Exciting Emulation: Academies and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1780s-1820s

Abstract

When James Morris returned to South Farms, in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, from Continental army service, he found his native parish “a stench in the nostrils of all good men.” Rude, grasping, and hopelessly provincial, the local farmers seemed quite unworthy of the nation he had fought to create. Thus the Yale-educated Morris channeled his energies into teaching the parish youth. Beginning in 1783, he examined his students (girls and boys) in front of the South Farms meetinghouse, awarding books and other “premiums” to the best scholars. “This apparently excited a spirit of emulation,” he recalled. Soon after, he officially established Morris Academy, which proved popular with the local youth—but less so with many parents. “It was said [that] I was making an innovation on the manners and customs of youth,” Morris recounted. “I was blowing up their pride. They would feel themselves above their mates and they would feel above labor. There must be a stop put to all this.” Some of his critics (Morris lumped them into a single, passive-voiced other) added the lurid charge that he was “too familiar” with his female pupils. This “spirit of opposition,” which Morris ascribed to “envy,” landed him before a tribunal of area ministers in 1794. Accused of disturbing the Christian peace, Morris escaped with a warning and went on to bring the “spirit of emulation” to some fifteen hundred pupils during the next twenty years.1