The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict in Public Schools of the 19th Century

Most modern accounts of the history of public education in the nineteenth century make for grim reading. The story goes something like this: an anti-Catholic, Protestant majority foisted common schools on a resistant, but ultimately overwhelmed Catholic minority. Out of self-defense, the Church built a separate system of schools. Historians use words like “battles” and “wars” to describe the development of mass, public education as a series of waves of hostility and violence. Given the popularity of these historical accounts, it should not be surprising that conservatives in the Supreme Court, for example, are now arguing that the public school is an inherently religiously bigoted institution (and therefore we need vouchers).

Surely there was hostility, violence, and even murder in some cases. Before the Civil War, religious controversy led to riots in Philadelphia and Boston in the 1840s and 50s. In a few infamous examples, zealous anti-Catholic schoolmasters in New York, Boston, and elsewhere, compelled Catholic children to read or recite offensive religious material and were backed by like-minded judges. Catholic and Protestant school leaders painted the situation in the gravest terms. But the general assumption among scholars is that these types of evidence—the words of prominent state school officials and religious leaders, big-city riots, and a handful of state court decisions—were representative of the typical common school experience regarding religious diversity.

Perhaps. But there is a strong mismatch between such evidence and the subject matter. The public schools of the nineteenth century were vast (over ten thousand districts in New York State alone), deregulated, democratic, and intensely local. Most schools and school children were in rural areas or small towns, and even within cities, by mid-century ward-based public schooling tended to provide neighborhood-level control of schools. The binary model of “the Protestant public schools” versus the Catholic schools reflects the polemics of advocates for various reforms and, at times, the scare tactics of Republican politicians (especially in the 1870s), but does not do justice to the rich complexity and high degree of control that most nineteenth-century Americans in the North and West experienced in their local public schools.

Were the tens of thousands of nineteenth-century public schools battlegrounds? Given their huge numbers, it’s impossible to say. But some compelling sources suggest that the typical common school of the late nineteenth century was neither ideologically provocative, nor hostile to religious minorities. In a recent study, I examined over 2,000 legal appeals and 7,000 letters written by New York State residents complaining or inquiring about the policies of their local schools during the 1870s and 1880s. I also looked at local newspapers and the minutes of board of education meetings. What did I find? In less than one percent of their letters did New York State residents complain about religious problems in their schools. In fact, they were far more likely to complain about trustees’ buying maps and globes than about their children being persecuted by religious bigots. For every district with a battle there were hundreds without.

How did these schools resist religious controversy? Democratic localism allowed districts to blow off steam in a number of ways. Schools were organized democratically enough that school residents largely believed the system was fair and reasonable. In remote areas residents abided by the decisions that their districts reached, and district trustees sometimes avoided making controversial decisions by putting them to a vote. The dynamic, fissiparous nature of school districts sometimes allowed the disgruntled to switch schools and join more favorable communities. The local aspect of common schools had a similar effect—even in cities. School districts tended to mirror settlement patterns and neighborhoods, so that religious and ethnic minorities could find themselves in the majority when it came to electing trustees, hiring teachers and setting school policy.

Moreover, localism meant flexibility. From 1865-1900, New York State saw a variety of local compromises on the problem of religious diversity, from after-school programs to mandatory Bible reading, to pan-Christian hymns, to cooperative ventures with local parishes, to banning religion altogether. French, Irish and German Catholic communities were not the only beneficiaries. Groups of Shakers, Freethinkers, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others patronized public schools under their own, lay control. When communities did outlaw religious exercises—one of the most common solutions—it was not through the plotting of liberal atheists, but from wariness, and weariness, of the union of church and state in a religiously diverse context.

Religious compromise and relative peace did not mean that Americans shared any great love for one another, or that there was some broad consensus. Tyrannies of the majority can exist at any level, and certainly democratic, local control did, occasionally, result in religious controversies in rural school districts and in cities of New York State. But the system gave residents a means at settling their ideological differences through a creative, generally accepted process, allowing for the expansion and consolidation of public education in a religiously diverse nation.

The sources from New York suggest that historians would benefit from looking outside of a few northeastern cities and beyond the rhetorical constructions of nineteenth-century polemicists to the more typical experiences of actual schools and scholars. The New York example also offers a way of thinking about the role of democracy in education today that moves past the limited debates between a one-size-fits-all public-school policy toward religious diversity and a market-based voucher system of education that repudiates of any notion of democratic oversight in the shaping of our Republic’s next generation.