the worst of sins and practically guaranteed the liar an eternity spent in “the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” One seven-year-old who told his father a lie in order to cover up a forbidden skating expedition pined away and died of remorse—even though he confessed the lie ten minutes after telling it and was corrected with the rod.

That awe-inspiring implement, the rod, was usually either a slender switch of birch or apple or a whalebone from Mamma’s stays. It was kept in a handy and conspicuous place, such as the mantelpiece. Theoretically, it would be seldom needed if the parents did an efficient job of subduing their children, preferably at the first sign of defiance. Mothers magazine about 1833 told of a sixteenmonth-old baby girl who was able to say “dear Mamma,” but one day declined to do so on command.

“Say ‘dear Mamma,’” insisted Dear Mamma.

“Won’t,” replied the child, and the battle was joined. For four hours the mother alternately whipped her daughter and shut her in the closet. At last “dear Mamma” was forthcoming and the Devil exorcised. Whether he ever attempted a comeback in this case is not recorded, but the Reverend Orange Clark proudly described an infant boy whose will had been broken at ten months. He was taught “never even to cry in his father’s presence,” and when he grew up his chief delight was in rendering his parents happy; their wish was his law. “Life to such a child is never a burden. … A parent’s will to him is paramount, and cheerfulness and happy industry crown his days.”

But if traditional child-rearing methods were still being followed in the early nineteenth century, change was abroad in the land. The Republic was young and rambunctious. It had achieved its independence not through submission and a broken will but through self-assertion- a lesson not lost on bright children, who were urged to be patriotic and to learn their country’s history. “In every home in our land, the altar of patriotism should stand beside the altar of religion,” intoned a writer on child care. “Mothers should teach the first lesson in history, in one word—Washington.”

In colonial times, when most men tilled the soil at home, it had been the fathers, not the mothers, who taught and disciplined their children. But with the progress of the new industrial age, fathers were likely to be away from home for ten or more hours a day, six days a week. They necessarily delegated the reins of child management to their wives, who were often young things in their teens or early twenties—eager and determined but woefully uncertain, and suspecting that the changing times required changed methods. In 1830 a mother looking for a book on child care would have found that the few that were available gave far more attention to physical care, manners, and salvation than to everyday problems of management. But not many

years later the situation was entirely changed: a mother would scarcely have found time to read all the advice available. She could learn what to do if her little boy should bite the baby (bite him back); whether to tell a child to believe in ghosts (yes, because there are supernatural beings in the Bible and children must believe the Bible); how to handle questions about sex (use unintelligible terms). For good measure a mother might join a mothers’ club, usually supervised by a clergyman but not limited to religious discussions.

The young American mother threw herself into her new role as energenitically as her husband threw himself into his business. Her most important job was to produce sons who would become the nation’s leaders and some day say, like George Washington, “Home influence directed by pious mother is the source of my success.” As for the daughters, they were to become gentle, devout, pure, and accomplised—not much in domestic skills as in such pursuit as piano playing, embroidery, and reading Sir Walter Scott aloud and with expression. The old-fashioned domestic skills, such as spinning, weaving, and making candles, were no longer esteemed. Some mothers did not even teach their girls to cook and dust. In the first place it was now possible to buy many necessities readymade and to hire immigrant Irish girls to do the dirty work, and in the second the American middle class was slowly becoming infected by the Old World idea that ladies and gentlemen did not work with their hands. Better travel facilities now enabled rich Americans to visit England and the Continent, whence they were likely to return (as the New York diarist Philip Hone complained) full of “the foppery of foreign manners and the bad taste of antiAmericanism. ” Their less prosperous but upwardly mobile neighbors watched what they did and tried to imitate them.

Old-fashioned people railed against the bad influence of un-American notions. Mrs. Lydia Child, a New Englander of impeccable background, argued in The Mothers Book (1844) that daughters must be prepared to fill any station in life: ”… half our people are in a totally different situation from what might have been expected in their childhood.” In case a girl’s fate took her downward, she should be able to support herself; if she moved up, domestic efficiency should be no disgrace. Mrs. Child pointed out that Abigail Adams, “the admiration of European courts… knew how to make butter and cheese as well as any woman in Weymouth.” Foreign observers were almost always dismayed by American children, finding them precocious, noisy, and disrespectful of their elders. One of the more charitable critics, the German Francis J. Grund, thought that the phenomenon was caused by bad climate, long school hours (a boy between four and six years old was likely to spend six hours a day in school and three more doing homework), and the fact that American parents “are living

altogether for their children.” Harriet Martineau also noted this devotion and added shrewdly that it was natural for children to occupy an important place in a country of enormous resources and small population.

Another cause of early precocity, just beginning to be apparent in the 1830’s and 40’s, was the decline of the father as teacher, model, and authority. Now that boys necessarily acquired skills and knowledge outside the home, they often picked up bits of new technology and science that the father had never heard of. No wonder (Grund said) that “from the earliest period of his life a young American is accustomed to rely upon himself as the principal artificer of his fortune” and exhibits “a certain untimely intelligence seldom found in Europe.”

Yet never before in history had there been children so worried over and thought about as those little Americans born in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Although the rod was prominently displayed on the mantel, and in many households did not gather dust, it was no longer used as a matter of course. There were doubts as to the desirability of breaking the will. Would not the child have need of one when he entered the great American race for success? As Catherine Sedgwick briskly pointed out in a book addressed to boys and girls, “You have a great responsibility as American children. It is not here as in the old world, where one man is born with a silver spoon, and another with a pewter one, in his mouth. You may all handle silver spoons, if you will.” Clearly a young person who was out to get his own silver spoon had better have work done on his character as well as on his soul.

Soul saving was not forgotten, but the new child-care books expatiated at length on character building. Two of the most widely read of these books were written by Congregationalist ministers who allowed their orthodoxy tobe tempered by compassion for children in this world. In The Mother at Home (1833) the Reverend John Abbott insisted on a child’s absolute obedience, exacted by the rod, if necessary; but at the same time he warned parents not to punish for accidents or ignorance, nor to find fault continually, nor to pepper the child with commands. If a whipping became inevitable, a mother should remain cool while making sure to inflict real pain. “It makes mother very unhappy to have to punish you,” she should say, adding, when the child appeared contrite, “Do you wish me to ask God to forgive you?”—for it must be clear that a parent acted as the Lord’s surrogate and that the only appeal was to Him.

Theodore Dwight, in The Father’s Book (1834) —despite the title, the book was also for mothers—showed sympathy and tenderness for small children, even while subscribing to the Calvinist doctrine that their natures are inherently evil (“The

nature of man is ever running one way”). He enjoined parents to soothe and divert fretful little ones in order to head off confrontations. Fathers ought to ask themselves,” What is my business and ought it to engross me so as to make me a stranger to my children?” Further, he recognized that children should not be blamed or punished for behaving like children.

“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight!” These are the opening lines of “Rock Me to Sleep,” one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century. It was learned by heart, wept over, recited in elocution classes, and given at Christmas in a keepsake edition bound in blue and gold. Its author, Mrs. Elizabeth Akers Alien, was born in 1832, a member of the generation in which children began to assert themselves. If the response to “Rock Me to Sleep” is any criterion, the new methods must have engendered many happy childhoods. For example, Julian Hawthorne, in his autobiography, wrote that if angels had given him permission to choose his own fate, he would have answered, “Let me be the only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, born in Boston, Massachusetts, at 1 o’clock in the morning of June 22nd, in the year 1846” —which is just what he was. Lucy Larcom, born in 1824, was one of ten children of a family so poor that when the father died, the little girls had to go to work in the Lowell mills. Nevertheless, she remembers her childhood as a joyful one. “We were a neighborhood of large families, and most of us enjoyed the privilege of a little wholesome neglect. Our tether was a long one. …” And ”… the happiness of our lives was rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we lived among…. There was granite in their character and beliefs, but it was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe itself with flowers. We little ones felt the firm rock beneath us and were lifted up on it, to emulate their goodness and to share their aspirations.” (We, of the anxious, peripatetic twentieth century, have our own name for that kind of granite and sunshine: security.)

One could go on at length with these glimpses of satisfactory childhoods. Nevertheless, there were definite drawbacks to child life ofthat time, and most of us would find them hard to bear. Schools were stuffy and uncomfortable, the hours long, the masters handy with the rod. Children’s clothing inhibited play. Medications were horrid (for headache, leeches sucking blood at the back of the neck; for stomachache, a sticky paste of rhubarb and magnesia; for almost anything, castor oil). But worst of all, about a third of the children born did not live past the age of five. Tuberculosis took a terrible toll of adolescents and puerperal fever of mothers. This high mortality rate was nothing new, of

course, but now the widening horizons of science and the decline of Puritanism made meek resignation more difficult. Infant damnation was becoming very unpopular.

But if there was a falling off in strict adherence to Calvinism, there was little or no slackening of outward religious observance. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” was as important a Commandment for most Americans as the seventh or the sixth. In most homes no work or play was permitted from sundown Saturday evening until Monday morning. There were church services for three hours on Sunday morning and three hours more in the afternoon. The close of the day brought family prayers, Bible reading, and hymn singing. “What can be more delightful on earth,” asked Theodore Dwight in The Father’s Book , “than the Sabbath in a family where every arrangement and practice has been established in conformity with the principles of the gospel?” Yet Dr. Dwight allowed a few un-Puritan laxities that no earlier clergymen would have countenanced. Hc thought that small children might be given a toy or two on the Sabbath and that since pews are uncomfortable for little people—their feet dangle—they might be allowed sometimes to stand up on the seat and look about. Kind parental looks and even a few sugarplums might also help them through the service. However, there could be no question of leaving them at home.

A Boston Brahmin lady, born in 1842, writes of a contented childhood—except for Sunday. “Sunday,” she states flatly, “was a dreadful day.” On the other hand, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, born some years earlier into the same milieu, remembers “mild” Sundays. His mother circumvented the prohibition of secular music on the Sabbath by decreeing that “all good music is sacred.” Higginson even notes in his memoirs a Sunday afternoon when he actually played ball behind the barn. Apparently, Mrs. Higginson did not subscribe to Mothers magazine; if she had, she might have been dismayed by the story of a condemned murderer who said, “When I was quite young, I had many stings of conscience, till one Sabbath I went into a neighbor’s cornfield and plucked three ears of corn and my mother boiled them for me . From that fatal hour my career of sin and impiety has been unbroken till it has at length brought me to the gallows.” Deploring the laxity of the times, Mothers went on to say that in the old days a child who played in church would find the minister stopping the sermon to bellow out his name and command him to report to the parsonage next day. But now (1833) ministers seemed to have lost their power to terrify. And if they preached the doctrine of infant damnation, the result was likely to be newly empty seats in the meetinghouse rather than new conversions.

There was no doubt that the sterner Protestant communions—the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists—were

losing members to the Unitarians and Episcopalians. To the rescue, in 1842, came a Congregationalist minister named Horace Bushnell. He relieved the minds of thousands by pointing the way to reconciliation between the old beliefs and the new. In the book Christian Nurture Bushnell postulated that children are not born depraved but are “formless lumps” at birth, equally capable of good or of evil. If the parent gives proper guidance (“Christian nurture”), the child will grow and thrive in goodness. Religion should not be presented as a gloomy restraint but as “the friend of play.” Children should not be scolded for inattention in church, nor should they be “worried and drummed into apathy by dogmatic catechisms.” While parents “personate God in the child’s feelings and conscience,” they must be careful how they use their authority. If they are harsh and rejecting, the child will feel shut out from God.

Although Bushnell’s book was primarily intended to present a religious doctrine, it was filled with helpful hints on the daily management of children. Some of them seem to foretell modern psychology. Bushnell was the only writer of his day to suggest that children pass through developmental stages. An infant, he said, is at the “stage of impressions” ; the first three years are of more importance in character building than any “stage” that follows. The young absorb the faults and virtues of their parents, who must therefore make an enormous effort to be wise and self-controlled. While parents must not be harsh, neither must they be overprotective, for then the child will grow up lacking in self-confidence. The trick is to slowly let him go so that he will be able to stand on his own; not to break his will but to teach him to control it.

Bushnell’s superiors in the Congregational church were not ready for Christian Nurture . In fact, they found it so distressing that he withdrew it from circulation. But he went on preaching, and twenty years later, when his ideas no longer seemed radical, he revised and reissued the book and it became a best seller. By the time of his death in 1878 most clergymen and most child-care writers found Bushnell’s methods normal, if perhaps even a little oldfashioned.

By midcentury there had clearly been a revolution in child management, even though it took time for its impact to spread from the comparatively few parents who read books and magazines and were not afraid of new ideas. Some advice was reiterated for decades before it became common procedure. For example, we read again and again of the necessity for fresh air in the nursery; or of the inadvisability of securing a diaper with straight pins or (!) needles; or of the therapeutic benefits of allowing little girls to dress simply so that they might romp and play. America must have abounded with stuffy nurseries, pricked babies, and wan girls keeping their dresses clean.