By 1850 there had been formulated three basic principles of education:
- Free primary and secondary schools should be available for all children
- teachers should have professional training
- all children should be required to attend some school- up to a certain age
By 1840 over 150 small denominational colleges were in existence in the country. American science soon became specialized. Joseph Henry discovered the electromagnet and many other features of electricity and Samuel F.B. Morse used the former to develop the telegraph. Charles Goodyear had patented the vulcanization of rubber by 1844. The Smithsonian Institute was started in 1846 with Joseph Henry as its first director. Only astronomy lagged and this was due to the effect of organized religion, which considered probing the heavens with a telescope as mildly blasphemous.
And now we must consider life in the American south. We have already discussed the Indian-Negro situation at some length on pages 1115 and 1116. "Cotton was king in the south from 1815 to 1861, and the principle bulwark of his throne was Negro slavery"
Quotation from Reference 151, page 500
. By 1860 the crop was almost 2,300,000,000 pounds, accounting for 2/3 of the total exports of the United States and 5/6 of the world's production. In that harvest 4,000,000 slaves were used. A prime field hand 18 to 25 years old was worth $500 in 1832 and $1.300 just before the panic of 1837, although their yearly maintenance cost only $15 to $60. Morison (Ref.
151 ) says that 13% of all Negroes in the U.S. in 1860 were mulattoes, but as we have seen, later writers might put this much higher, especially if one adds in Indian blood. The south was ruled by a few but strong classical southern gentlemen, of which only a few descended from the colonial aristocracy. The great mass of wealthy planters by 1860 were self-made men like Jefferson Davis, whose parents had lived in log cabins. There were probably fewer than 15,000 families of the southern white gentry and most of the white southerners were small farm owners. The latter were actually the governing class in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. About half the cotton crop was made by those who owned from 1 to 6 slaves. Whites were forbidden to teach slaves to read and write in every southern state except Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee. (Ref.
151 ) In contrast to this slavery in America we should recall that although slavery was almost universal in more ancient times, the slaves then were of the same race as their masters, of ten the better educated and usually could work or buy their way out of slavery eventually. In the U.S., slavery was fatally united with the permanent, physical fact of color. (Ref.
217 ) A slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the deaths of 57 whites and perhaps up to 100 Negroes before it could be put down by regular troops and navy personnel. Elsewhere in America slaves were being freed, in the British colonies in 1833, the French Antilles in 1848 and the Spanish republics in turn between 1813 and 1854. Only in a few Spanish and Dutch islands, the United States and Brazil did slavery continue after 1854. Some effort had been made to return blacks to Africa by the American Colonization Society, but by 1855 only 3,600 had been sent. This did help the Republic of Liberia to form a constitution patterned on the U. S. model, however, in 1857.
