other academy students were attuned to the “beauties of nature” or to beauty in general. For eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, the beauty that one encountered on the page was connected to the beauty one saw in the world. Beauty was connected, in other words, to visual perception. Consider Hugh Blair. His Lectures focused on elevating rhetoric and imbuing it with taste. But because he defined taste as the “power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of art or nature,” he had no choice but to consider beauty. And beauty was, in the first instance, visual. Thus, hundreds of pages of lectures detailing sentence structure, cautioning against hyperbole, and explicating genres ranging from lyric poetry to legal summation were preceded by a discussion of “sublimity in objects” and a disquisition on beauty as it was grounded in color, shape, and motion and as it was manifested in the human countenance and in “artful design.”³⁰

Texts that expounded on beauty had to look the part. Academies thus placed great emphasis on penmanship, which one authority declared was “generally considered a strong evidence of a polite education.”³¹ Projecting the abstract realm of sentiment and thought onto the smooth surface of the page, penmanship demonstrated more than a writer’s physical mastery of pen, ink, and letter-forms. It also revealed his or her social rank, education, taste, and character. Penmanship signified so powerfully partly because writing had been an exceptional skill in the colonial era and partly because it acquired new meanings after the Revolution. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anglo-Americans viewed reading and writing as separate and only tangentially related skills. Although significant percentages of colonial men and women learned to read, if only to read the Bible, writing remained the province of a far more select group. Ministers, doctors, lawyers, wealthy women and men, and, especially, merchants could wield a pen. As the expansion of commerce increased the demand for writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of education increased opportunities to acquire it. But if writing became less rarified, it did not become less resonant. The proliferation of print in the second half of the eighteenth century tightened the association between handwriting and selfhood. Unlike the mechanized, impersonal regularity of a typeface, the small idiosyncrasies that marked one man’s round or Italian hand also signaled his temperament. In the years following the Revolution, this association became far more urgent. Educational theorists who posited republican society as the guarantor of a republican state attempted to identify the particular script best suited for a republic. At the same time, pervasive anxieties about authenticity compelled some readers to seize on a “good hand” as one more proof of an individual writer’s character. Thus, a “good hand” rendered both text and writer legible.³²

With so much riding on the stroke of a pen, handwriting could not be left to chance. Although the ability to write was a prerequisite for admission to an academy, an ongoing emphasis on penmanship was a routine component of the curriculum. Some academies hired writing masters outright; others made do with teachers already on staff who claimed some competence as “writing instructors.” Whatever form the training took, students could expect to be judged on their proficiency with the pen. The younger students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary, for example, kept both individual writing books and a collaborative daily school journal. All these books were evaluated on the grounds of “writing and language.” Congratulating the girls on their improvement in “writing a fair hand,” school principal Jacob Van Vleck admonished them not to rest on their laurels but rather to continue “giving all possible pains in obtaining this noble art.” The Bethlehem students were not alone. Well into the nineteenth century, academy students spent hours and hours copying words, phrases, and epigrams into their penmanship books: “By commendable deportment we gain reputation.” “Virtue preserves friendship.” “Xenocrates recommended virtuous employments.” “Commend good men.” “Merit creates envy.” “Wisdom and virtue are ornaments of the soul.”³³ The more advanced the student, the longer the passages. During their second year, the young men at Nazareth Hall graduated from short epigrams to business correspondence: “Rec’d from Francis TrueMan the Sum of Forty Seven Pounds Pennsylvania Currency being in of a Debt due by Mssr.s Trueman and Wilson.” Even when students moved beyond the rote copying of the penmanship book, they were expected to continue honing their hands at the same time that they composed letters and filled up commonplace books and diaries.³⁴

This was not a matter of elevating style over substance. As one educator put it, a good hand bestowed a “grace to composition.” Thus Cheever understood that he was expected to fill his journal with his “feelings just as they are, and if possible in good style and fair writing.” The quality of handwriting mattered well beyond the walls of the academy. To hear Stephen Salisbury’s parents tell it, his wretched handwriting spoiled the letters he sent them from a Massachusetts academy. “Your father rec’d your careless Scrawl, & desires me to ask you if any of the other Scholars send such scraps of paper folded up as letters,” his mother wrote. Ignoring the letter’s contents—which recounted her son’s life at school—she issued a warning: “It is time you did better Stephen.” The quality of the medium and the message were of a piece.³⁵

Figure 2. William Winchester prepared this example of the running hand for the Oct. 1793 examination at Nazareth Hall. Samples of the students’ writing were preserved in a volume marked “Specimens of Writing Made by the Scholars in Nazareth School for the Autumnal Examination.” Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

The conventions governing students’ penmanship paralleled and amplified the conventions of their compositions. Both were governed by the aesthetics of emulation and the mechanics of reproduction. The work submitted by students at Nazareth Hall for their 1793 examination, for example, certified them as masters of the running hand, which was the script of choice for commerce and the professions. But the samples also certified the boys as masters of the copy. Almost to a one, they replicated the example provided by the teacher so closely that it is all but impossible to distinguish one writer from another. Only the small notation of names on some of the entries makes it possible to distinguish one boy’s work from the next. For these boys and countless others, the goal was not legibility so much as submission to the conventions of a codified style. This discipline ensured consistency across the pages of script penned by a single writer as well as consistency among all the student writers. An observer might recognize a particular penmanship sample as an example of the running hand but he would not immediately identify it as the product of any particular individual’s hand. The uniformity of the script appears effortless. Along with the identities of the writers, the labor necessary to comply with the model has been effaced.

Figure 3. Nathaniel Ray Greene’s “specimen,” prepared for the same examination as William Winchester’s, is nearly identical to it. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

Like the return of the repressed, traces of labor that have been erased in one place reappear in others. Occasionally, students’ everyday writing—marked by careening slants and misshapen letters—hint at the effort required to produce writing that met the standards held up by instructors and parents. Penmanship books, like the one kept by Samuel Salisbury in the summer of 1780 provide a clearer picture of a good hand in the making. For two months, Salisbury alternated daily between copying pages of single letters and pages of epigrams. Gradually, his lettering became more consistent, his script more fluid. Salisbury’s book evidences his labor, but does not remark on it.³⁶

Memoirs are more explicit on this point, recording both the effort and its value. Mary Jane Peabody recalled that the girls at her “boarding school” were required to write abstracts of Sunday’s sermons. By the time she left, she had filled several books with summaries set down in “round, clear hand writing.” But although the précis were easy to read, she was not satisfied with her writing. “Determined to write better, more like a lady,” Peabody found a “good copy to imitate” and took “infinite pains.” Her progress was measured on paper, in a book that began in her “usual hand” and ended in “very delicate neat writing.” While Peabody described her pursuit of a good hand in a memoir, Samuel May inscribed his in the front covers of the same penmanship books he had filled as a boy. Near the end of his life, he wrote that because he had but a “cramped and awkward hand” at the age of twelve, his father arranged for him to leave the public Latin school for an hour and a half each day to take “at least 110” private writing lessons with the Reverend John Pierpont, “a penman of the very rarest excellence & good taste.” At the minister’s house, he traced sloping, parallel lines to memorize the ideal slant of the running hand and repeated single letters for pages at a time. Only then did he graduate to words and, shortly after that, to an “intermediate” writing school. In May’s telling, his work with Pierpont was as significant a step on the road to Harvard’s entrance examinations as the time he spent at the public Latin school.³⁷

Chirography—the art of writing—involved more than the hand-eye coordination necessary to form letters. A penman “of the rarest excellence” produced legible text and did so in a way that commentators routinely described as “useful and polite” or “easy and correct.” These stock phrases make clear that a “good hand” was defined as much by the person manipulating the pen as by the letters inscribed on paper. While we might trace Salisbury’s progress as a penman by the changing appearance of his handwriting, his contemporaries would also have considered the changing appearance of his body as he wrote. Polite penmanship was a total body effort: That was the message drilled home by the “practical” writing guides published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Claiming to duplicate in book form the training offered by writing masters, authorities like George Fisher and Nathan Towne dictated the correct placement of every finger in the hand that held the pen and cautioned students never to allow the “ball and fleshy part of the hand” to touch the paper. But they also prodded would-be writers to pull their elbows in close to their sides, to keep their pens inclined toward their right shoulders. They insisted variously that writers sit “pretty upright” or that they lean forward over the table, making sure to keep their heads within the same plane as their spines.³⁸

These dicta obviously helped novice writers learn to control the flow of ink and to protect their sleeves and cuffs from stains. But they also prescribed a bodily aesthetic. Like the pen-wielding sitters painted by John Singleton Copley or Charles Willson Peale, the writers conjured by Fisher and Towne could turn gracefully from their work to acknowledge observers. They arranged themselves, their pens, and paper to communicate that they were engaged with but never consumed by the texts they produced. Real writers and painted ones drew attention to the performative and social contexts of penmanship, underscoring an aesthetic that encompassed process as well as product.

Figure 4. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), John Hancock, 1765. Oil on canvas, 49 1/8 × 39 3/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Deposited by the City of Boston, L-R 30.76d statement. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Student Bodies

Learning to cultivate and demonstrate one’s taste, like learning more generally, was an intensely embodied process. For one thing, the richly aestheticized education promoted by early national academies depended on the senses, especially sight. It was manifested materially, physically. Thus it is not surprising that teachers paid careful attention to the students’ bodies. For another, educators, parents, and students were heirs to a long-standing western tradition that elevated a mastery of the body into a hallmark of gentility, imagining it as a central element of what one scholar has called “the civilizing process.” An individual’s mind and affections correlated with his or her physical form.

This inclination to view the body as the initial register of character was invested with new political and cultural significance after the Revolution, when Americans were keen to find evidence of themselves as a people who were truly republican and intensely worried that they would come up short.³⁹ The same assumptions and anxieties that connected the life of the mind to the body politic also connected the life of the mind to the bodies of students themselves. Accordingly, many academies incorporated into their curricula what we might call a course in physical education, one that started at the washbasin and ended in the ballroom.

First, students learned to pay close attention to their bodies. Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy included instructions about hygiene in the school’s long list of rules, requiring “Cleanliness in Dress and Person” and directing students to take care that “the head be combed and the hands and Face washed before coming to School.” Young women were also encouraged to heed their appearance. Every week, students at the Litchfield Academy were directed to inventory their bodies as well as their souls. Just as they “prayed to God in whose hands your breath is” they were to review whether they had “been neat” in their “persons” or careless with their clothes, whether they had combed their hair with a “fine tooth comb” and cleaned their teeth every morning. This preoccupation with the well-groomed body as a manifestation of inner character worked its way into book learning. “Neatness is the natural garb of a well ordered mind and has a near alliance with purity of heart,” wrote one Litchfield student, pointing out that “Richardson whose taste was exquisite as his imagination glowing has painted his Clarissa as always dressed before she came down for breakfast.”⁴⁰

Regular and diligent grooming was a precursor to physical grace. In repose and in motion, students were taught to conform to the kinetic conventions of refinement. The goal was a kind of erect ease through the torso and neck, leaving one’s arms, legs, and head free to trace Hogarth’s line of beauty. Failure to master those conventions was a matter of real concern. Elizabeth Way, who operated a school for girls in eighteenth-century Delaware, was especially vigilant in policing the bearing of her charges. Way reportedly hung necklaces of “Jamestown-weed burrs” round the necks of students who let their heads hang forward and strapped both steel rods and “morocco spiders” to the backs of young girls inclined to slouch. In 1802, fourteen-year-old Lucy Sheldon shamefully reported that when she and her peers at Litchfield assembled to hear “Miss Pierce tell our faults,” she had been singled out for “holding my arms stiff which made me appear awkward, and which I shall certainly endeavor to correct.”⁴¹

If steel rods and public scoldings discouraged bad posture, dancing fostered physical grace and infused it with politeness. Both a physical discipline and a mode of interaction, dancing represented the union of genteel body and genteel sociability. Accordingly, many schools made dancing lessons available to male and female students for an extra charge. As Mary Bacon put it in an 1820 composition, dancing was “professedly an essential part of a good education as correcting any awkwardness of gestures giving an easy and graceful motion to the body.” She was not alone. Speaking before Philadelphia’s Young Ladies’ Academy, Swanwick suggested that dancing promoted health and rendered “the figure and motions of the body easy and agreeable.” The principals of the Clermont Seminary went further. They promised parents that dancing lessons combined with a close supervision of their sons’ manners would impart “a taste and relish for decorum, and politeness,” which was “no small part of education.” Indeed, the Reverend James Cosens Ogden told the notables assembled for the dedication of the Portsmouth Academy in 1791 that dancing contributed decisively to a broader social good by dispelling “the rust of prejudice.” When diverse and even divided men and women see one another in their “best dress and most pleasant face,” he enthused, “spleen flies—harmony reigns.” Amid the rancorous political climate of the 1790s, some observers hoped that society could serve as a balm to the wounds of partisan politics.⁴²

Certainly, dancing attracted its share of critics. The novelist and educator Hannah Webster Foster surely spoke for many when she listed dancing among “the most fascinating, and of course the most dangerous,” of accomplishments. The dangers were especially acute for women. A woman might well appear “polite and elegant” while executing the steps of a cotillion. But the thrill of self-display and the gratification of public recognition all too often lead to “unbounded wants,” to psychic ambitions and physical desires that could not be satisfied within the realm of propriety. Because the ballroom was the setting for collaborative, ensemble performances, a woman who aspired to command center stage was surely headed for trouble. The boundary between the polite and the erotic was disconcertingly porous. Even Bacon, who credited dancing with erasing “awkward gestures,” worried that “modern manners may however have carried the fondness for this accomplishment to an immoderate extreme.” She wondered whether “exceling in this particular does not inspire too great a fondness for dissipated pleasures and proportionably abate the ardur for more retired virtues.” After all, she reasoned, “a woman who can sparkle and engage the admiration of every beholder at a birth night or a ball is not always content with the grave office of managing a family.”⁴³

Removing dancing from a school’s curriculum did not remove it from its culture. Many of the same schools that excluded dancing from their course lists included balls on their social calendars, suggesting that educators and parents expected students to have at least a passing familiarity with the basics. At singlesex and coeducational academies, balls were typically staged to mark holidays like July 4th and to celebrate the close of the school year. And at some schools, balls and dances were organized far more often than that. Certainly that was the case with Litchfield Female Academy. Although the school did not offer dancing lessons, student diaries and journals are punctuated with references to “pretty agreeable” balls, “very agreeable” balls, “school balls” composed of students only, and “public balls,” where scholars mingled with select townsmen and -women.⁴⁴

The point of dancing was not simply to school the body in grace but also to put the graceful body in the service of polite society. If student balls were rehearsals, public balls were auditions. Students were judged on their dancing and on the number of partners they attracted. But observers also took note of their dress, mien, conversation, and charm. Scattered accounts from diaries, letters, and memoirs suggest that young women were ranked more on appearance; young men, on their social skills. In both cases, the stakes were high. Most obviously, balls served as very public vehicles for initiating courtship. They also served as a proving ground for polite society. As a middle-aged woman quipped after watching the “heels fly this way and that” at a Litchfield ball, “This is solemn business.” Or, in the words of her companion, a law student seeking the admiration of Litchfield’s loveliest belles and the respect of its best families, balls “could make toil of pleasure as the old man said when he buried his wife.”⁴⁵

Like mastery of the body, mastery of the politesse that made balls such serious business was a formal part of academy educations. Especially around the turn of the nineteenth century, academies and seminaries took pains to assure parents and patrons that they could train citizens who were as well mannered as they were virtuous. Schools promised to police sloppy table manners, hush loud laughter, and calm boisterous behavior. But they also pledged to inculcate the sort of manners appropriate to a harmoniously hierarchical social order. Prominent among the “rules” that students at Litchfield Academy copied every year, for example, was a definition of politeness that directed “Every real Lady” to “treat her superior with due reverence” and her “companions with politeness.” According to the trustees of New Hampshire’s Atkinson Academy, precisely because politeness formed the “basis of honour & happiness to individuals, the foundation of harmony to society & felicity to nations,” students must extend respect to superiors, friendship to equals, and courtesy to inferiors. At Leicester Academy, students were required to leave their heads uncovered when a tutor was present in the yard, even though they might be older than the tutor. Looking back on the practice some fifty years after the fact, John Pierce, who had served as an assistant preceptor in the 1790s, conceded that the practice probably seemed “extreme” to those who had grown up a generation or two later. But surely, he insisted, this rather stuffy past was preferable to the present, in which all forms of deference had fallen by the wayside.⁴⁶ Pierce understood that the outmoded rules of his youth had ensured order within the academy and beyond it. They prescribed clear channels of deference for students whose age or family background might otherwise allow them to claim precedence over instructors and schoolmasters just as they primed students to assume their proper social place after graduation.

The codification of etiquette also underscored the explicitly social ends of an academy education. Far from cultivating intellect for its own sake, academies groomed young men and women to take their places on a larger stage, one that began immediately outside the academy yard. Consider, for example, the cautions, prohibitions, and exhortations for student behavior on the streets. On their way to and from school, students were to refrain from “uncouth noises and gestures.” They were to keep to the public roads and not trample across private property. They must not be “rude to any Person” and should extend themselves by “paying a handsome compliment to the passing stranger or citizen, by pulling off the hat or otherwise, as propriety & genteel conduct may require.” They were in short, to “manifest, by [their] whole deportment, respect for the quiet of the place,” and thereby “win the respect of the residents” for themselves and their teachers.⁴⁷ The imperative to maintain good-neighbor status accounted for much of this concern. No academy could afford to have its students associated with rowdiness or impropriety by the surrounding community. But more than town-gown diplomacy was in play.

Admonitions about students’ public behavior, read alongside contemporary descriptions of students and reminiscences about academy life, reveal a selfconscious sense of young women and men on display. Especially in provincial towns and villages, where local academies were associated with brilliant careers and sparkling sociability, students constituted a special—and especially observed—group. This was as true in church as it was in the street or in the ballroom. Students at many academies attended church as members of a group, with the academy “family” sitting alongside the congregation’s other, natal families. Numbers alone would have rendered them conspicuous. But some students sought seats that afforded them maximum visibility. In Litchfield, for example, Sarah Pierce’s decorous young ladies preferred a “select” group of benches up front, where they were both free from immediate adult supervision and visible to the rest of the congregation. One student recalled that when “out girls” (farmers’ daughters who lived “out” as “help” in village families) arrived at church early to commandeer the choice pews, a surreptitious battle of “pinching, pin pricking, and punching” ensued until the “school girls” could reclaim their turf the following week. Some seventy miles north in Massachusetts, male students from the Monson Academy were consigned to rear pews. But they nevertheless imagined themselves to be visible, at least to those who mattered most. Decades after leaving the academy, Charles Hammond could still summon to his mind’s eye the “dioramic procession of the fathers and magnates of the town” as they promenaded with their families past the scholars to seats at the very front of the church. The front seats of the old-fashioned, three-sided pews were occupied by the heads of households, who sat with their backs to the minister, facing their wives and children. But in Hammond’s telling, the notables kept their eyes “always directed toward us”—the academy students. As he “watched them in turn,” Hammond judged them to be exemplars of “personal gravity.”⁴⁸ In this fantasy of mutual recognition, the “fathers and magnates” served as a mirror into the future, allowing Hammond to anticipate his own “personal gravity.”

Not all the fantasies spun by this sort of visibility were so uplifting, especially where young women were concerned. Poised on the brink of courtship, female students often figured as objects of sexual desire. This was certainly the case in Litchfield. There is no doubt that Sarah Pierce, a devout Christian and a shrewd politician, held her charges to the strictest standards of decorum. Yet the proximity of Tapping Reeve’s law school meant that the young women faced a steady stream of potential suitors, to say nothing of men who were less interested in securing wives than in testing their own appeal. The charged atmosphere that resulted reverberates through student diaries and letters and into late nineteenth-century memoirs of life in “olden times.” Recalling his arrival in Litchfield as a new law student, Edward Mansfield wrote that one of the “first objects that struck [his] eyes” was a procession of “school girls.” Some fifty years later, he could still recall the scene: He stood atop a hill, looking down onto a parade of “gaily dressed” ladies who passed beneath “lofty elms,” moving in time to the music of a “flute and a flageolet.” He was entranced. In subsequent months, he confessed, “one of [his] temptations” was to time his walk in order to “meet the girls, who … were often seen taking their daily walk.” This fascination with the town’s concentration of eligible “girls” was more than the nostalgia of an old man who found a wife among Pierce’s students. The “private journals” of John P. Brace, who taught at the school in the 1810s, are shot through with erotic tension. Frankly assessing his students’ charms, Brace vacillated between swaggering proclamations that were he not a teacher he could triumph as a beau and nagging fears that he would never measure up to the ladies’ exacting expectations. And a law student, George Younglove Cutler, filled up a journal with comments about the appearance and dress of Litchfield’s belles that he illustrated and then circulated among male and female friends. It was no secret among his intimates, then, that Miss Hart appeared “most horribly fashionable in her accouterments,” that Miss Talmadge was “certainly elegant,” and that when Miss Munson dressed with fewer ruffles, her shoulders appeared “infinitely more to advantage than common.”⁴⁹

For women like the Misses Hart, Talmadge, and Munson, the politics of this highly eroticized visibility cut in multiple directions. Pleasure and power (if young men like Brace are to be believed) were countered by concerns about feminine reputation. Overexposure or improper exposure, especially before the wrong sort of spectator, could do permanent damage to a young woman’s social and moral standing, undermining her prospects for a good marriage and a secure place within the community. That was the lesson driven home to Caroline Chester in 1816, when she and several schoolmates trekked to Little Island on the Bantam River. Splashing from stone to stone to reach the island, the girls got wet and one fell into the river. “Some one” proposed that because the island was “so retired a place,” the girls could safely take off their shoes to wash their feet. The wettest also took off their “frocks” to dry across a bush. Alas, Little Island was not “so retired” as they hoped. After “spying two gentlemen” on a hill about “a quarter of a mile distant,” the young women threw on their clothes and beat a fast path home. Within twenty-four hours, exaggerated accounts of their indiscretion had reached Pierce. Chester and her friends managed to prove that they were “careless only & not improper” and that they had been “unjustly accused.” Still, for days afterward they were lectured about the uneasiness and unhappiness they had brought to the school. They were assured that some citizens continued to suspect them of the “most flagrant breach of propriety & delicacy.” They were exhorted “like Caesar’s wife [to] beware of being even suspected.” After hearing for the umpteenth time that she should never even “approach the boundary line of propriety,” Chester concluded that were she to “stay in Litchfield 100 years I would never, never walk to Little Island.”⁵⁰

Figure 5. Page from the diary of George Younglove Cutler depicting Miss Munson, August 13, 1820. Litchfield Female Academy Collection, Litchfield Historical Society, Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library, 7 South Street, P.O. Box 385, Litchfield, CT 06759.

More striking than the story’s predictable moral—that a “woman’s fame is easily tarnished”—or the way that it maps feminine propriety onto the town’s geography, is the way that Chester’s narrative illuminates the importance of seeing and being seen. Spectatorship pervaded the academy experience. The anonymous men on the hill who may have glimpsed the girls, or the spectators who may have hidden on the island itself, were no different from Mansfield, the would-be suitor who timed his walk to coincide with the students’. The citizens of Litchfield who decried the girls’ scandalous undressing on the island were the same people who applauded their fashionable attire at balls. Those citizens, in turn, were little different from teachers like Pierce, who trained an eagle’s eye on her charges’ posture.

There was more to this than the imperative to submit rigid discipline of society; politeness was not an end in itself. By training young women and young men to mind their grooming, their posture, and their manners, academies instilled a doubled sense of self. As the objects of observation and as increasingly adept observers, students learned simultaneously to inhabit their world and to imagine how they must appear to others as they inhabited it. The ultimate aim was what the literary critic Peter de Bolla, following Adam Smith, has termed a “spectatorial subjectivity,” which was “precisely not positioned in the eye of the beholder but, rather, in the exchanges that occur in the phantasmic projection of what it might feel like to be constituted as a subject by looking on the onlookers of ourselves.” Or, as Chester came to understand after the disastrous trip to Little Island, the key to looking, like the key to looking good, was to understand immediately and intuitively how one looked to others.⁵¹

Academic Art

The close connections between taste, beauty, and selfhood coupled with the porous boundary between the textual and the visual prompted many academies to provide students with access to books and images aimed at sharpening their visual literacy. The same institutions were likely to offer some form of handson instruction in the fine arts. Although textile arts ranging from ornamental embroidery to worsted work remained the exclusive preserve of young women, other pursuits, especially drawing, attracted both genders. Whatever the media, students’ artistic productions were meant to reinforce their book learning. The same themes dominated the images they created and the books they wrote. Like composition and chirography, drawing and embroidery were predicated on emulation. Both sets of practices, like the academy experience more generally, were calculated to ground students in a gendered republic of taste.

The haphazard nature of early national academy records makes it difficult to know for certain exactly which art books and images any particular school supplied or how many schools supplied them, but scattered references are suggestive.⁵² Some libraries contained books that focused on art history, theory, or practice. The library of the Bethlehem Female Seminary, for example, acquired Paston’s Sketch book, Smith on Drawing, and an edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting.⁵³ Many more schools would have made do with books like Richard Turner’s Abridgement of the arts and sciences or William Duane’s Epitome of the arts and sciences, which were specially “adapted to the use of schools and academies.” These books provided rudimentary definitions of an art form like architecture (“the art of building or raising all kinds of edifices”); broke it down into subcategories (civil, military, and naval); and identified its key styles (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite). Written with recitation in mind, these texts unfold as a series of formulaic questions (“How many sorts of paintings are there?”) and answers (“Five: oil, fresco, water-color, glass, and enamel”).⁵⁴

At best, such books were sparsely illustrated. In the first edition of his Epitome, for example, Duane included woodcuts illustrating mythological figures and natural phenomena like waterspouts, but he saw no point in picturing the difference between Doric and Corinthian columns. Authors like Duane and Turner were less interested in feeding students’ eyes than in training them. They seem to have assumed that their readers already had access to paintings, sculpture, and architecture or to the representation of those arts in prints. That is, they provided the tools to translate what readers observed elsewhere into a shared language and to turn that language back onto images and objects in the form of criticism.

In order to provide objects for their pupils’ criticism, educators called on a variety of sources. Printed images were an obvious choice. Judith Foster Saunders and Clementina Beach, who operated a female academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, amassed a print collection that included prints based on Angelica Kauffman’s paintings, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, and the Bible. Nazareth Hall early on acquired Johann Daniel Preissler’s eighteenth-century German drawing manual, Die durch Theorie erfundene Practic, which worked its way from studies of single body parts like eyes, noses, and feet through the whole human form and then culminated in classical figures, both nude and clothed. The Bethlehem Female Seminary began acquiring prints in the eighteenth century and continued at least through the 1820s. Catalogs for the Germantown Academy in Pennsylvania boasted that the school had built a print collection to “interest the students in the productions and nature of art.”⁵⁵ Illustrated books offered educators another obvious source for visual materials. The plates in Charles Rollin’s Ancient History and Pope’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, introduced students to the visual conventions of classicism, regardless of their ability to read Latin. The Litchfield Academy purchased an edition of the Count de Buffon’s Natural History that included a “great number of cuts.” At a Massachusetts boarding school catering to younger girls, the scholars were allowed to look at two images in a large, lavishly illustrated Bible every Sunday as a reward for good behavior. Teachers and schoolmasters and mistresses also took advantage of resources outside the academy walls when they could. Madame Rivardi, who operated Philadelphia’s Seminary for Young Ladies, regularly dispatched groups of chaperoned girls to the city’s galleries and museums. Pierce made certain that an itinerant artist who performed demonstrations with a perspective glass and a set of English landscapes put in an appearance at her school.⁵⁶

The cultivation of students’ taste extended beyond criticism to hands-on training in the fine arts. Male and female students regularly studied drawing; women were also likely to have their choice of painting, fancy needlework, and a whole range of other “ornamentals.” Unlike the study in composition or history, which might progress over several years, classes in the arts were generally designed to last but a single term. And unlike courses in composition or history, which were required and included in the standard tuition, courses in the arts were optional and almost always required an additional fee. Contemporary scholars have paid scant attention to this training. Historians generally regard it as a frivolous distraction from bookish learning—from the real work of republican education. Women’s historians, especially, have condemned it for tainting serious learning with domesticity. Art historians have compared it to the formal studio training available to aspiring academic painters in Britain and on the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and found it lacking. Yet the sheer numbers of young women and men who sought art instruction, and who paid extra for it, suggest that this training occupied a far more important place in the early republic than scholars have recognized.⁵⁷

Female and coeducational academies were especially likely to offer some instruction in the fine arts. Indeed, it is far easier to list women’s schools that excluded the ornamentals, like the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, than to count the ones that included them. In his seminal study of American women’s education, Thomas Woody found that between 1742 and 1871, 162 female seminaries offered more than 130 courses in the visual arts. And this number probably underestimates the percentage of schools that offered such training during the early national period, for Woody’s calculations do not distinguish between the curricular offerings before and after the 1820s, when the “ornamentals” suffered increasing, and increasingly sharp, attacks.⁵⁸ Figures on the number of men’s schools that offered art instruction are far harder to come by, in large part because a far smaller percentage of them offered these courses. Nevertheless, drawing lessons were hardly an unusual component of a young man’s education. In Philadelphia, the Clermont Seminary (later Carre and Sanderson’s Seminary) included drawing lessons in their program to inculcate “a taste and relish for decorum, and politeness.” So did the Round Hill School in Massachusetts, the New Haven Gymnasium in Connecticut, and Nazareth Hall in Pennsylvania. Drawing was common enough that in the “Desolate Academy,” a poem satirizing the vagaries of learning at men’s academies, Philip Freneau poked fun at drawing lessons along with math, history, Greek, and Latin.⁵⁹

Even when academies excluded drawing from the formal curriculum, it was often available off-site from independent teachers. This was especially true in urban centers, where, in the words of Charles Willson Peale, foreign and nativeborn artists had by the 1790s “become so numerous that I cannot undertake to make any account of them.” Looking to supplement their incomes, these men (and a few women) established drawing academies whose hours were carefully coordinated with the schedules of surrounding seminaries. For example, James Cox, who operated a “Drawing and Painting Academy” in New York and Philadelphia, taught “ladies” from 2 until 4 and “gentlemen” from 4 until 6, beginning his classes at precisely the time that students would have been released from their other studies. In a gesture of respect for the social distinctions prized by his patrons, he offered a separate “Evening School” to attract “gentlemen” who worked during the day. Although it is impossible to know how many students, male or female, attended schools like Cox’s, the number of drawing masters who sought their patronage suggests that there must have been a steady demand for their services.⁶⁰

If both sexes studied aesthetics and some form of fine arts, they did not study in quite the same way or toward quite the same ends. The most obvious differences derive from conventions governing the gender division of labor: A young woman would have been very likely to produce a piece of ornamental needlework, something ranging from an alphabetic sampler to a large, embroidered picture; a young man would never have plied a needle. While a young woman might have chosen classes in fancy needlework or drawing, she might also have chosen to learn calligraphy, painting, japanning, waxwork, or worsted work; a young man learned to draw. A young woman with the inclination and the financial resources might have opted to pursue some form of “the ornamentals” throughout her school years; a young man typically relinquished his drawing class in favor of more focused attention on the classics or branches of English and mathematics that might serve useful in commerce. But gender also shaped the kinds of art that young women and men produced as well as its meaning.

Figure 6. “Autumn,” illustration from James Thomson, The Seasons: With the Castle of Indolence (1804). Library Company of Philadelphia.

Figure 7. Needlework picture depicting Palemon and Lavinia, created by Sarah Ann Hanson while she attended the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Litiz, PA. Pictorial embroidery of silk, chenille, spangles, paint, and ink. Private collection; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens.

Figure 8. Embroidered picture of Mount Vernon, ca. 1807, made by Caroline Stebbins when she was a student at Deerfield Academy. Her father paid $5 (the equivalent of a half year’s tuition) to have the embroidery framed. Silk on silk, 13¼ × 16⅞ in. Courtesy of Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA.

The pedagogical and thematic parallels between young women’s book learning and their “ornamental” studies are arresting. Both were structured by emulation, by the belief that in copying appropriate models, students might transcend mere mimicry and internalize the style and substance of their betters. Students’ commonplace books and journals might have included their own observations, poetry, and even drawings. But they were largely devoted to “improving” extracts transcribed from published sermons, essays, poetry, and conduct and letter-writing manuals.⁶¹ Their painted and embroidered pictures were based on popular prints, usually selected by their teachers and produced in a style specified by—and identified with—those same teachers.⁶² The arts, in fact, were believed to be especially useful for inculcating the habit of emulation in young women. Thus, when one young woman turned up her nose at the ornamentals offered by the Bethlehem Female Seminary, her guardian was dismayed. “Her unwillingness to undertake any of the ornamental branches, shews her totally devoid of that emulation, without which nothing can be acquired almost induces me to believe that she is not compos mentis,” he fumed. Never mind that the girl displayed “no taste for the arts”: the arts fostered the habits demanded by other branches of study. “I want her mind exercised by every possible means,” he continued, demanding that the girl be kept at “worsted work as long as you can control her” and that she begin drawing lessons immediately. This, he hoped, “may prove the inception to other undertakings, which may diminish if not destroy” the girl’s “indolence of mind.”⁶³

It was not just the process of emulation that linked literary and ornamental work. It was also the sort of original that female students copied. The same themes and turns of phrase that young women recorded in commonplace books and schoolgirl essays to demonstrate their mastery of polite letters were embroidered on samplers. Inscriptions testifying to women’s religious faith and practice dominated both media. But samplers, like commonplace books, also testified to young women’s participation in the transatlantic community of letters that shored up the republic of taste. If quotations from Isaac Watts were especially popular, girls also selected verse from Pope, Goldsmith, and Cowper. With needle and pen, girls praised nature, whose “beauteous works” when “fitly drawn” “please the eye and the aspireing mind/To nobler scenes of pleasure more refined.” They yearned for immortal friendships that might “outlive … the stars survive … the tomb.” Anticipating death, young women anticipated the passing of time, youth, and beauty. In prose and embroidered inscription, they reminded themselves that only virtue and intellect withstood the test of time. As one young woman put it, “Rear’d by blest Education’s nurturing hand/Behold the maid arise her mind expand/Deep in her heart the seeds of virtue lay/Maturing age shall give them to the day.” Or, in the words of another, “Beauty will soon fade away,/But learning never will decay.” All of these lines, culled from late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century samplers, could as easily have been drawn from copybooks from the same period.⁶⁴

Literary themes and print culture more generally also dominated young women’s pictorial embroidery and their paintings. The characters and plots of much-loved books, mediated by imported, engraved prints, provided scores of young women with fodder for needles and paintbrushes. Many students, for example, worked from illustrations from James Thomson’s perennially popular book of verse, The Seasons. Following the lead of British painters and engravers, teachers and “schoolgirl” artists were especially keen to reproduce the plate for “Autumn,” which showed the gentleman Palemon confessing his love to rustic Lavinia. Others favored themes that infused polite culture with civic duty and nationalism. In 1804, a student named Mary Beach created a large needlework copy of a Francesco Bartolozzi engraving taken from Angelica Kauffman’s painting of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi. Cornelia was a figure revered in the early republic for her eloquence as well as her maternal strength. By choosing Cornelia, Beach (or, more likely, her teacher) simultaneously signaled her republican commitments and her familiarity with the cosmopolitan world of engraved prints. Similar sentiments were at work in the many pieces of art honoring George Washington. Elaborate renditions of prints depicting the Washington family were common subjects. Washington’s death in 1799 predictably prompted an outpouring of mourning art. Even Mount Vernon attracted its share of attention from academy instructors and their students.⁶⁵

Whatever they depicted, these images were created explicitly for display. The paintings and embroideries created by female students were generally framed, often at great expense. One Connecticut man recalled that any young woman who had attended an academy was “expected to bring home … some evidence of proficiency in her studies. Those who could, exhibited elaborate water color drawings which have hung ever since on the walls of … [local] Parlors.” In fact, the imperative to display girls’ accomplishments was so strong that frame-making began to employ significant numbers of artisans when and where schoolgirls began to make art.⁶⁶

It is far harder to generalize about the artistic work of boys and young men, if only because so little of it has survived. That, in and of itself, is suggestive. Whatever happened to those drawings and paintings, they were not encased in expensive frames, hung up in family parlors, or passed lovingly from one generation to the next. They were never, in other words, intended for display outside the walls of the academy. But the short life of the final product (pictures) does not mean that the process (learning to draw) was unimportant. On the contrary. Thomas Jefferson took pains to ensure that the University of Virginia included drawing and painting in its curriculum. At the prestigious Nazareth Hall, drawing was a mandatory and integral part of the curriculum. In an 1815 poem celebrating the school’s effect on its students, the principal W. H. Van Vleck ranked the transformative power of drawing alongside that of the classics:

There first with rapt’rous eye, the page sublime

Of classic Rome and Greece I wandered o’er;

Now dared with, with venturous pencil, to portray

Fair Nature’s smiling face in mimic hues. …

Clearly, the ability to draw signified. But how exactly?⁶⁷

The extraordinarily rich collection of surviving student drawings from Nazareth Hall can suggest some answers to that question. The young men who attended Nazareth Hall between 1785 and 1830, much like their female counterparts at academies throughout the country, learned to draw by copying examples selected by their teachers. And by the 1810s, a small number of students produced images analogous to the ones painted and embroidered by female students—botanical drawings complemented by Latin names and root systems, landscapes, and genre scenes. One young man, whose ambition outstripped his talent, painted a copy of Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, an image that had circulated widely through the colonies as an engraved print. Yet the majority of images produced at Nazareth Hall bear little resemblance to these polished, detailed images and even less resemblance to the painted and embroidered pictures that young women created.⁶⁸ The lion’s share of the young men who learned to draw at Nazareth Hall did not reproduce complete images, much less images that thematized an expansive, transatlantic print culture. Instead, their training conformed more or less to the trajectory advocated in the drawing manuals that circulated on the continent and in Britain from the sixteenth century on. (In this case, the manual was the multivolume treatise written by Preissler, who served as the director of the Nuremburg Academy of Art in the early eighteenth century.) Academic artists and drawing masters began with the assumption that pictorial representation unfolded systematically; perceptual deconstruction preceded pictorial reconstruction. A draftsman first learned to break complex forms down into composite parts, which were in turn reduced to the most basic geometric shapes, lines, and proportions. Only after mastering the pieces, after learning to recognize and reproduce the basic elements of each constituent element, could the artist aspire to the whole. The studies of eyes, heads, and feet completed by the Nazareth Hall students stand at a midpoint in this trajectory. The young draftsmen have moved beyond curved lines, geometric shapes, and basic outlines; they stop short of full compositions. The drawings do not signal an interrupted process; the students have progressed as far as their teacher intended. The schematic, formulaic figure studies that the students completed were of a piece with their architectural drawings, which aimed at familiarizing them with classical styles and proportions and the basic principles of mensuration.⁶⁹

Figure 9. Charles Schweiniz was one of many students at Nazareth Hall to copy this head from Johann Daniel Preissler’s drawing manual. Nazareth, PA, 1789. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

This was not preprofessional training; it did not impart a salable skill. Instead, the lessons were as much about learning to observe and to recognize as learning to draw.⁷⁰ These exercises, which had become a routine component of an English gentleman’s education by the first half of the eighteenth century, taught republican gentlemen to see with a draftsman’s eye. This carefully schooled perception was simultaneously a physical and intellectual process. It was likewise a metaphor for a way of being in the world. It enabled individuals to look beyond incidental variations and petty distinctions and seek out the transcendent and the universal in nature and society. It resonated with scientific convictions that pictorial representation could mirror a legible natural world. Of course, this visual proficiency was as prescriptive as it was mimetic. It instilled a set of standards that could be used for judging artistic representations and for assessing the merits of real objects and individuals. Just as important, the visual skills taught through drawing lessons held out the distinctly republican promise of access. The elegantly reasoned world represented in sketches of faces and columns is within the reach of diligent schoolboys.

Figure 10. Ludwig Schweiniz drew this Tuscan column to demonstrate his familiarity with the classical orders of architecture for an examination. Nazareth Hall Collection. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Winterthur Museum and Library.

Setting the extant drawings from Nazareth Hall alongside abundant examples of schoolgirl art, we can begin to see how the gendered production of art shaped the cultural meanings of emulation. The male students’ drawings, like the engravings in Preissler’s manual, do not depict any particular face, foot, or column. Instead, they describe a series of ideal types. Recapitulating assumptions that stood at the center of the Enlightenment project, the drawings’ techniques and subjects champion the universal over the particular. The draftsmen are not intended to develop individual styles; their studies bear only the most attenuated relation to specific objects. Drawing lessons are analogous to moral philosophy; sketches of eyes and columns form a pictorial corollary to the universalizing maxims that students transcribed into their commonplace books.

Young women’s pictures gesture toward a closely related intellectual milieu, the transatlantic world of polite letters. And, like the young men’s drawings, their painted and stitched pictures are predicated on emulation. But where young men’s art proclaims universal truths, young women’s art illustrates narrative. It figures contexts and characters, choices and dilemmas. Just as important, young women’s art concretizes and elaborates its origins in the material world in ways that young men’s art does not. Women’s pictures reproduce particular heroines drawn from particular engraved prints and particular illustrated volumes, insisting on the material underpinnings of the republic of letters. More than that, it trumpets their access to exclusive visual resources and expensive materials. If male students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas, female students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas-as-commodities. Depictions of Palemon and Lavinia or of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, with their tiny stitches and delicate washes of color, inscribed the American republic not as a republic of letters but as a republic of taste, where virtue resided in the propertied discernment of the connoisseur rather than the earnest, workaday morality of the artisan.

This was hardly a neutral substitution. Literary critic Michael Warner has famously argued that, in the years following the Revolution, growing numbers of Americans laid claim to print culture as a means of articulating their citizenship and defining their place in an emergent public sphere. But if these men and women aggressively pursued books and periodicals, they did not gain access to costly illustrated books; they enjoyed far less exposure to fine, imported engravings. Female students’ grandest productions underscored the fact that print cultures, like the citizens who participated in them, were not equal. Culled from exclusive books and prints, fashioned in silk and watercolor, and executed by graceful young ladies, “schoolgirl” art ensured that the highly restrictive republic of taste would work to counter the more protean republic of letters.⁷¹

Exhibiting Taste

An academy education, encompassing art and composition, penmanship and politeness, was ultimately calculated to culminate in the production of a virtuous citizenry. More immediately, though, it culminated in the production of academy examinations and exhibitions, where students displayed the fruits of their learning before a public audience. Colonial colleges had long sponsored public commencement ceremonies. But in the years following the Revolution, with the growing insistence on the connections between the quality of education and the health of the republic, examinations and exhibitions became more common, more public, and more elaborate. As rituals, examinations were intended both to demonstrate that students were fit to join a republican culture and to provide an idealized picture of that republican culture. The academy exhibition was the public sphere writ small.

The ceremonies typically took place in school halls, drawing townsmen and -women into the school proper and underscoring the public ends of private education. And they were routinely covered in the local press. Reportage ranged from cursory announcements to full-blown stories that ran for inches and included the names of especially impressive students, male and female alike. Either way, the press made the proceedings available even to those who were unable or unwilling to attend. It is difficult to know for certain exactly who turned out for exhibitions. William Bentley, Salem’s indefatigable minister, made a point of attending local academy examinations just as he did Harvard’s commencement. Joseph Dennie was a regular at the annual exhibitions at the Philadelphia Young Ladies’ Academy. Harriet Beecher Stowe recalled that the “literati of Litchfield” always turned out for exhibitions at Pierce’s academy. It is likely that audiences grew to include more than local literati, given that newspaper accounts regularly reported audiences numbering in the hundreds. By the 1800s, many schools were publishing broadsides that advertised the dates, times, and order of exercises for their exhibitions in order to encourage attendance.⁷²

The precise format and content of these exhibitions varied from school to school. The trustees of the Atkinson Academy promised audiences that their exhibitions “shall not exceed four hours,” while students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary thanked the audience for their “kind indulgence” after five days of public examination and exhibition. Exhibitions might include musical interludes or full-blown plays, complete with stage, scenery, and wardrobes “in true theater style.” Some schools concluded their exhibitions with a public ball, where students could put their dancing lessons to good use. Regardless of the program’s duration, audiences could count on hearing oratory, recitation, salutations, and staged “conversations” encompassing a variety of topics. Patriotic odes and essays on the significance of education in a republican society were popular among male and female students. But audiences might also hear students perform a dialogue such as “On Civilization, between a Fop and a Farmer,” “On Taste,” a “Latin dissertation on Electricity,” or a “Lecture on Wigs.”⁷³

Academy examinations and exhibitions were public performances that literally displayed students’ learning, sensibility, and suitability for civic life. Indeed, the emphasis on performance was so pronounced that some educators hastened to reassure parents and audience members that the public examinations would offer an accurate representation of student ability. Principals of the Clermont Seminary promised that their students appeared “in their true and natural state both of mind and body.” Genuine accomplishment rather than hollow performance was the order of the day. “No one of our pupils is made to learn particular pieces of prose or poetry to recite,” they insisted, “that he may shine a moment like a meteor in the darkness.”⁷⁴

If these “true and natural” displays depended on the spoken word, they also depended on a careful attention to visual detail. Even elementary student oratory was yoked to stylized gestures that underscored the speakers’ meaning. A successful speech depended almost as much on choreography as recitation. As a consequence, efforts to reinforce the import of students’ words with the movements of their bodies could become quite elaborate. Consider the dialogue “Astronomy and the use of the globe,” performed at Nazareth Hall as part of the 1793 examination. The performance culminated when one of the boys explained how the stars, which were “calm, regular, & harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed them,” were “ranged all around” the earth. As he spoke, his classmates turned themselves into a human orrery. Quietly forming a semicircle around the globe, the students stood in for the stars that “ranged round the earth.” The boys embodied the very qualities that the speaker explained governed the stars—regularity, harmony, and the determination to follow “the path prescribed them.” By their positions onstage, as much as by the work they had submitted for examination, the boys suggested that the laws regulating the movements of the heavens could also regulate republican society.⁷⁵

The visual dimensions of academy exhibitions extended well beyond choreographed oratory. Samples of penmanship, arithmetic, composition, drawing, painting, and embroidery were set out for audiences to inspect. Even commonplace books, diaries, and personal letters were mandatory submissions.⁷⁶ Students’ bodies, especially those of young women, also came in for a fair amount of scrutiny. Visitors took pains to note how young women’s virtue and accomplishment registered in their appearance as well as in their work. At Susanna Rowson’s academy, for example, an observer reported that the “ladies [were] attired with the greatest simplicity; no ornament whatever appearing among them.” At Bethlehem’s 1789 examination, the girls arranged themselves before the audience “in the form of a half-moon, and were mostly dressed in white.” And in 1814 John P. Brace noted that on examination day the Litchfield “girls were all arranged in their best apparel” around the schoolroom. Only after the visiting “ladies and gentlemen had looked as long as they pleased” at both the girls and the specimens of their work could he announce the students’ credit marks.⁷⁷

Jacob Marling’s May Queen (Crowning of Flora) (1816), which captures a May Day celebration at North Carolina’s Raleigh Academy, plays on the fascination with female display and performance that informed this exhibitionary culture. The young women who dominate the canvas have honored Mary Du Bose of Georgia, their “favourite girl,” by electing her May Queen. Surrounded by her loving peers, Du Bose sits in the center of the canvas, facing an audience that includes faculty, townspeople, children, and slaves. As the queen is wreathed with flowers, her fellow student, Ann W. Clark, recites an address that simultaneously celebrates the pleasures of spring, when “all nature is now attired in its loveliest robe,” and warns that those pleasures are bound to fade. The fate of the season and of the students is the same. The “blooming crown” of spring blossoms will soon decay, reminding Du Bose of “beauty’s transient glow, while its fragrant sweetness forcibly inculcates the superior charms of virtue.” Quoting lines from Cowper that were as suitable for a commonplace book or a sampler as they were for an address, Clark pronounces “the only amaranthine flower on earth, is Virtue—the only lasting treasure, Truth.”⁷⁸

Perhaps. But Marling’s painting is more concerned with display and publicity than with “amaranthine flowers” or “lasting treasures.” The celebration of aestheticized, feminized publicity plays out on multiple levels. Marling himself was among the audience, perhaps invited because his wife was the academy’s art teacher. He sketched the scene as it unfolded in order to share the moment with a larger audience who frequented his “exhibition gallery.” A lengthy description of the event, including Du Bose’s and Clark’s names, a transcription of Clark’s speech, and a discussion of Marling’s planned painting, was reported in regional papers and approvingly reprinted in both the New-York Weekly Museum and the Port Folio. The fusion of taste and learning enabled a virtuous, distinctly feminine publicity.⁷⁹

Marling painted a romantic May Day celebration rather than a sober annual examination; Du Bose was singled out for her popularity rather than her intellect. Nevertheless, the May Queen reproduces many of the conventions of the academy exhibition: the white-gowned young ladies; the staged accomplishment; the attentive, genteel spectators; and the multiple varieties of publicity. More than that, the painting helps us to recognize the pronounced resemblances between the female students who assembled to exhibit their learning and skill and the painted and embroidered female figures who populated their artwork. The same aesthetic—which might be summed up as the willful physical projection of a deeply internalized taste and sensibility—is at work in the painting, in abundant samples of schoolgirl art, and in young women’s studied self-presentation. And why not? For if one of the main aims of an academy education was, in Pierce’s terms, “to create or direct taste,” then these young women had surpassed the goal. More than acquiring taste, they had become it. And they had done so in a context where, as we have seen, taste had considerable moral and political purchase.

But that process of becoming cut in multiple directions. On the one hand, it allowed women to stake a claim to the republic of taste and to play a crucial role in maintaining its boundaries. On the other hand, it raised questions about the legitimacy of women’s claims to full participation within the republic of the United States. The same commonplace books, pictures, and performances that registered virtuous taste also summoned to mind the threatening specter of luxury, commodities, and consumption that haunted the public discourse on reading and accomplishment. This specter was made manifest at academy exhibitions, not only in the skills and supplies that schoolgirl artists purchased, but also in the ways that their paintings and embroideries emulated and referenced luxury goods. Worse, young women’s accomplishments revealed the degree to which republican self-fashioning and republican taste were tangled up with consumption. After all, women’s public presence was articulated through images, objects, texts, and performances that simultaneously connected them to republican refinement and to luxurious consumption—connections made all the more potent by the resemblances between students and the art they created.

Academies gave life to the American republic of taste. These institutions valorized taste as a crucial component of republican manners and genteel subjectivity. Just as important, they concretized it. Academy students learned to recognize beauty in texts, images, and objects. They learned that taste was realized in their posture and their penmanship; it was expressed in their belletristic essays and elegant embroidered pictures. The curricula and culture of early national academies helped ensure that students experienced taste as a way of being in the world and not merely as a philosophical abstraction. And by cultivating an appreciation for taste, academies also helped create a market for it. Young men and women left academies with identities and subjectivities that had been deeply influenced by their aesthetic, aestheticized educations. Certain that their taste signified national and personal merit, these students-turned-citizens retained the habits and appetites that their instructors had worked so hard to impart. They continued to want and need objects and images on which they could exercise their taste. They sought out cultural spaces where they could perform their taste alongside others. Stepping outside the academy and into the larger world, students encountered growing numbers of aesthetic entrepreneurs, eager to make a living off of the appetite for taste.