the antebellum american textbook authors’ populist history ... · while it met with great...

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 2015: 25–50 © GEIdoi: 10.3167/jemms.2015.070102 ISSN 2041-6938 (Print), ISSN 2041-6946 (Online)

The Antebellum American Textbook Authors’ Populist History of Roman Land Reform and

the Gracchi BrothersEdward McInnis

Professor of history at the University of Louisville, USA

Abstract • This essay explores social and political values conveyed by nineteenth-century world and universal history textbooks in relation to the antebellum era. These textbooks focused on the histories of ancient Greece and Rome rather than on histories of the United States. I argue that after 1830 these textbooks reinforced both the US land reform and the antislavery movement by creating favorable depictions of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus. Tiberius and Caius Gracchus (known as the “Gracchi”) were two Roman tribunes who sought to restore Rome’s land laws, which granted public land to propertyless citizens despite opposition from other Roman aristocrats. The textbook authors’ portrayal of the Gracchan reforms reflects a populist element in antebellum American education because these narratives suggest that there is a connection between social inequality and the decline of republicanism.

Keywords • American, education, Gracchi, reform, Rome, slavery, textbooks

In 133 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus, a member of Rome’s nobility, initiated a controversial reform effort that would divide Rome during the late republic and catch the eye of nineteenth-century American reformers nearly 2,000 years later. Gracchus, recent historians report, introduced a law ostensibly to alleviate the suffering of impoverished citizens by allotting to them plots of public land to farm. This plan would also increase the pool of freeholders eligible to serve in Rome’s military, since only landowning citizens could serve in the Roman army during the republic.1 Rome’s long wars of conquest had forced small farmers to remain in the army for many years, making it hard for their families, in the absence of their menfolk, to maintain the family farm. The rich, according to most accounts, took advantage of this situation by buying up these distressed properties, acquiring large tracts of land at the expense of small farmers. Gracchus, a military man himself, was alerted to this issue while traveling through the Italian countryside and noticing that large slaveholding estates had replaced small freeholding farms. This meant that not only

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was the number of landless citizens increasing, but the pool of eligible soldiers was decreasing.

Gracchus’ land reform bill was controversial. While it met with great enthusiasm from the general population, especially landless Romans, and members of his own inner circle of aristocratic supporters, other members of the senatorial aristocracy, who for the most part benefited from the decline of small farms, were livid. Not only did Gracchus’s reform bill threaten public lands they considered their own—having squatted on it for years, and sometimes generations—but his method of enacting it also alarmed them. When the senate refused to consent to a hearing of his bill, Gracchus, in an unprecedented act, brought it to the tribal assembly, a popular body dominated by non-poor men, for a hearing. He then had Octavius, a fellow tribune who had stubbornly vetoed his land bill, removed from office in order to pass the bill.2 Many senators regarded Tiberius Gracchus’s political maneuvering as well as his land reform bill as an attempt to seize power by manipulating the landless masses, and responded by instigating a lynch mob to attack and kill Gracchus and his followers.3 His brother Caius Gracchus followed in his footsteps in 123 BCE by not only promoting a new agrarian law, but also by granting citizenship to non-Roman Latins, improving roads, and capping grain prices. His goal was to both increase the eligible numbers of soldiers and to alleviate the suffering of the poor. However, because he threatened their interests, like his brother, he met with strong opposition from members of the senate, which passed a decree that granted them legal cover to put Caius Gracchus to death in 121 BCE.

Nearly 2,000 years later, American political leaders and commentators would resurrect parts of the history of the Gracchan reform effort to promote their own causes and agendas. Historians such as Margaret Malamud in Ancient Rome and Modern America and Carl Richard in The Golden Age of the Classics in America illustrate this. They show how both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social reformers in particular found that the account of the Gracchi, when told in a certain way, effectively illustrates how slavery, festering poverty, demagoguery, and elites threaten a republic.4 Malamud and Richard contend that the Gracchi brothers, prior to the nineteenth century, were put forth as examples for responsible political leaders to avoid on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States president John Adams, for example, regarded Tiberius and Caius Gracchus as demagogues seeking to stir up the Roman masses in a bid to increase their own power in republican Rome.

Malamud and Richard note, however, that by the 1830s the reputation of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus had changed in the United States. American reformers and politicians in sermons, speeches, and essays began casting them as heroes of the middle class, rather than rabble rousers, who were attempting to restore virtue to republican Rome in the face of aristocrats

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The Antebellum American Textbook Authors’ Populist History of Roman Land Reform

seeking to hoard great profits at the commoners’ expense. Richard, for example, notes that Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri invoked the Gracchi in 1826 when arguing that small farmers were the most loyal and dedicated citizens.5 Negative views of the Gracchi’s actions had become scarce. In essence the Gracchi episode for antebellum Americans represented the struggle between virtuous and corrupt individuals attempting to shape the direction of their country. Their story became the moral foundation for social and economic populist movements in nineteenth-century America rather than the more complicated and morally ambiguous story featured by recent historians.6

It is during this time of increasingly positive portraits of the Gracchi that textbook authors, individuals who supplied emergent secondary schools with their primary source of historical information, also began featuring histories that depicted Gracchi land reform actions favorably. This positive (and more subjective) presentation of the Gracchi differs from how recent historians of Rome such as Potter, Brunt, and Stockton discuss them. Rather than a conflict between corrupt and virtuous individuals, these more recent historians tend to view the Gracchi episode as a historical event driven largely by economic and political forces. These forces—such as the increased use of war captives as a labor force, a growing shortage of unused farmland for soldiers, a growing empire, and an outdated political structure—shaped the actions of key players in the Gracchi episode.7 While they note that the Gracchi potentially acted out of genuine concern for the poor, Stockton in particular notes that the limited number of sources makes it difficult if not impossible to fully understand the motives of all participants.8 This more objective approach differs from antebellum-era interpretations, which cast this event as a morality play that highlights the relationship between a powerful and corrupt elite and the loss of liberty, even though they had access to the same sources.

The more positive and subjective presentation of the Gracchan reforms by nineteenth-century historians suggests that the histories written by textbook writers reinforced populist trends in the broader society and introduced a populist tinge to antebellum-era education. Populism, as defined by Ronald Formisano, consists of social and political movements comprised of individuals energized by anti-elitist causes. Their movements, however, do not form around class conflict.9 They can be reactionary, as in the nativist movements of the 1850s, or progressive, as in the land reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s. Populist movements, he contends, tend not to be intensely ideological but rather often driven by one issue.

Most commentaries on the interrelationship between history in antebellum educational curriculum and nineteenth-century American values originate from Ruth Elson’s study of nineteenth-century history

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textbooks published in 1964. In Guardians of Tradition she identifies no populist sentiments in textbooks, and she contends that nineteenth-century textbook authors generally wrote histories designed to promote nationalism, patriotism, and the status quo.10 This conclusion rests primarily on textbooks that feature American history, omitting any analysis of universal and world history textbooks. More recent studies of nineteenth-century secondary school textbooks by Frances Fitzgerald and Eugene Provenzo highlight the nationalistic themes in history texts. Like Elson, Fitzgerald also bases her analysis primarily on textbooks that feature United States history.11 Provenzo, in a different vein, notes that readers and spellers for young children likened American founders such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to Greek heroes in order to create nationalistic symbols for the new nation. However, his analysis includes no exploration of how textbooks for older pupils used ancient Greece in their history narratives.12 The broader studies of American educational history by William Reese, Carl Kaestle, and Stuart Cooke also echo Elson, Fitzgerald, and Provenzo’s conclusion, and likewise feature no analysis of world and universal history textbooks.13

My study addresses this gap by exploring how early and mid-nineteenth-century universal and world history textbook authors presented history. Universal and world history textbooks generally focused on ancient Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages rather than the United States. Writers frequently invoked ancient Greece and Rome when discussing a range of social and political issues including proper gender roles, the nature of education, and the meaning of republicanism. After 1830, these textbooks featured modified and abridged versions of the Gracchi episode for nineteenth-century readers, which cast Tiberius and Caius Gracchus in a favorable light. These textbooks portray the Gracchi brothers as concerned with the rise of wealthy slaveholding patricians throughout Rome and the decline of small freeholders. Authors describe the Gracchi as individuals who wanted to provide land to poor Romans and support Rome’s “middle class” even though the patricians opposed this idea. They never characterize the Gracchi as demagogues. They attribute the failure of the Gracchi’s land reform efforts and the demise of freedom in Rome to a corrupt aristocracy rather than to all Romans. While the ancient historian Appian of Alexandria documented Roman patricians’ legitimate reservations about the Gracchi’s plan, antebellum-era textbooks make no mention of these concerns. In essence, they offered historical narratives that were of help to land reformers and antislavery advocates of their own times.

Additional factors indicate that textbook authors supported these populist reformers. For example, Elson casts textbook authors as generally conservative individuals who embrace traditional ideas. However, many held social and political views that suggest that they would have

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favored the Gracchi’s actions. Sarah Pierce and Emma Willard organized schools on the premise that women and men were intellectual equals, though neither embraced the ideals of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Samuel Goodrich’s support for the Whig party and his youthful Federalist Party ties suggest that he would have opposed land reform. However, he praised Benjamin Franklin’s rise from humble origins to become a distinguished American statesmen.14 Marcuis Willson, later in life, supported the reformer William Jennings Bryan, who addressed the negative impact of industrialization on ordinary people.15 Textbook authors not featured in this article also embraced social reforms: Selma Hale, William Grimshaw, Elizabeth Peabody, and Benson Lossing all opposed slavery, while Jesse Olney supported the temperance movement.16 This indicates that they would have shared the concerns of politicians who favored the land reform legislation emerging during the late 1840s and 1850s.

Textbook authors would have also sympathized with the concerns of an emergent middle class. Several of them, such as Joseph Worcestor, Pierce, and Willard, worked in middle-class professions such as teaching before becoming successful textbook authors. In addition, they wrote their histories for male and female secondary school students as people from middle-class backgrounds striving for respectability in their communities. Willard expressed the view that the “middling sort,” rather than elites, were the most loyal revolutionaries and best citizens in a republic.17 Willard’s view that middle-class Americans were better citizens than wealthy Americans reiterates John Gilkeson’s observations in Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940.18 In this study, Gilkeson asserts that members of the middle class in Providence, Rhode Island, deemed the values of wealthy Americans unsuitable for a republic.

While not necessarily populists themselves, by featuring favorable depictions of the Gracchi, history textbook authors increased the likelihood that many Americans would better grasp the populist message of antebellum-era land reformers and antislavery activists. This is because they sold large numbers of textbooks. Willard wrote a history of the United States that sold nearly 300,000 copies.19 Willson sold more than 14,000 copies of his Outlines of History in 1854 alone, and earned nearly $250,000 in royalties from textbook sales. Samuel Goodrich is reported to have sold over one million copies of his textbooks.20 Peabody, while not as prolific as other writers, was a noted reformer and antislavery activist. Joseph Worcestor also achieved national popularity through his textbook publications.21

In addition, data shows that many regions used these textbooks. Prior to the Civil War, most New York public schools used Willson’s textbooks, as did several Michigan school systems, including the cities of Jackson, Ann Arbor, Cold Water, and Grand Rapids.22

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Some Michigan schools and the city of Philadelphia’s Central High School used Willard’s textbooks, while other Michigan schools and the state of Connecticut used Samuel Goodrich’s textbooks.23 The paucity of textbooks published in the South, especially before the Civil War, forced southerners to use many of these history textbooks even if the texts sometimes cast the South in an unfavorable light.24 An essay in De Bow’s Review lamented the use of Willson’s History of the United States textbook in a Charleston school because it cast southerners as addicted to “gambling, intemperance, and cockfighting.”25 Thus world and universal history textbooks, through the Gracchi, exposed large numbers of Americans to a narrative about the dangers presented by aristocracy, slavery, poverty, and injustice to the republic.

The remainder of this article is divided into three parts. In the first part, I show that universal and world history textbooks before 1830 included little about Tiberius and Caius Gracchus even though histories of their actions were available to those textbook writers. I then show, in part two, that after 1830 descriptions of the Gracchi brothers’ attempts to reinstitute Rome’s land laws occur more frequently and in far more detail in world and universal history textbooks than in earlier decades. I also explain in part two that these more detailed and optimistic textbook narratives of the Gracchi coincided with nineteenth-century essays, speeches, and public addresses of the time that called for land reform in the United States, an end to slavery, or to both. I also show that many of these antebellum-era speeches on land reform and slavery made allusions to the Gracchi brothers. Finally, I argue that this more optimistic presentation of the Gracchi after the 1830s indicates that textbook authors agreed with the concerns of land reformers and antislavery activists, and deliberately featured optimistic accounts of the Gracchi’s actions in order to support their cause.

The History of Universal and World History Textbooks, Roman Land Reform and the Gracchi

World and universal history textbooks published before 1830 rarely discuss the Gracchi reforms as part of Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire, even though authors had access to well-established classical sources such as Sallust, Livy, Appian of Alexandria, and Plutarch, who each provided detailed accounts of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus.26 In addition to these classical sources, American textbook writers of the early 1800s could also access Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Rome, which featured a detailed account of the Gracchi translated into English.27

Despite having access to narratives about the Gracchi, textbook authors during this time emphasized the role of self-interest and a loss of

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personal virtue when describing Rome’s decline.28 These authors rarely expressed hostility toward wealthy and powerful Romans of any kind, and a few even legitimized the elites’ dominant political position in Rome by attributing Rome’s fall to foreigners or to the inclusion of those unaccustomed to self-rule. John Robinson’s An Easy Grammar of History and William Mavor’s Catechism of Universal History for the Use of Schools and Families were originally printed in Great Britain before being published in the United States.29 Robinson writes only two lines on the Gracchi land reform efforts, while Mavor leaves them out altogether.

The American author and teacher Benjamin Tucker, who published his textbook Sacred and Profane History in 1806, attributes Rome’s decline to the extension of democracy to unworthy subjects who cared little about liberty rather than to the unwillingness of elite citizens to share wealth. By gradually extending Roman citizenship to an increasingly diverse population, Rome increased the numbers of individuals who cared little about virtue and public spirit. This had the result of pulling down the “dignity” and virtue of Romans.30 Although Caius Gracchus proposed this idea in order to increase loyalty among all Italians, this part of the story is not mentioned in Tucker’s text. It is unclear where this explanation comes from, since neither Plutarch, Sallust, nor Appian make similar statements about new groups of citizens who contribute to a loss of public spirit.31 Tucker’s interpretation may in part reflect the attitude of contemporary federalists towards a series of proposed naturalization acts that had been devised in response to the French Revolution and what they saw as a wave of “radical” Irish and Scottish immigrants.32 They believed that demagogues and revolutionaries would easily manipulate these immigrants, who had not grown up with republican institutions. Federalists thus believed that the numbers of such immigrants must be limited.

Tucker offers another explanation for the loss of republicanism in Rome, which other early nineteenth-century textbooks repeat:

Its gradual progress (Rome’s decline) may be traced from the destruction of Carthage. Profusion and extravagance began to prevail as soon as precious metals were introduced in abundance.Voluptuousness usurped the place of temperance; indolence succeeded activity; self-interest, sensuality and avarice, totally extinguished that ardor, which, in ancient times, glowed in every breast, for the public good. The republic, which had long withstood the shocks of external violence, fell gradually a prey of prosperity.33

In this passage he attributes Rome’s decline to consumer excesses by citing “extravagance,” “indolence,” and “avarice.” These concerns closely reflect the way in which other late eighteenth-century Americans viewed the fall of Rome, especially during the critical period of the 1780s when more

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people participated in republican government.34 However, neither passage explains the Roman republic’s collapse in terms of social inequality or the aristocracy’s unwillingness to share power. The Gracchi’s attempt to enforce the Licinian Law is not mentioned, even though descriptions of their efforts would have been available to Tucker.

Other textbook authors during the first two decades of the nineteenth century offered similar explanations for the fall of republicanism in Rome. Caleb Bingham, in A Historical Grammar (1802), never claims that con-flict between patricians and plebeians was a cause of the decline of re-publicanism in Rome.35 He instead cites the personal faults of its citizens, writing that “the Roman citizens suffered themselves to be corrupted by luxury; and losing their native energy of character, sunk into a state of in-dolence and effeminacy.”36 Frederick Butler’s Universal History (1818) also attributes the decline of republicanism to consumer culture, stating that a loss of “respect for poverty” led to a society where “money supplanted all virtues.”37 Textbook authors before 1830 thus link Rome’s decline to con-sumerism and selfishness rather than to conflict between classes or social orders. In addition, these authors do not single out any particular class or social order, but instead blame all Romans equally. Caius and Tiberius Gracchus are only briefly, if ever, mentioned.

Few pre-1830 narratives of Rome’s decline list the dangers presented to the republic by disparities of wealth. Pierce acknowledges that conflict between patricians and plebeians plagued Roman society, although she also refrains from linking this conflict to the decline of Rome. Nor does she mention Rome’s agrarian conflict. Donald Fraser’s A Compendium of the History of All Nations (1807) explains the “loss of popular liberty”38 in Rome in terms of the growing disparity of wealth and the failure to enforce Rome’s agrarian laws. Fraser writes several lines describing both Tiberius and Caius Gracchus’s attempt to reinstitute the agrarian laws. His reference, however, is the only textbook reference to this event before 1830.

This limited discussion of the Gracchi and land reform in textbooks, despite the availability of this narrative, corresponds to a society in which land reform had become common knowledge but not a major social or political movement. Thomas Jefferson had called for a nation of small farmers, arguing that those who work possess stronger morals. However, a movement to galvanize support among urban workers for a homestead act would not emerge until several decades later. In Maine, squatters who called themselves “Liberty Men” challenged property rights of landed proprietors, often with violence.39 Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Man to Property (1829) recommended that all Americans have a right to land, that land should be equally divided, and that no land should be inherited. However, many Americans considered these approaches to be too radical, and labeled such plans as examples of “agrarianism,” which entailed redistributing one person’s wealth to another.40 In

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addition, calls to distribute land as a safety valve for social unrest had not become a major part of American discourse at this time. Finally, in the early nineteenth century, some politicians viewed the Gracchi brothers’ reforms as a negative example of how to remake the United States. Malamud, as stated already, notes that John Adams and other conservatives in American politics viewed the Gracchi as a threat to order, property, and the status quo. Rather than addressing a legitimate need to provide land to poor citizens, they interpreted the Gracchi as appealing to the undeserving wishes of debtors, drifters, and scoundrels to enhance their own popularity.41 Thus textbook authors and publishers who might have shared these sentiments may have felt that omitting the Gracchi could boost the popularity of their textbooks.

The Gracchi’s Rise to Prominence in Textbooks after 1830

After 1830, history textbooks began to feature much more detailed descriptions of the Gracchi. This trend parallels more organized efforts to enact land reform in the United States, which had become more moderate and acceptable to history textbook authors targeting a middle-class audience. First, activists promoted land reform through the prism of republicanism, an ideology that all levels of society embraced in nineteenth-century America. In line with the tenets of republicanism, republics required economically independent citizens to thrive. Since colonial times, republican ideology functioned as a form of civic morality that strongly influenced American political sensibilities. By the nineteenth century, this ideology had changed significantly. While eighteenth-century intellectuals cast elites and members of the landed gentry as the building blocks of republican government, nineteenth-century intellectuals viewed the “middling sort” as the foundation of a republic.42

The concentration of wealth, coupled with the emergence of the wage labor system produced by rapid industrialization, threatened this middle-class vision in the eyes of many Americans, including school reformers.43 Small farmers and artisans in particular felt threatened by an economic system that required them to sell their labor to employers rather than grow crops or create finished products.44 This concern was important because ensuring property ownership for all white males constituted an important component of republicanism for many nineteenth-century Americans. Only with the economic independence that land ownership could bring could individuals function as disinterested citizens.45 This idea appealed widely to the American population, casting it in a populist light.

Educators and reformers were nonetheless worried about industrialization and consumerism’s impact on republicanism. Horace Mann, for example, believed that the “republic was a noble but precarious

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experiment” and that the United States needed common schools to prevent conflict between rich and poor.46 In his Twelfth Annual Report to the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, he argues that, in modern industrial societies characterized by wage labor, vast fortunes encourage even greater abuses of power than feudalism.47

For some Americans, using the United States’ stock of land (called “public lands”) became an appealing and more moderate remedy to the threat to republicanism posed by social dependency. The British immigrant George Evans helped to craft a populist movement that would accomplish this through an organization called the National Reform Association.48 Evans’s association called on the government to distribute unused public land. The National Reform Association’s plan tapped into values that middle-class Americans embraced, such as respectability, private property, and the idea that farm life more effectively protected republicanism than manufacturing or urban life.

Prominent antebellum political leaders linked land reform to the ideology of republicanism by appealing to the idea that small farmers made the most virtuous citizens.49 The Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson conveyed this sentiment in 1846 when introducing a homestead bill that would eventually become the Homestead Act.50 Later, in 1858, Johnson unambiguously reinforced this view in a speech to the United States Senate: “The rural population, the mechanical and agricultural portions of this community, are the very salt of it. They constitute the ‘mud-sills,’ to use the term recently introduced here. They constitute the foundation upon which the Government rests.”51

In 1851, in a speech entitled “The Public Lands,” Indiana state repre-sentative George Julian also expressed the importance of expanding land ownership in a republic. In this speech he claims that giving the poor land and homes will lead them away from crime, starvation, and prison, and transform them into loyal citizens who will be grateful to their government. His references to “virtue,” “citizen,” and “freeholder” point to an appeal to republicanism, a common goal among many sectors of antebellum American society.52

During the 1850s, the National Reform Association’s more moderate idea of land reform merged with the Free Labor movement. Many land reform supporters believed that slavery would only lead to large plantations under elite control rather than small farmers on public lands, thus undermining the goal of using land reform to promote republicanism.53 The use of historical narratives about Rome would facilitate the merging of these ideas. Malamud, Richard, and Shevaun Watson show that historical narratives and allusions to ancient Rome fill antebellum literature and punctuate political tracts. Richard notes that even antebellum Americans with little or no formal classical education knew about famous individuals and events from antiquity.54

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Two Kentuckians, for example, used the Gracchi example to change cultural ideals. Cassius Marcellus Clay did this in his speeches, and alongside the Presbyterian minister John Breckenridge in The Western Luminary (1824), which featured essays that invoked the Gracchi to show that slavery presented an economic danger to a republic.55 Both writers alluded to slavery’s devastating impact on the yeoman farmer in Rome when calling for an end to slavery in their own country. Other political leaders invoked ancient Rome and the Gracchi brothers to increase support for land reform. On the eve of the American Civil War, a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Galusha Grow, invoked the Gracchi when calling on Congress to make public lands available to settlers at a nominal cost. He claims that, had Rome embraced the plans of the Gracchi, they would have created a population of loyal soldiers to hold off the nomadic invaders of later generations.56 In a speech made on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1860 supporting the passage of a homestead act, Stephen Foster of Maine invoked the Gracchi to argue that providing public lands to American settlers, rather than to speculators and slave-operated farms, benefitted a republic more. He blamed the patricians for Rome’s failure to fully implement the law and suggested that the same dynamic was playing out in the United States during his own times.57

Adam Gurowski linked land reform and slavery by writing in 1860 that “The murder of the Gracchi was applauded by the degraded Roman rabble; so also did the ‘poor whites’ in the South applaud the assault on Sumner, as well as every other act of savage violence perpetrated in Washington or elsewhere in the interest of slavery.”58 Here, Gurowski uses an episode of individuals involved with land reform and reframes it so that it also fed the tensions over slavery that had gripped the United States by 1860. These examples demonstrate that, for many Americans, the Gracchi symbolized the necessity of slave-free land reform in the United States and the consequences of failing to pass a homestead bill during their own times. When textbook authors of this time included the Gracchi in their histories of Rome, they also promoted land reform during their own times.

Favorable depictions of the Gracchi in textbooks also derived from a new view of the Gracchan reforms written by Barthold Niebuhr (1828) and later George Bancroft (1855). While both Niebuhr and Bancroft wrote very detailed accounts of the Gracchan episode, they also wrote very subjective accounts, especially when compared to how recent historians describe the event. Niebuhr’s history differed from the classical accounts by describing the conflict involving the Gracchi as a class struggle in which Tiberius and Caius attempt to strengthen a “middle class.” He also compares the Gracchi struggles of ancient Rome to more recent struggles over land tenure issues in Italy.59 Although best known for his

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American histories, Bancroft’s Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855) included an account of the Gracchi reforms that closely resembles that of Niebuhr.60 Like Niebuhr, he lists the “middle class” as those who had been adversely affected by the Roman aristocrats’ and senators’ reluctance to relinquish public land. Thus Niebuhr and Bancroft offered new phrases and expressions to the narrative that increased the likelihood that readers would see this episode as an allegory for their own times.

Niebuhr’s writings directly influenced some antebellum-history textbook authors. The 1835 edition of William Pinnock’s History of Rome lists Oliver Goldsmith in the title. However, the publishers (Pinnock had long since died) invoked Niebuhr as a source of their information. In addition, Willson and Elizabeth Peabody cite Niebuhr in their introduction as having influenced their histories of Rome.61 Thus world and universal history textbooks published at this time in the United States drew on European perspectives when formulating their narrative of the Gracchi.

It is in this larger cultural and reformist context that textbooks featured positive depictions of the Gracchi’s actions. Malamud contends that after 1830 history textbook authors increasingly portrayed the Gracchi in favorable terms. She offers only one example, an 1870 edition of Samuel Goodrich’s History of Rome.62 However, other textbook accounts of Rome featured favorable accounts of the Gracchi well before 1870. These accounts often modified the classical versions to make them more supportive of slave-free land reform and more antagonistic toward aristocrats. Worcestor’s 1838 textbook, for example, casts the Gracchi and their agrarian reforms in a positive light:

Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, men of eloquence and influence, distinguished themselves by asserting the claims of the people. Tiberius, the elder of the two brothers, being a tribune, attempted to check the power of the patricians, and abridge the overgrown estates, by reviving the Licinian law, which ordained that no citizen shall possess more than 500 acres of public lands. A tumult was the consequence and Tiberius, together with 300 of his friends, was killed in the forum of the senate.

This fatal example did not deter his brother Caius from pursuing a similar career, in endeavoring to maintain, by force, the privileges of the people against the encroachment of the senate. But like his brother, he fell victim to the attempt, with 3,000 of his partisans, who were slaughtered in the streets of Rome by the consul Opimius.63

Here, Worcestor portrays Tiberius and Caius Gracchus’s land reform pro-posal as an attempt to address the needs of commoners rather than as an attempt to position themselves politically to seize power. This is a much more positive view of the Gracchi and their reform than the one found in late eighteenth-century accounts. It is also a much more negative view of the aristocratic senate than that provided by late twentieth-century

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historians who claim that the aristocrats’ motives were not entirely clear. Potter, in particular, argues that they presented the land law in a way that would lead aristocrats to suspect that they were trying to seize power. Worcestor never addresses that possibility, even though sources that tell this side of the story were available.

Worcestor’s description also offers greater detail than pre-1830 American accounts. It describes the Licinian law, casts the patricians as obstacles to a civilization trying to retain small farms, and suggests that social conflict played a greater role in the decline of the republic than excessive consumerism. However, unlike recent historians, he never explains that the patricians no longer comprised a distinct class separate from the plebeians during the time of the Gracchi. Wealthy patricians had combined with rich plebeians to become a new class of nobles. This class of nobles had been allowed to keep their land holdings for nearly two centuries. Worcestor never discusses this fact, although documents showing this would have been available to him. He also omits, as Stockton does in his 1980 study of the Gracchi, any connection between land reform and the need to increase the pool of citizens eligible for military service, a motive that goes beyond the simple desire to help the poor.

Finally, Worcestor resurrects the term “public lands” when describing the conflict between patricians and plebeians. While this term had been used in early texts by Plutarch and Appian, and had been available to nineteenth-century authors, textbooks published before the 1830s never used it.64 Referencing this term, however, increased the odds that this history would remind readers of the emerging debate over land reform in antebellum America. While Plutarch used this term when describing the Gracchan reforms, so too did the US government during the nineteenth century when it considered making land available to settlers for a nominal price.65 Worcestor retells the Gracchi’s efforts to revive Rome’s agrarian laws in a way that pins the loss of republican freedom on the elites’ unwillingness to make public land available to poor citizens; this approach represents a significant shift away from the way in which earlier textbook authors and recent historians tell this story.

His account still omits controversial parts of the Gracchi narrative that might offend some Americans. For example, his narrative leaves out Plu-tarch’s account of Tiberius’s view of slavery’s negative impact on Roman farmlands. In addition, he omits terms such as “middle class,” which Ban-croft uses in his description of the event. However, he also never calls this event “the sedition of the Gracchi,” 66 a statement which implies that Ti-berius and Caius Gracchus were demagogues interested in seizing power for themselves. Goldsmith and, later, Sullivan retain this as part of their narrative. Nevertheless, Worcestor’s account of the Gracchi closely tracks artisan and land reformer views of this event from Roman history.

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Perhaps the one connection to earlier narratives of the Gracchi that Worcestor retains is the idea that republicanism in Rome began its decline when Romans embraced the habits of “foreigners.” This increased their desire for luxury goods and contributed to the decay of their republican values and the ultimate loss of republican liberties. Worcestor’s account represents the only example after 1830 of a textbook that links Rome’s decline to a force that resembled the Know Nothing Party’s fear of immigrants.67

Pinnock’s textbook, published in Philadelphia in 1835, also presents a sympathetic account of Rome’s policy of making public lands available to those with little property. And like Worcestor’s account, it uses words and expressions that make the story align with American discussions of land reform during that time.

Before the plebeians obtained an equality of civil rights, the state neither commanded respect abroad, nor tranquility at home. The patricians sacrificed their own real advantages, as well as the interests of their country, to maintain an ascendancy as injurious to themselves, as it was unjust to other citizens. But no sooner had the agrarian laws established a more equitable distribution of property, and other popular laws opened the magistracy to merit without distinction of rank, then the city rose to empire with unexampled rapidity.68

Rather than describing the decline of the Roman republic, he instead explains why Rome became a great civilization. He never mentions the Gracchi brothers in this section, but notes that the passage of agrarian laws, which promoted the fair distribution of land, allowed Rome to thrive as a republic and that the patricians’ initial reluctance to redistribute land actually hurt their long-term interests. Pinnock’s narrative is not a story about creating equality, but a moral lesson about providing opportunity for poor and rich citizens alike. In this way, his story about land reform resembles that of the United States, since creating opportunity, rather than perfect equality, was the ultimate goal of land reformers.

The 1835 edition of Pinnock’s work highlights the idea of merit as a path to advancement, rather than rank, when explaining Roman social reforms. This too reflects a modern sensibility that Americans would identify as desirable for their own times. On the whole, Pinnock illustrates how chronicling Roman land reform allowed readers to consider the negative relationship between slavery, aristocracies, and a republic.

Samuel Goodrich’s textbook on Roman history of 1846 also features a modified narrative of the Gracchi that advocates antebellum-era land reform and promotes a republic founded on middle-class values. First, it attributes the loss of republican values to Rome’s aristocracy: “With the Gracchi perished the real freedom of Rome. From this time the power of the state was wielded by a corrupt and insolent aristocracy. The senate was now essentially changed from that venerable assembly, whom we

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have seen overthrowing Pyrrhus and Hannibal, as much by their virtues as by their arms.”69 It should be noted that Goodrich copied this passage almost word for word from Goldsmith. However, by featuring Goldsmith’s passage explaining that Roman freedom ended with the death of the Gracchi, Goodrich provides a moral critique of Rome’s elite that is not found in Plutarch’s essay.

Goodrich also attacks elites in his narrative by labeling the aristocracy as “corrupt and insolent” while citing a new class of tribunes interested in using power to enrich themselves and bring about the republic’s decline.70 This explanation is more subjective and negative than the one offered by modern historians such as Potter, Beard, and Crawford. In addition, Goodrich, unlike pre-1830 authors, omits corruption of the general population as an explanation for the republic’s decline. Finally, Goodrich never links demagoguery and personal ambition to the Gracchi even though Goldsmith suggests that this might have partially motivated them.71 Goodrich’s history makes this omission more noticeable because his narrative is much shorter than Goldsmith’s history.

Despite his negative description of aristocrats, Goodrich offers a more moderate critique of elites and slavery than other antebellum-era views of the Gracchi episode. Writers inspired by Bancroft and Niebuhr often wrote at length about the Gracchi’s fear that slaves would replace freeholders and yeoman farmers in Rome. Goodrich, notably, excludes this event from his narrative. This may be in part because Goodrich sold his textbook all over the United States, including a few in Kentucky (a slave state) and feared a backlash if this part of the story was mentioned.

Goodrich’s Third Book of History, as with his History of Rome, depicts the Gracchi and their agrarian laws positively. He never calls this episode the “sedition of the Gracchi” and characterizes the Gracchi’s attempt to address corruption and help the unfortunate citizens as patriotic.72 By suppressing the flawed elements of the Gracchi character, Goodrich helps resurrect their reputation during a time of social protest in America.

Willard, whose 1849 edition of Universal History in Perspective exhibits less evidence of Goldsmith’s influence than Goodrich’s textbook, offers perhaps the most favorable descriptions of the Gracchi brothers’ land reform efforts. Like her peer textbook authors, Willard never characterizes Rome’s agrarian reform as a plan to redistribute land. Instead, she casts it as reasonable and fair by describing it as “modest,” and “mild in character,” and designed to “improve conditions of the poor” through the distribution of “public lands.”73 Unlike Willard, Goldsmith, Appian, and most modern historians hardly describe the Gracchi reform as “modest.” Appian even described it as somewhat harsh and painful to the patricians.74 Like other writers, Willard cites the assassination of Caius Gracchus as the moment when the Roman masses lost a voice in Roman government on account of the nobility. However, only Willard uses the word “odious” to describe the

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nobility. Since this word is not found in earlier texts by Sallust, Appian, or Plutarch, we may assume that she added it in order to link the Roman republic’s decline to its aristocracy rather than to popular corruption or consumerism. Thus Willard modifies the narrative, resurrecting those parts that enhance the Gracchi’s image while leaving out those parts that might tarnish it.75

Willard also reframes the Gracchi episode in a way that resembles antebellum-era conflicts. First, by using the term “public lands,” she reintroduces a term used by political leaders such as Andrew Johnson and Stephen Foster to describe land owned by the United States government, which might be distributed to landless Americans. Willard’s 1835 edition of Universal History is one of the first textbooks to link land monopolization and slavery. She writes that “the power of the aristocracy had, however, gradually increased, until they had now secured to themselves the public lands, which were cultivated by their slaves.”76 This statement, which also appears in Plutarch’s description of Tiberius Gracchus, closely resembles the way in which American antislavery and free labor activists described the South. By reintroducing the Gracchan land reforms, albeit in a tentative way, as a response to the growing domination of a slaveholding aristocracy, Willard transforms Rome into a symbol of the danger of slavery and highlights the importance of land reform in her own time.77 Willard was no abolitionist according to Stuart Cooke. Nevertheless, although she embraced colonization and supported John Bell in the 1860 election, she still would have supported slave-free land reform. Her father was a supporter of Jefferson, a staunch proponent of a republic built around a strong yeomanry.78 Moreover, Willard believed that those of the “middling sort” made the best citizens of a republic.

Peabody’s 1850 textbook, like Willard’s, describes the Gracchi favorably. First, she suggests that their land reforms would have prevented “much of the evil” Rome experienced after the Punic Wars, implying that these types of reform benefit society.79 Peabody also avoids the phrase “the sedition of the Gracchi,” and leaves out political ambition as a motive for their action. In fact Peabody cites Niebuhr and Dr. Thomas Arnold as sources for her history, but leaves out the political machinations that they describe.80 Her textbook, like Willard’s, also ties land reform and antislavery together by resurrecting that part of the Gracchi episode that blamed Rome’s corruption on the use of slave labor for farming and “the wealthy” gaining control of public lands.81 Peabody, as an abolitionist, would most likely have linked the need for reform to slavery during her own time. Finally, her account of the Gracchi cuts out some of the political machinations and the patrician point of view presented by Appian that lends the story moral complexity. Thus she features a story that both highlights certain events of the Gracchi episode while suppressing others in order to create a history that reinforces the idea that a powerful slaveholding aristocracy contributed to the republic’s decline.

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Willson’s Outlines of History (1854) makes one of the greatest modifications of all the textbook authors in a way that makes the narrative of the Gracchi resemble an allegory of their own times in support of the middle class. Although he never mentions the term “public land” or even Rome’s agrarian laws, he uses the term “middle class,” a modern idea that is absent from Plutarch, Sallust, or Appian’s accounts.82 Willson also makes the interests of the middle class appear most important to a republic by explaining that the Romans exercised greater virtue during the republic’s early period when a high percentage of its citizens engaged in small farming.83 He contends that, when larger commercial farms replaced small farms in Rome, economic inequality increased, causing greater conflict between social orders and resulting in the loss of public spirit.84 Reflecting a trend in textbooks published after 1830, Willson notes that, prior to the Gracchan reforms, “large slave plantations increased in the country to the disparagement of free labor.”85 This passage echoes the way in which advocates of land reform in the United States during the 1850s connected slavery to free labor. Willson, as noted earlier, supported the Democratic Party during the 1850s, the party that won the support of most slavery advocates in the South. As a Democrat, he also supported William Jennings Bryan, an advocate for the interests of small farmers during the 1890s. Thus, featuring a positive account of the Gracchi reforms remained within the parameters of his ideology.

For textbook authors writing after 1830, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus’ attempt to address tensions between Rome’s landless citizens and its elites became the dominant narrative of Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire. The fact that land reform, antislavery, and immigration concerns all came together around free soil issues during their own time helps to explain this trend in history textbooks. The Free Soil movement believed that land made available on the frontier could solve any overcrowding that immigration might cause.86 New immigrants could move to the frontier to form family farms and labor pressures would be relieved in large cities by urban dwellers moving to the frontier to use public lands. Eric Foner describes this as the “pressure valve,” which would relieve eastern regions of potential sources of disorder and low wages. All of this, of course, would depend on the availability of slave-free land in the West. The Gracchi reforms in Rome became the symbolic solution for addressing these antebellum-era problems that beset the American republic. Textbook authors, in a tip of their hat to populist solutions, therefore made sure that students were aware of the reforms. Left out of the stories they told, however, was the link between the Gracchi’s land reform and Rome’s requirement that landowning citizens could serve in the military. Also left out was the unprecedented method used to provide land to citizens: land already held by elites rather than newly conquered land would be distributed. Telling this part of the story would have made

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the narrative of the Gracchi a much more morally ambiguous story and less like the situation facing the use of public lands in the United States.

In sum, only a few authors featured mixed or somewhat negative depictions of the Gracchi in the period under scrutiny here. William Sullivan, while explaining that the Gracchi called for land reform policies popular among poor Romans, attributes them to a combination of motives: “Whether the purpose of the Gracchi was to arrest the growing luxuries and depravity of Rome, and to restore it to republican simplicity; or to gratify some passions, which they concealed under some pretense of patriotism, is a matter which remains in doubt. It is not improbable that their motives may have been derived from both of these sources.”87 Sullivan both questions their motives and calls the episodes “The Sedition of the Gracchi.” 88 Furthermore, he never links the loss of republican liberty to the Gracchi’s assassination as other authors do. Pierce Grace’s 1851 textbook also features a presentation of the Gracchi that is both short and mixed in tone. While acknowledging that Tiberius Gracchus attempted to check the “increasing power of the patricians,” he also argues that Caius Gracchus committed an act of sedition when pursuing the same policy. Rather than citing the death of Caius Gracchus as the beginning of the end of republican liberty, Grace merely notes that Caius was the victim of his own “zeal and temerity.” Finally, he makes no mention of the land reform Tiberius and Caius Gracchus attempted to implement.89

Sullivan’s and Grace’s lesser known textbooks most likely exerted a smaller impact on students and adult readers than those popular works published by Willard, Goodrich, Willson, and Worcestor. Nevertheless, the textbooks by Sullivan and Grace reflect an additional antebellum-era concern about republicanism emanating from the Whig Party. Andrew Jackson, as general and as president, sometimes disregarded court rulings, laws, or treaties.90 While popular with the public, his decisions overreached his authority in the eyes of some Whig members of congress.91 They viewed his actions as demagogic and anti-republican. Daniel Walker Howe notes that Whigs such as Henry Clay often favored internal improvement but feared a strong active government controlled by a charismatic figure who might manipulate citizens with great promises. These Whig members pointed to Roman figures such as Caesar, and to the more recent French ruler Napoleon, as the kind of leader to avoid.92 While addressing the dangers of inequality, the history of the Gracchi represented, for some, the danger of demagogic leaders.

Conclusion

History textbook authors after 1830 reinforced land reform in the United States through their favorable presentations of Tiberius and Caius

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Gracchus’s land reform efforts in Rome. Spreading their ideas broadly through the American population through the sale of large numbers of textbooks, they presented elite resistance to the Gracchi brothers’ attempts at land reform as part of the larger story of Rome’s transformation from a republic to an empire. They modified Roman history drawn from earlier texts in ways that enhanced the Gracchi brothers’ image while depicting the Roman aristocracy as an impediment to republican values. Authors featured abridged texts that retained accounts of corrupt aristocrats and elites but omitted descriptions of the Gracchi as ambitious or demagogic.

Antebellum textbook authors not only featured negative descriptions of the aristocrats but also presented the Gracchi episode in such a way that readers would see it as analogous to land reform conflicts of their own times. Willard describes the land reforms of the Gracchi as reasonable and fair, while Willson uses the term “middle class,” making the episode closely resemble antebellum-era struggles. Peabody, Willard, and Willson even reintroduce the Gracchi’s observations of slavery and its connection to the decline of the Roman freehold system. Finally, Worcestor and Willard use the term “public lands,” which appeared in discussions of antebellum-era land reform plans in the United States, to describe the conflict in Rome. Thus, this historic episode, which evolved into a story about corrupt aristocrats ending Roman freedom by destroying the middle class and expanding slavery, increasingly resembled the free labor argument for slave-free land reform.

Statements by these textbook authors indicate that they intended readers to connect these histories to their own times rather than simply to view them as interesting stories about a past civilization. Willard, in her introduction, writes that “[h]istory allows students to see how human passion influences the chain of events. He thus has an understanding of how humans are influenced and possibly how to influence events... History might allow politicians to predict wars before they occur.”93 William Sullivan describes history as knowledge that “was full of instruction,” and which warned readers against those things that brought misery to a civilization.94 Elizabeth Peabody writes, “If he [the student] knows nothing else, he ought to know the history of the nations, especially of the nations whose career is run through. He needs to see how the institutions which have cursed the world have grown up, and to learn how the more blessed influences in society are cherished by government, or at least kept unquenched.”95 Although Willson and Worcestor viewed accounts of the past as imperfect, they also believed that the past helped readers to understand their own times.

If we accept the view conveyed by textbook authors in their introductions, expressing the belief that history offers guidance on how to organize society during one’s own times, then their choice to resurrect, omit, and modify the Gracchi narrative indicates that textbook authors

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wanted their histories to make readers confront the controversial issues of their own time. Authors wanted to alert readers to threats to republicanism such as inequality and slavery, even if their history divided Americans. They reinforced the nineteenth-century idea of a republic founded on a middle class rather than the eighteenth-century idea of a republic reliant on elite citizens.

Rather than simply promoting a romanticized vision of the United States for readers to consume, authors featured narratives that opened new opportunities for discussions about social and economic fairness. Through narratives of the Gracchi they expanded the way in which Americans could talk and think about economic exploitation and possible solutions. Textbook authors made it easier for readers to understand, if not agree with, the rhetoric of social reformers. It is in these ways that narratives of the Gracchi gave nineteenth-century education a populist slant that other studies have failed to illuminate.

Notes

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for constructive comments about this article.

1. This law, which was one of the Licinian-Sextian laws, had been implemented in 314 BCE almost two hundred years before the Gracchi attempted to resurrect them. The original thinking behind these laws was that a republic would be strongest when populated by a farming population. Tiberius and Caius Gracchus hoped that enforcing these laws would provide public land to destitute Roman citizens and increase the number of people eligible to serve in the Roman military. Because these laws limited the amount of land any one person could hold to five hundred acres, enforcing them would force many aristocrats to give up holdings they had held for several generations. Peter Brunt makes this case most strongly although other historians echo his argument. See Brunt, Social Conflict in the Roman Republic (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971), 77; David Potter, Ancient Rome: A New History, 2nd edition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 110–112; David Stockton, The Gracchi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 31–33.

2. Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University press, 1985), 4–6; Brunt, 79–81.

3. Stockton, Gracchi, 38–39. 4. Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (West Sussex: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2009), 50–51. 5. Carl J. Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the

Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 87. 6. Since land reform laws had gone unenforced for several centuries, Potter

contends that the elites who occupied the public lands no longer took the five hundred-acre limit seriously. In addition, Potter notes that the agrarian

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laws were not needed to increase the pool of eligible soldiers for the military. See David Potter, Ancient Rome: A New History, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 110–112. Willem Jongman raises the possibility that slavery was not as dominant in the Roman countryside as many historians suggest. He notes that the main sources for this view, Plutarch and Appian, wrote their histories more than two hundred years after the fact. He also points to archeological evidence suggesting that small farms existed in large numbers in the Italian countryside where Tiberius Gracchus traveled. See Jongman, “Slavery and the Growth of Rome: The Transformation of Italy in the Second and First Centuries BCE,” in Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 111–112.

7. Beard and Crawford, like Stockton, highlight the connection between the need for soldiers and the enforcement of Rome’s land laws. They also note that Tiberius Gracchus’s land reforms threatened the holding of Rome’s allies, the Italians. They note that the Italian elite in particular felt threatened because, while they were allies to Rome, they were not considered citizens. See Beard and Crawford, 4–6, 82; Potter takes a sympathetic view of the aristocrats, for whom Tiberius Gracchus’s reforms would have had adverse effects. He notes that Tiberius Gracchus’s actions possessed the hallmark of an individual seeking to gain power in the manner of a tyrant. See Potter, Ancient Rome, 110–112.

8. Stockton, Gracchi, 35. 9. Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the

Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 8–11.

10. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 339–340.

11. Frances Fitzgerald, History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1979), 47, 227–228.

12. Eugene Provenzo, “Education and the Iconography of the Republic,” in The Textbook as Discourse: Sociocultural Dimensions of American Schoolbooks, eds Eugene Provenzo, Annis Shaver and Manuel Bello, (New York: Routledge, 2011), 13–14.

13. William Reese, Origins of the American High School (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 118; Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Way, 1983), 137; Stuart Cooke, “Jacksonian Era American Textbooks” (Ph.D. diss, University of Denver, 1986), 246.

14. Samuel Goodrich, Recollection of a Lifetime, or Men and Things I Have Seen: In a Series of Letters to a Friend, Historical Biographical, Anecdotal, and Descriptive (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856), 414–415.

15. Cooke, “Jacksonian Era American Textbooks,” 362; Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Early American Textbooks: 1775–1900 (Washington: US Department of Education), 365.

16. Office of Educational Research, Early American Textbooks, 307, 321, 339, 344.17. Emma Willard, Abridgement of the History of the United States (New York: N. & J.

White, 1832), 193.

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18. John S. Gilkeson, Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 44–54.

19. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing, Volume I: The Creation of an Industry (New York: R. R. Bouter, 1972), 297.

20. Cooke, “Jacksonian Era American Textbooks,” xiv.21. Mildred Sandison Fenner and Eleanor Fishburn, Pioneer American Educators

(Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1944), 76; Charles Carpenter, History of American Schoolbooks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 200–201.

22. Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan, with Accompanying Documents, for the Year 1859 (Lansing, MI: John Kerr and Company, 1859), 294, 298, 312; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan, with Accompanying Documents, for the Year 1862 (Lansing, MI: John Kerr and Company, 1862), 99, 121,145, 188.

23. Twenty-Third Annual Report, 312; Connecticut Board of Education Annual Reports, Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools to the General Assembly (New Haven, CT: Carrington and Hotchkiss, 1856), 142; Francis W. Sherman, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction with Accompanying Documents, Made to the Legislature (Lansing, MI: George W. Peck, 1853), 166; State of Michigan, 1851 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (1 January 1851), 99.

24. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 8.25. “Southern Schoolbooks,” De Bow’s Review 25, 1 (July 1858): 117; Marcius

Willson, History of the United States from the Earliest Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Ivison and Phinney, 1856).

26. Some of the most detailed and favorable depictions of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus come from Plutarch and Appian of Alexandria. Many American reformers cite Plutarch’s description of Tiberius Gracchus passing through Etruria and noticing the absence of freeholders and the great number of foreign slaves. Plutarch also describes Tiberius Gracchus’s reimplementation of the agrarian laws and the wealthy landowners’ angry response to it. See Plutarch, Makers of Rome, Nine Live, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 159–161. Appian also describes Tiberius Gracchus’s attempt to bring land reform to Rome. However, he offers a more complex picture of the Gracchi, suggesting that Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, by offering land reform plans favorable to the poor, sought to further their own ambitions for power. He notes that, while Rome’s wealthy citizens had unfairly gained public lands, they nevertheless regarded it as their own and viewed efforts by the state to reclaim it as unfair. They claimed to have buried their ancestors there, and used the land to secure loans and award dowries. Appian notes that Tiberius Gracchus’s assassination saddened some but gladdened others. Appian, Roman History, Vol. III, Book One, translated by Horace White (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1913), 8-19, 21–23, 35.

27. Oliver Goldsmith highlights both the corruption of Rome’s patrician class and Tiberius and Caius Gracchus’s attempt to restore virtue in the senate following the Punic Wars. While Goldsmith mentions the attempted implementation of the Licinian laws, he writes little about slaves replacing

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yeoman farmers as Plutarch and Appian do. Goldsmith suggests that ambition might have partially motivated Tiberius and Caius Gracchus’s appeal to land reform. Nevertheless, Goldsmith views the Gracchi favorably and argues that they genuinely sought to improve the lives of everyday people. See Oliver Goldsmith, The Roman History: From the Foundation of the City of Rome to the Destruction of the Western Empire in Two Volumes (London: Printed for S. Baker and G. Leigh, 1769), 313–329.

28. Sallust is often noted for highlighting the general corruption and loss of virtue among the Romans. He explains how the Gracchi tried to restore the liberty of common people in the face of a powerful nobility in The Jugurthine War. In this translation, Sallust mentions nothing about Rome’s agrarian laws or public lands, and focuses on the greed and selfishness of the nobles. See Sallust, The Jugurthine War: Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 77–79.

29. John Robinson, An Easy Grammar of History, Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia: Bennett and Walton, 1807), 20. William Mavor, Catechism of Universal History for the Use of Schools and Families (New York: Samuel Wood and Son, 1819), 31.

30. Benjamin Tucker, Sacred and Profane History Epitomized, with a Continuation of Modern History to the Present Time (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1806), 105.

31. Appian, History of Rome, 8-9. Appian discusses Tiberius Gracchus’s plan for providing land to Roman allies as a way to build greater loyalty. Neither he nor Plutarch discusses the quality of these people as citizens, however.

32. Erika Pani, “Saving the Nation through Exclusion: Alien Laws in the Early Republic in the United States and Mexico,” The Americas 65, no. 2 (2008): 223–228.

33. Tucker, Sacred and Profane History, 105.34. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 141.35. Historians of the last three decades argue that there was no distinction

between patricians and plebeians at this moment in Roman history. Beard and Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, 48–49.

36. Caleb Bingham, A Historical Grammar; or a Chronological Abridgement of Universal History, trans. Lucy Peacock. (Boston: David Carlisle, 1802), 47.

37. Frederick Butler, Sketches of Universal History, Sacred and Profane, From the Creation of the World, to the Year 1818 of the Christian Era: In Three Parts (Hartford, CT: Cooke and Hale, 1818), 71.

38. Donald Fraser, A Compendium of the History of All Nations: Exhibition of a Concise View of the Origin, Progress, Decline, and Fall of the Most Considerable Empires, Kingdoms, and States in the World, from the Earliest Times to the Present Period (New York: Henry C. Southwick, 1807), 61.

39. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 25.

40. Ibid., 42.41. Malamud, Ancient Rome, 58.42. Gordon Wood explains that, in the decades following the revolution,

Americans increasingly viewed leisure as less important to cultivating disinterestedness and increasingly saw labor as dignified. See Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical

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Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 276–277.

43. Malamud, Ancient Rome, 5.44. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, The Transformation of America,

1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 539.45. Gordon S. Wood “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the

Constitution,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward Carter II (Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 84–85.

46. David Tyack, and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1982), 56, 59.

47. Horace Mann, The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, ed. Lawrence Cremin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 85.

48. Ibid., 40–42.49. Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the

United States, 1800-1862 (Standford: Standford University Press, 1999), 232. 50. Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (New York: Little, Brown and Company,

1945), 348–349.51. Frank Moore, “On the Homestead Bill, Delivered in the Senate of the United

States, May 20, 1858,” in Andrew Johnson, Speeches of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States. With a Biographical Introduction (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1866), 35.

52. George W. Julian, “The Public Lands,” in Agrarianism in American History, ed. Louis H. Douglas (Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1969), 44–45.

53. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 232.54. Shevaun E. Watson, “Complicating the Classics: Neoclassical Rhetoric in Two

Early American Schoolbooks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2001): 48. Richard explains that, in northern cities, girls of European ancestry as well as some African Americans could receive an education in the classics during the antebellum period. See Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America, 3–4. Malamud explains that labor reformers frequently quoted Plutarch in their speeches. See Malamud, Ancient Rome, 49.

55. “On Slavery,” The Western Luminary, 29 September 1824, 1,12, 178; Cassius Clay, The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay Including Speeches and Addresses, ed. Horace Greeley (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1848), 411.

56. Speech by Hon. G. A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, in the House of Representatives, 29 February 1860, Free Homes for Free Men, https://archive.org/details/freehomesforfreegrow (accessed 11 January 2015).

57. Speech by Hon. Stephen C. Foster, of Maine. Delivered in the House of Representatives, 24 April 1860, Republican Land Policy – Homes for the Million: Give the Public Lands to the People and You Settle the Slavery Question, Obliterate the Frontiers, Dispense with a Standing Army, and Extinguish Mormonism, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AJC3495.0001.001 (accessed 11 January 2015).

58. Adam Gurowski, Slavery in History (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1860), 138.59. First published in 1828, Niebuhr presents an even more favorable account

of the Gracchi than Goldsmith. There is no doubt in Niebuhr’s mind that both Tiberius and Caius Gracchus acted out of kindness and for the public good. While more detailed than Goldsmith, Niebuhr frequently cites political

https://archive.org/details/freehomesforfreegrow

https://archive.org/details/freehomesforfreegrow

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clashes and controversies from his own time to explain the actions of Romans involved in the Gracchi episode. In the course of doing this Niebuhr expresses hostility to capitalists whom he compares to the cowardly equites. In addition, unlike Goldsmith, he uses footnotes, frequently listing Plutarch, Livy, Appian, and Sallust as sources. Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome from the First Punic War to the Death of Constantine, ed. Leonard Schmitz (London: Taylor and Walton, 1844), 279–310.

60. George Bancroft, Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 284.

61. Elizabeth P. Peabody, The Polish-American System of Chronology, Reproduced from General Bem’s Franco-Polish Method (Boston: G. P. Putnam, 1850), 191; Marcius Willson, Outlines of History; Illustrated by Numerous Geographical and Historical Notes and Maps (New York: Ivison and Phinney, 1854), 168; William Pinnock, Pinnock’s Improved Editions of Dr. Goldsmith’s Abridgment of the History of Rome (Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1835), 51.

62. Malamud, Ancient Rome, 52.63. Joseph E. Worcestor, Elements of History Ancient and Modern with a Chart and

Tables of History (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1838), 75.64. Stockton, Gracchi, 40.65. Helene Sara Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 29–30. Plutarch uses the term “common land.” Plutarch, Makers of Rome, 159.

66. Although he uses the phrase “sedition of the Gracchi,” Goldsmith contends that it should be called “sedition of the senate.” See Goldsmith, Roman History, 312, 329; William Sullivan, Historical Class Book; Containing Sketches of History, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Roman Empire in Italy, A.D. 476 (Boston: Carter, Hundee, and Company, 1833), 162–163.

67. The Know Nothing Party was the well known but unofficial name for the American Party. This party emerged from a nativist movement that gained a wide following during the late 1840s and early 1850s. The Know Nothings officially named themselves the American Party in 1855 after several electoral successes. However, when slavery became a major political issue after 1855, the Know Nothing Party withered away. See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 682–685, 693.

68. Pinnock, Pinnock’s Improved Editions, 37–38.69. Samuel Goodrich, A Pictorial History of Ancient Rome, with a Sketch of the Modern

History of Italy (New York: Huntington and Savage, 1849), 98.70. Ibid., 98.71. Goldsmith, Roman History, 312.72. Samuel Goodrich, Parley’s The Third Book of History, Containing Ancient History in

Connection with Ancient Geography (Boston: Jenks, Hickling, and Swan, 1853), 72–73.

73. Emma Willard, Universal History in Perspective (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1849), 120–121.

74. Both Appian and Goldsmith describe the reform as very divisive. Appian, Roman History, 19. Goldsmith, Roman History, 315.

75. Willard, Universal History, 120–121.

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76. Willard, Universal History, 86.77. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, 161.78. Cooke, “Jacksonian Era American Textbooks,” 352–353.79. Elizabeth P. Peabody, Polish-American System, 191.80. Although Arnold was an English writer, he cites the classics and Niebuhr as

his sources. He makes no reference to Goldsmith. See ibid., 191.81. Ibid., 191.82. Willson, Outlines of History, 728.83. Ibid., 730.84. Ibid.85. Ibid.86. The Free Soil movement’s followers came from all the antebellum-era parties.

They opposed slavery for economic as well as moral reasons and created the Free Soil Party in 1848. See Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 625–626.

87. Sullivan, Historical Class Book, 162–163. 88. This statement mirrors how Goldsmith introduces the Gracchan episode. See

Goldsmith, Roman History, 310.89. Pierce Grace, Outlines of History, Compiled for the Use of Schools and Academies

(New York: Edward Dunigan and Brothers, 1851), 72.90. John William Ward explains that Jackson relied on his intuition to guide his

actions, which angered his opponents but endeared him to the American public. See Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 59.

91. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 90–91.

92. Malamud notes that the Whigs frequently compared Jackson to both Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. See Malamud, Ancient Rome, 19.

93. Emma Willard, History of the United States or Republic of America (New York, 1831), xv.

94. Sullivan, Historical Class Book, 13.95. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Universal History, Arranged with Plates and Bem’s

Charts of Chronology (New York: Sheldon, Blackman, and Company, 1859), iv.