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Child Life in Colonial Days

<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> <h3>OLDTIME DISCIPLINE</h3> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> My child and scholar take good heed unto the words that here are set, And see thou do accordingly or else be sure thou shalt be beat. </div> <div class="stanza"> —<cite>The English Schoolmaster. Edward Coote, 1680.</cite> </div> </div> The manner of oldtime children differed as much from the carriage of children to-day as the severe and arbitrary modes of discipline of colonial days differed from the persuasive explanations, the moral inculcations and exhortations by which modern youth are influenced to obedience. Parents, teachers, and ministers chanted in solemn and unceasing chorus, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child," and they believed the only cure for that foolishness was in stern repression and sharp correction—above all in the rod. They found abundant support for this belief in the Bible, their constant guide. John Robinson, the Pilgrim preacher, said in his essay on <cite>Children and Their Education</cite>:— [192] <blockquote> "Surely there is in all children (though not alike) a stubbernes and stoutnes of minde arising from naturall pride which must in the first place be broken and beaten down that so the foundation of their education being layd in humilitie and tractablenes other virtues may in their time be built thereon. It is commendable in a horse that he be stout and stomackfull being never left to his own government, but always to have his rider on his back and his bit in his mouth, but who would have his child like his horse in his brutishnes?" </blockquote> The chief field of the "breaking and beating down" process was in school. English schoolmasters were proverbial for their severity, and from earliest days; though monks with their classes are never depicted with the rod. We find Agnes Paston, in 1457, writing to London for word to be delivered to the schoolmaster of her son Clement, who was then sixteen years old:— <blockquote> "If he hath nought do well, nor wyll nought amend, pray hym that he wyll trewly belassch hym, tyll he wyll amend; and so did the last master, and the best that ever he had, at Cambridge. And say I wyll give hym X marks for hys labor, for I had lever he were beryed than lost for defaute." </blockquote> <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 425px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i065.jpg" width-obs="425" height-obs="575" alt="Katherine" /> <div class="caption">Katherine Ten Broeck, Three Years Old, 1719 </div> </div> She herself had "borne on hand" on her marriageable daughter; beating her every week, sometime[193] twice a day, "and her head broken in two or three places." This seems to have been the usual custom of the British matron in high life. Lady Jane Grey, when she was fifteen years old, never came into the presence of her father and mother but she was "sharply taunted, cruelly threatened, yea, punished sometimes with pinches, nips, bobs, and other way." Elizabeth, Lady Falkland, as long as her mother lived, always spoke to that rigid lady while kneeling before her, "sometimes for more than an hour together, though she was but an ill kneeler, and worse riser." Poor Elizabeth! she was an only child, "an inheritrice"; but she could truthfully aver she never was spoiled. An early allusion to school discipline is in the <cite>Boy Bishop's Sermon</cite> from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, who died in 1535. It runs thus:— <blockquote> "There is no fault he doth but he is punished. Sometimes he wringeth him by the ear, sometimes he giveth him a strype on the hand with the ferrul, sometimes beateth him sharply with the rod." </blockquote> Great Cromwell was sent off to school with injunctions to the master, Dr. Beard, to flog the boy soundly "for persisting in the wickedness of the assertion" that he had had a vision and prophecy of his future greatness. Dr. Johnson told of the[194] unmerciful beating he had by one Master Hunter, who was "very wrong-headedly severe." He said the man never distinguished between ignorance and negligence, and beat as hard for not knowing a thing as for neglecting to know it, and as he whipped would shout, "This I do to save you from the gallows." Still the Doctor was grateful for the beatings, as he felt to them he owed his knowledge of Latin; and he approved of the rod, saying of some well-behaved young ladies whose mother had whipped them oft and heavily, in variation of one of Shakespeare's lines, "Rod, I will honor thee for this thy duty." His creed of correction was this:— <blockquote> "I would rather have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than to tell a child, if you do this, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers and sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on't. Whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other." </blockquote> The illustrations of old Dutch books that show school furniture, have the odd ferules of monkish days, the flat ladle-shaped pieces of wood which were distinctly for striking the palm of the scholar's[195] hand. The derivation of the word "ferule" is interesting. It is from ferula, fennel. The tough stalks of the giant fennel of Southern Europe were used by the Roman schoolmasters as an instrument of castigation. <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 450px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i066.jpg" width-obs="450" height-obs="504" alt="dunce" /> <div class="caption">21. THE DUNCE. This is a sight to give us pain, Once seen ne'er wished to see again. Illustration from <cite>Plain Things for Little Folks</cite> </div> </div> Old English lesson books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many, even, of the early years of this century, that have any illustrations of classes, schoolmasters, or school interiors, invariably picture[196] the master with a rod or bunch of birch twigs. An old herbalist says:— <blockquote> "I have not red of any vertue byrche hath in physick, howbeit it serveth many good uses, and none better than for the betynge of stubborn boyes, that either lye or will not learn." </blockquote> Birch rods were tauntingly sold on London streets with a cry by pedlers of "Buy my fine Jemmies; Buy my London Tartars." Even that miserable <cite>Dyves Pragmaticus</cite> enumerated "Fyne Rod for Children of Wyllow and Burche" among his wares. A crowning insult was charging the cost of birch rod on schoolboys' bills; and in some cases making the boy pay for the birch out of his scant spending money. Birch trees were plentiful in America—and whippings too. Scholars in New England were not permitted to forget the methods of discipline of "the good old days." Massachusetts schools resounded with strokes of the rod. Varied instruments of chastisement were known, from <div class="poem"> "A besomme of byrche for babes verye fit To a long lasting lybbet for lubbers as meet." </div> A lybbet was a billet of wood, and the heavy walnut stick of one Boston master well deserved the name. A cruel inquisitor invented an instrument[197] of torture which he termed a flapper. It was a heavy piece of leather six inches in diameter, with a hole in the middle. This was fastened by an edge to a pliable handle. Every stroke on the bare flesh raised a blister the size of the hole in the leather. Equally brutal was the tattling stick, a cat-o'-nine-tails with heavy leather straps. The whipping with this tattling stick was ordered to be done upon "a peaked block"—whatever that may be. That fierce Boston disciplinarian and patriot, Master Lovell, whipped with strong birch rods, and made one culprit mount the back of another scholar to receive his lashing. He called these whippings trouncings, the good old English word of the Elizabethan dramatists. Another brutal Boston master struck his scholars on the head with a ferule, until this was forbidden by the school directors; he then whipped the soles of the scholars' feet, and roared out in an ecstasy of cruelty, "Oh! the Caitiffs! it is good for them." There was sometimes an aftermath of sorrow, when our stern old grandfathers whipped their children at home for being whipped at school, so told Rev. Eliphalet Nott. <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 350px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i067.jpg" width-obs="350" height-obs="545" alt="whispering" /> <div class="caption">Whispering Sticks </div> </div> Many ingenious punishments were invented. A specially insulting one was to send the pupil out to cut a small branch of a tree. A split was made by[198] the teacher at the severed end of the branch, and the culprit's nose was placed in the cleft end. Then he was forced to stand, painfully pinched, an object of ridicule. A familiar punishment of the dame school, which lingered till our own day, was the smart tapping of the child's head with a heavy thimble; this was known as "thimell-pie." Another was to yoke two delinquents together in a yoke made with two bows like an ox yoke. Sometimes times a boy and girl were yoked together—a terrible disgrace. "Whispering sticks" were used to preserve quiet in the schoolroom. Two are shown here, wooden gags to be tied in the mouth with strings, somewhat[199] as a bit is placed in a horse's mouth. Children were punished by being seated on a unipod, a stool with but a single leg, upon which it was most tiring to try to balance; they were made to stand on dunce stools and wear dunce caps and heavy leather spectacles; they were labelled with large placards marked with degrading or ridiculous names, such as "Tell-Tale," "Bite-Finger-Baby," "Lying Ananias," "Idle-Boy," and "Pert-Miss-Prat-a-Pace." One of Miss Hetty Higginson's punishments in her Salem school at the beginning of this century was to make a child hold a heavy book, such as a dictionary, by a single leaf. Of course any restless motion would tear the leaf. Her rewards of merit should be also told. She would divide a single strawberry in minute portions among six or more scholars; and she had a "bussee," or good child, who was to be kissed. Many stories have been told of special punishments invented by special teachers. The schoolmaster at Flatbush was annoyed by the children in his school constantly using Dutch words, as he was employed to teach them English. He gave every day to the first scholar who used a Dutch word a little metal token or medal. This scholar could promptly transfer the token to the next child who spoke a Dutch word, and so on; thus it went from[200] hand to hand through the day. But the unlucky scholar who had the token in his possession at the close of school, received a sound whipping. An amusing method of securing good lessons and good behavior was employed by old Ezekiel Cheever, and was thus told by one of his pupils, Rev. John Barnard:— <blockquote> "I was a very naughty boy, much given to play, in so much that Master Cheever openly declared, 'You, Barnard, I know you can do well enough if you will, but you are so full of play you hinder your classmates from getting their lessons, therefore if any of them cannot perform their duty, I shall correct you for it.' One day one of my classmates did not look at his book, and could not say his lesson, though I called upon him once and again to mind his book. Whereupon our master beat me.... The boy was pleased with my being corrected and persisted in his neglect for which I was still beaten and that for several days. I thought in justice I ought to correct the boy and compel him to a better temper; therefore after school was done I went to him and told him I had been beaten several times for his neglect and since master would not correct him, I would, and then drubbed him heartily." </blockquote> The famous Lancasterian system—that of monitorial schools—discountenanced the rod, but the forms of punishment were not wholly above criticism. They were the neck-and-hands pillory, familiar up[201] to that date in England and America as a public punishment of criminals; wooden shackles; hanging in a sack; tying the legs together; and labelling with the name of the offence against rules. <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 450px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i068.jpg" width-obs="450" height-obs="423" alt="falsehood" /> <div class="caption">12. Falsehood Punished. Illustration from <cite>Early Seeds to Produce Spring Flowers</cite> </div> </div> I have found nothing to show that Dutch schoolmasters were as severe as those of the English colonies. Dr. Curtius, the first master of the Latin School in New Amsterdam, complained that "his[202] hands were tied as some of the parents of his scholars forbade him punishing their children," and that as a result these unruly young Dutchmen "beat each other and tore the clothes from each other's backs." The contract between the Flatbush Church and schoolmaster, dated 1682, specifies that he shall "demean himself patient and friendly towards the children." The discipline of Master Leslie, a New York teacher of the next century, is described by Eliza Morton Quincy in her delightful <cite>Memoirs</cite>. The date is about 1782:— <blockquote> "His modes of punishment would astonish children of the present day. One of them was to hold the blocks. They were of two sizes. The large one was a heavy block of wood, with a ring in the centre, by which it was to be held a definite number of minutes, according to the magnitude of the offence. The smaller block was for the younger child. Another punishment was by a number of leathern straps, about an inch wide and a finger long, with which he used to strap the hands of the larger boys." </blockquote> One German schoolmaster, Samuel Dock, stands out in relief in this desert of ignorance and cruelty. With simplicity and earnestness he wrote in 1750 the story of his successful teaching, as in simplicity and earnestness he had taught in his school at Shippack. His story is as homely as his life:— [203] <blockquote> "How I Receive the Children in School. "It is done in the following manner. The child is first welcomed by the other scholars, who extend their hands to it. It is then asked by me whether it will learn industriously and be obedient. If it promises me this, I explain to it how it must behave; and if it can say its A. B. C.'s in order, one after the other, and also by way of proof, can point out with the forefinger all the designated letters, it is put into the A-b, Abs. When it gets thus far, its father must give it a penny and its mother must cook for it two eggs, because of its industry; and a similar reward is due to it when it goes further into words; and so forth." </blockquote> He made them little presents as prizes; drew pictures for them; taught them singing and also musical notation; and he had a plan to have the children teach each other. He had a careful set of rules for their behavior, to try to change them from brutish peasants to intelligent citizens. They must be clean; and delinquents were not punished with the rod, but by having the whole school write and shout out their names with the word "lazy" attached. Letter-writing was carefully taught, with exercises in writing to various people, and to each other. Profanity was punished by wearing a yoke, and being told the awful purport of the oaths. He taught spelling and reading with much Bible instruction; but he did not teach the Catechism, since[204] he had scholars of many sects and denominations; however, he made them all learn and understand what he called the "honey-flowers of the New Testament." In order to appreciate his gentleness and intelligence, one should know of the drunken, dirty, careless, and cruel teachers in other Pennsylvania schools. One whipped daily and hourly with a hickory club with leather thongs attached at one end; this he called the "taws." Another had a row of rods of different sizes which, with ugly humor, he termed his "mint sticks." Another, nicknamed Tiptoe Bobby, always carried a raccoon's tail slightly weighted at the butt-end; this he would throw with sudden accuracy at any offender, who meekly returned it to his instructor and received a fierce whipping with a butt-end of rawhide with strips of leather at the smaller end. One Quaker teacher in Philadelphia, John Todd, had such a passion for incessant whipping that, after reading accounts of his ferocious discipline, his manner and his words, the only explanation of his violence and cruelty is that of insanity. <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 389px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i069.jpg" width-obs="389" height-obs="600" alt="Post" /> <div class="caption">Cathalina Post, Fourteen Years Old, 1750 </div> </div> There is no doubt that the practice of whipping servants was common here, not only children who were bound out, and apprentices and young redemptioners, but grown servants as well. Occasionally[205] the cruel master was fined or punished for a brutal over-exercise of his right of punishment. At least one little child died from the hand of his murderous master. In Boston and other towns commissioners were elected who had power to sentence to be whipped, exceeding ten stripes, children and servants who behaved "disobediently and disorderly toward their parents, masters, and governours, to the disturbance of families and discouragement of such parents and governours." In Hartford, Connecticut, a topping young maid felt the force of a similar law:— <blockquote> "Susan Coles for her rebellious cariedge towards her mistris is to be sent to the house of correction, and be kept to hard labour and coarse dyet, to be brought forth the next Lecture Day to be publicquely corrected and so to be corrected Weekly until Order be given to the Contrary." </blockquote> Scores of similar records might be given. Judge Sewall, in his diary, never refers to punishing his servants, nor to any need of punishing them. There is some evidence of their faithfulness and of his satisfaction in it, especially in the references to his negro man servant, Boston, who, after a life of faithful service, was buried like a gentleman, with a ceremonious funeral, a notice of his death in the <cite>News Letter</cite>, a well-warmed parlor, chairs set[206] in orderly rows, cake and wine, and doubtless gloves. John Wynter was the head agent of a London company at a settlement at Richmond's Island, in Maine. His wife had an idle maid, and some report of her beating this maid was sent back to England. Wynter writes:— <blockquote> "You write of some yll reports is given of my Wyfe for beatinge the maide: yf a faire way will not doe yt, beatinge must sometimes vppon such idle girrels as she is. Yf you think yt fitte for my Wyfe to do all the work and the maide sitt still, and shee must forbear her hands to strike then the work will lye vndonn.... Her beatinge that she hath had hath never hurt her body nor limes. She is so fatt and soggy shee can hardly doe any work. Yf this maide at her lazy tymes when she hath bin found in her yll accyons doe not disserve 2 or 3 blowes I pray you who hath the most reason to complain my Wyfe or maide. My Wyfe hath an vnthankful office." </blockquote> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/i070.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="550" alt="Wilfrid" /> <div class="caption">Illustration from "Young Wilfrid" </div> </div> It has surprised me that this complaint—and others—should have been sent home to England, where (as we have abundant evidence) the whipping of servants was excessive and constant. Pepys and other old English authors make frequent note of it. Pepys whipped his boy till his arm was lame. The <cite>Diary of a Lady of Quality</cite> gives some glimpses of this custom. On January 30, 1760, Lady[207] Frances Pennoyer writes at her home at Bullingham Court, Herefordshire, that one of her maids spoke in the housekeeper's room about a matter that was not to the credit of the family. My lady knew there was truth in what the girl said, but it was not her place to speak of it, and she must be taught to know and keep her place. The diarist writes:— <blockquote> "She hath a pretty face, and should not be too ready to speak ill of those above her in station. I should be very sorry to turn her adrift upon the world, and she hath but a poor home. Sent for her to my room, and gave her choice, either to be well whipped or to leave the house instantly. She chose wisely I think and with many tears said I might do what I liked. I bade her attend my chamber at twelve. "Dearlove, my maid, came to my room as I bade her. I bade her fetch the rod from what was my mother-in-law's rod-closet, and kneel and ask pardon, which she did with tears. I made her prepare, and I whipped her well. The girl's flesh is plump and firm, and she is a cleanly person, such a one, not excepting my own daughters who are thin, and one of them, Charlotte, rather sallow, as I have not whipped for a long time. She hath never been whipped before, she says, since she was a child (what can her mother and the late lady have been about I wonder?), and she cried out a great deal." </blockquote> Poor little Dearlove, fair and plump, and in bitter[208] tears—you make a more pleasing picture seen through the haze of a century than fierce my lady with her rod. The many hundred pages of Judge Sewall's diary give abundant testimony of his tender affection for his children. In this record of his entire married life he but twice refers to punishing his children; once his son was whipped for telling a lie, a second time he notes the punishment thus:— <blockquote> "1692, Nov. 6. Joseph threw a knob of Brass, and hit his sister Betty upon the forehead so as to make it bleed; upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks I whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in, call'd by his Grandmother, he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle, which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage." </blockquote> It was natural that Judge Sewall, ever finding symbols of religious signification in natural events, should see in his son Joseph's demeanor a painful reminder of original sin; and we can imagine with what sad sense of duty he whipped him. It is the standard resort of ignorant writers upon Puritanism, and especially upon Puritanic severity, to give the name of Cotton Mather as a prime expositor of cruel discipline. I have before me a magazine illustration which represents him, lean,[209] lank, violent, and mean of aspect, with clipped head, raising a heavy bunch of rods over a cowering child. He was in reality exceedingly handsome, very richly bewigged, with the full, distinctly sensual countenance of the Cottons, not the severe ascetic features of the Mathers, and he as strongly opposed punishment by the rod as most of his friends and neighbors favored and practised it. His son wrote of him:— <blockquote> "The slavish way of education carried on with raving and kicking and scourging, in schools as well as in families, he looked upon as a dreadful judgment of God on the world: he thought the practice abominable and expressed a mortal aversion to it. "The first chastisement which he would inflict for any ordinary fault, was to let the child see and hear him in an astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child would do so base a thing. He would never come to give the child a blow, except in case of obstinacy, or something very criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family." </blockquote> There can be found episodes of colonial history where the disprejudiced modern mind can perceive ample need of the sharp whippings so freely bestowed upon dull or idle scholars and slow servants. Cotton Mather was too gentle and too forbearing[210] toward certain children with whom he had close relations. A "warm birch" applied in the early stages of that terrible tragedy, the Salem Witchcraft, to Ann Putnam, the protagonist of that drama, would doubtless so quickly have ended it in its incipiency as to obliterate it entirely from the pages of history. <div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 378px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i071.jpg" width-obs="378" height-obs="600" alt="Verstile" /> <div class="caption">William Verstile 1769 </div> </div> <hr class="chap" /> [211] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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