Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 05 Reading

At the heart of Lyddie’s journey is reading and writing. To Lyddie, education is freedom. She admires, even envies, those who can read. Unlike many girls her age, she was not able to go to school. Words came hard to her.

When Lyddie was growing up, more and more children were going to the country’s new public schools. The number of public schools increased after the American Revolution, expanding Americans’ access to reading and writing. The 1840 U.S. Census reported that about ninety percent of white men and women were literate.

By 1840, around 82% of New England’s white children between the ages of 5 and 19 enrolled in school. The school term averaged 24 weeks in 1849, although some districts kept school for as long as eight to ten months, according to Vermont’s state superintendent. But schooling in the early nineteenth century was not like today. Not all children went regularly. Lyddie couldn’t go at all. This may be why, when she learns that her brother Charlie had been sent to school while working at the mill, she is both glad for him and envious.

People continued to learn to read at home and at church, but they increasingly learned at school. And as more and more people could read, reading became part of American culture, fueled by cheap books and magazines. For Lyddie, this made not knowing how to read even more embarrassing and isolating.

People in Lyddie’s time read for many reasons. Advocates of public education proclaimed that citizens needed literacy to understand current affairs and vote. Reading, they believed, could help shape citizens who acted for the common good. In Lyddie’s day, like our own, people had ideas about which types of books were best suited for these purposes. Horace Mann, the nation’s leading advocate of public schools, thought novel reading was an “epidemic” that would unloose people’s imaginations without concern for moral consequences. (In Lyddie, one of the girls at the Lowell Mills echoes this idea, calling novels “the devil’s instrument” [chapter 12]). Yet novels allowed readers to see the world through others’ eyes—what 19th-century Americans called sympathy, and we’d call empathy.

Lyddie, for example, appreciated Charles Dickens’ story of the poor boy Oliver Twist. Despite her exhaustion after a day’s labor, Lyddie is “ravenous for every word” (chapter 10). Novels were really that powerful. Northern readers of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin empathized with the suffering of its enslaved characters. Stowe’s novel impacted so many Americans that President Abraham Lincoln referred to Stowe as the “woman who wrote the book that started” the Civil War.

Reading was not just about politics and power in the early nineteenth century, however. It was also about what people at the time called “self-culture.” A reader learned about the world through reading and gained a richer internal life. People read to improve themselves, and reading was a source of pleasure. It also defined the growing middle class.

But this opportunity for pleasure and self-improvement was not available to all. Enslaved people who gained literacy often had to “steal” it. As Lyddie becomes a better reader, she purchases Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography and learns this truth from its author, an escaped slave who became a leading antislavery activist and intellectual. Frederick Douglass learned to read from his mistress in Baltimore, until her husband asked her to stop teaching because reading “unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass persevered, getting help from white boys on the street, and practicing with selections from The Columbian Orator. The Columbian Orator, a book used in schools, was filled with moral and political stories about equality and liberty. Reading it, Douglass wrote, made him want freedom. Douglass recognized that reading and freedom went hand in hand.

Slave owners recognized this, too. After Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, southern states made it illegal to teach slaves and free Black people to read or write. Turner was a minister inspired by the Gospel to seek freedom. Despite the law, it is estimated that 5-10% of enslaved people could read. They learned from their masters or mistresses, from other enslaved people, or on their own. There were even secret schools, sometimes hidden pits in the ground. Students and teachers could be punished if caught.

In the North, free Black children could attend integrated or segregated public schools in many communities, but not everywhere. That’s why Black families also started their own schools. If their parents could afford it, Black children might attend private academies, but whites often resisted integrated schools. Sometimes, they responded with violence. In Canaan, New Hampshire, for example, in 1835 about 100 white people used 95 yoke of oxen to drag Noyes Academy—a private integrated school—off its foundation and into a nearby swamp. Yet, despite the threats, Black parents and children understood how empowering an education could be.

When the novel Lyddie ends, reading has not just become a part of the protagonist’s life, but also of American life. To Americans, reading meant many things: citizenship, power, status, freedom, and self-culture. It was also a source of enjoyment. Lyddie took advantage of all these benefits. Like Frederick Douglass, she declares that “I will not be a slave, even to myself” (chapter 23). Her freedom came through learning to read. She recognized that a woman like herself had a mind that deserved an education.

About the Author

Dr. Johann N. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America